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Journalism of Courage
I can’t swim, let alone snorkel or dive, so I have never really encountered these scintillating sea-creatures in their natural environment. But it has done nothing to lessen my admiration and awe of them. These are my five top favourites:
Seahorses
Quaint, quirky and oh so ethereal, these strange fish, which look like miniature dragons (ah, there are proper sea-dragons too!) shimmer about in the shallows of tropical and semi-tropical seas, donning brilliant colours – and camouflage. The smallest is just 1.5 cm, the largest over 35.5 cm. They are poor swimmers but huge romantics and most girls will love the way they bring up their babies. A pair will meet, tenderly ‘hook up’, often with their tails entwined and having sworn allegiance to each other, will begin their family: the lady inserts her eggs — up to 1,500 of them — into her partner’s tummy pouch and then lovingly stays close while he fertilises and incubates them. Eventually, tiny shimmering replicas of their parents pop out of papa’s paunch and are borne away by the currents to live their own lives. Seahorses must eat nearly constantly – they have no stomachs as such – just a digestive tract. Being propelled vertically (and not very strongly by a single pair of delicate dorsal fins), they often hitch lifts off detritus floating by – still entwined lovingly around each other!
Mantis Shrimp
These guys can be stabbers, or punchers depending on their armaments. They’re crustaceans living in tropical and semi-tropical seas, vividly coloured and up to 38 cm long. Shy and retreating, they are nevertheless ruthless hunters and defenders of their homeland – a burrow or hole on the sea-bed. The punchers are equipped with the equivalent of a pair of lead-lined (actually calcified) ‘boxing gloves’, with which they flay punches so fast, that cavitation bubbles form ahead of the blow, and explode with a shock wave that stuns its opponent (or prey – say a hard-shelled crab) followed by the actual blow which shatters it completely.
They are family minded: a gentleman will guard his lady (a traditional housewife) in their burrow and may be with her for as long as 20 years. But alas, if he hears rumours of a bigger (more beautiful) lady living in the neighborhood, he will up sticks and leave to join her because she has a better chance of giving him more (and better-looking) babies. The original wife and her babies are left to starve, unless she can attract another gentleman to her home.
Mantis shrimp have astonishingly complex eyes mounted on stalks, with as many as 16 colour receptors (we have just three), several of which are sensitive to UV light.
Octopus
With their wise domed heads, forward-facing eyes, extraordinary IQ and Houdini-like escape-ability, octopus have often been believed to be aliens from another planet. Jules Verne gave them a disastrous rap in 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, but Craig Foster in his documentary, My Octopus Teacher, redeemed that. Entirely soft-bodied, octopuses are armed with a single, hard venomous beak with which they stab their prey, and the powerful suckers on their arms. They are solitary creatures, only coming together to mate (the male dies soon after) and can change colour and texture at will. When threatened, they will squirt you with a face-full of black ink and zoom away.
Starfish
Technically they are not ‘fish’ but sea stars and may have between 5 and 40 arms radiating from a central disc. They’re brainless – but each arm contains all the vital organs needed for survival and can thus exist independently. So independently, that if an arm is detached from the starfish, it will grow another arm in its place – and the dismembered arm will grow back into an entirely new starfish. This is like if you lose a limb not only will you grow a new limb but your separated limb will grow into another you!
Starfish use hydraulics to move around the ocean floor – and dine in a manner that will utterly delight all children: they’ll insert an arm into a crack in their prey’s (say, a bivalve) defences and then extrude a part of their stomach into their victim, flooding it with digestive enzymes, before retracting back their stomachs with the digested meal! What a marvellous way to eat – especially at a formal banquet!
They are a ‘keystone’ species in their habitat but can be disastrous in the wrong place – like the Crown of Thorn starfish which are making mincemeat of the corals of the Great Barrier Reef.
Best of all, starfish can be both dudes or dudettes, or both at the same time; dudes can turn into dudettes and dudettes into dudes, so the scope of writing a dizzy Bollywood blockbuster on their love lives is epic!
Hermit Crabs
Hermit crabs live in the discarded shells of other mollusks, but have a problem. Like children outgrowing shoes, they tend to outgrow their homes and need to upgrade. A size 5 will want a size 6, but, alas, can find only a size 13, which is far too big. So, patiently, the crab waits. Another home-shopper comes around looking for a size 5, but it’s still occupied. So, it waits, as do others of varying sizes in the queue. Eventually, a size 12 turns up looking for a size 13 – and hey presto, it’s available! It discards its size 12, which in turn is quickly occupied by a size 11 awaiting a vacant size 12 and this goes all the way down the line, till they all have new homes! All that queuing: how the Brits must love them!
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