Skeleton Sea

CHAPTER 22

“Think of it as the sucky zone,” Dr. Russell said, gesturing at the undulating red blob on the giant auditorium screen.

She flashed us a movie-star smile.

Violet Russell, Professor of Marine Ecology at Cal Poly State University, had just finished conducting a class and remained on stage for our instruction. She'd promised to get to Walter's coral, once she explained what was going on in Tolliver's patch of ocean.

“Right now we're gasping for breath,” she said. “We're oxygen-starved.”

I bet her delivery went over well with her students. Sure had our attention. The woman could command a room. Professional in her white linen pants and red linen blazer and beige silk tee. Witty in the silver starfish clipped to the silver streak in her Afro. Practical in her leather sneakers, smoothly striding across the stage to the podium.

She tapped a computer keyboard and our blob was now superimposed on a profile of the continental shelf.

We hovered just off the shelf.

“Any idea what causes it?” she asked.

Nobody volunteered.

“I’ll give you a hint. It’s not caused by the zombie apocalypse.”

We dutifully laughed.

“Oookay, bear with me, I’m used to competing with Facebook, or whatever the site-du-jour is with my students. Let me adjust. I’ve got two scientists and a police detective.”

Tolliver found his voice. “I’m not a scientist. Student-level is fine with me.”

Walter nodded. “Cassie and I aren't oceanographers. We’re students here.”

“Then I'll give it to you straight,” she said. “Our sucky zone is caused by oxygen depletion. At the ocean surface, the waters are rich in plankton. When they die and sink and decay, that uses up oxygen in the water column. And for that reason it’s called an oxygen minimum zone. OMZ, for short.” She added, “Not OMG.”

We laughed, again.

Tolliver said, “We've got one of those zones?”

“We do — and there are hundreds more rimming coasts around the world. They're naturally occurring. They’re not new. What’s new is what they’re doing.”

“Which is?” Walter asked.

“Expanding.”

She clicked another slide and the red blob was rising, with red arrows flowing up the continental slope, lapping onto the shelf. “Our OMZs are creeping into shallow waters.”

I said, “I assume that's not good.”

“No,” she said. “It sucks.”

“I’ll bite,” Walter said. “Why are they expanding?”

“Short and sweet? Global warming.”

Tolliver snorted.

“Ah Detective, I sense a skeptic.”

“I just know what I read in the paper.”

“And you scientists?”

Walter said, “The evidence is certainly in.”

“In spades,” I said.

Tolliver folded his arms.

She said, “We can debate the causes until hell freezes over — which it likely won’t, at this rate. But the fact is that the last two decades of the twentieth century were the hottest in four hundred years. And it’s getting hotter.”

Tolliver uncrossed his arms and lifted his hands.

“Surrender, Detective?”

“I just thought the jury was still out.”

“The jury’s in. Sea levels are rising. Ocean acidity is rising. Carbon dioxide is souring the seas.”

“I don’t know about that,” Tolliver said, “but I goddamn do know that what I saw out there in my ocean three days ago isn’t right. And by the way — it was cold and foggy.”

“A cold foggy day means nothing. A cold foggy week means nothing. Those are small-scale fluctuations. The air is warming. The oceans are warming.” Now Russell lifted a hand. “Don’t worry, I’m not ignoring what you saw out there. I’m going to tell you why you saw it.”

“That’s why I came. Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet. You won’t like what you hear.”

Tolliver once again folded his arms.

“The warmer the water, the less oxygen it absorbs. And so our OMZs expand. And now we come back to our sucky zone out there in your ocean. Wind and current patterns have changed, pushing that oxygen-starved sucker into shelf waters.”

“Caused by global warming?”

“A-plus, Detective.”

“I’ve been a long time out of school. I don’t need a grade.”

Violet Russell was drawn up short. She said, after a moment, “I apologize.”

“I don’t need an apology, either. I just need an answer.”

“And you’re getting a lecture.”

Tolliver shrugged.

There was a sudden vacuum in the large auditorium, the professor onstage at a loss and the audience out here rendered silent. Thing was, everything she was telling us was in way of an answer to Tolliver’s question. What’s going on in his ocean? Scary stuff. But there was no single perpetrator for him to collar, nothing he could accuse and arrest and bring to justice. I sympathized. I too was in the business of identifying the perp and trying to right the wrongs. This time, I too was at a loss.

“I guess it won't goddamn kill me,” Tolliver said, “to learn something new.”

She smiled. Low-wattage, this time.

“Very well,” Walter said. “We have the stage set. So what we saw out at sea — dazed fish, crabs climbing onto the rock — was a response to the hypoxic waters shoaling?”

“It's likely. Organisms that inhabit the shallow banks are, in effect, suffocated. Those that can escape, do so. Those that can’t, sicken and die.”

“Is that how you know there’s an oxygen minimum zone off the coast?”

“I’m afraid I already knew. We have instruments, measurements, reports like yours from the field. All of it pointing to a shoaling OMZ in our waters. It comes in patchy. Tongues of hypoxia here and there, depending on the topography. I hadn’t heard about Birdshit, in particular. Now I know.”

“Just to add to our field report,” I said, “there were some humongous squid going after the dazed fish.”

She tapped a couple of keys on the computer and a new slide appeared on the overhead screen.

“This fellow?” she asked.

It was a huge tube-bodied creature, an angry purplish-red against blue water, its hood spread and its tentacles grasping.

I said, “Yeah.”

“Dosidicus gigas. Humboldt squid. Also known as Diablo Rojo.”

“Red devil,” Tolliver said.

She nodded. “Not all animals suffer in the sucky zone. Dosidicus is well adapted to low-oxygen conditions. He moves in to feast on the poorly adapted.”

We knew. We’d seen.

“And he has company.” She took a moment and found another slide. “Here’s the real master of the hypoxic universe.”

It was a nearly translucent jellyfish, a white lacy bubble, its tentacles as thin as hairs.

“Aurelia aurita. The moon jellyfish. There are several moon species but aurita or labiata is our local variety.”

I’d hooked one on my kayak paddle. Almost flipped it into the boat. “Does it sting?”

“He might give you a mild rash. But that’s not his claim to fame these days.” She clicked to another slide.

There were hundreds of moon jellies. Thousands. Swarming.

I said, “Isn’t that what they do? Bloom? That the right word?”

“That's the word. That's normal jellyfish behavior. But let me use another word. Plague. Jellies are on the rise. Firstly, you've got overfishing that removes their competitors and predators. Then you've got people building more and more marinas and breakwaters and docks and oil platforms — perfect nurseries for jellies. And you've got warming seas, a dream come true for jellies — the polyps produce more little jellyfish when it's warm. And then you've got algal blooms and acidic polluted waters and hypoxia — jellies do just fine. Fish can't survive in low-oxygen waters so they swim away, leaving their larvae behind for adaptable jellies to eat. And they don't just eat the fishes' young, they eat their lunch too — the small crustaceans that forage fish rely on.”

I said, “They’re carnivorous?” I had pictured diaphanous jellyfish grazing delicately on passing… something or the other. Tiny finger sea sandwiches.

“Yes they are,” Russell said, “but they're not picky eaters. If nothing else is available they'll eat bits and pieces of organic matter. Survival rations.”

Walter said, “You mentioned algal blooms.”

“Oh yes, you get something like an algal bloom that feeds a lot of zooplankton — jellies just chow down.”

“This morning,” Walter said, “we witnessed the rescue of a sick sea lion, evidently poisoned by a harmful bloom.”

She nodded. “On the one hand you've got adaptable creatures like jellies and Humboldt squid and on the other you've got losers like sea lions. You could say they're the marine version of canaries in the coal mine.”

Tolliver said, “So now what?”

“Now what, what?”

“Now how do you fix it?”

“It’s not that simple. There are approaches to be taken, ways to mitigate certain aspects.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning, we’re having this conversation a little late.”

“Meaning?”

She paused, then said, “What the hell — I'm going to get poetic on you.”

Walter sat up straight.

“You asked about algal blooms. There is a diatom that has caused some nasty blooms here and there. It's adaptable to warming seas. It's called Skeletonema costatum. Under the microscope it looks, well, skeletal.” She shrugged. “After I've had a strong whiskey or two I've been known to employ S. costatum in a metaphorical sense. We're in danger of reducing our oceanic ecosystem to a skeleton of its former self. Oceanus skeletonema.”

After a moment Tolliver said, “Skeleton sea.”

“You got it.”

“I don't want it.” He added, “But I'll take a rain-check on the whiskey.”

We moved on to the skeletal coral.

Dr. Russell led us from the auditorium across the campus to her office. The office was compact and neat. So neat that a neatnik like Doug Tolliver said, “Nice place.”

Necessarily neat, since the office was crowded with a wall of bookshelves, a large roll-top desk and desk chair, a worktable, and a three-tiered bamboo basket filled with seashells.

Russell offered to bring in chairs for us and we offered to stand.

She laid out a bathymetric map on the worktable and put Walter’s coral on the stage of a stereoscopic microscope. She switched on the attached monitor, which showed the coral in magnification.

Deep purple, lacy, and altogether looking like a coral to me.

“Stylaster californicus,” she said. “Otherwise known as purple hydrocoral. Technically, it’s not a true coral — in true corals the living tissue is what has the color and that's why when they die, their skeletons are white. Now, Stylaster's color is contained in its skeleton, so even after it dies the color remains. More skeleton talk for you…” She shot a glance at Tolliver, parked against the wall beside the basket stand. “I’ll spare you the lecture.”

He shot her a grin. “Nah, I’m fine now. We’re talking evidence. I can talk evidence all day long.”

Walter, who could talk evidence all day and all night, said, “And the coral’s range?”

She moved to her desk and consulted the site she’d pulled up on her computer. “San Francisco south to Baja California. Still, it’s not all that common. As to habitat…” She read. “Let’s see, looks like Stylaster prefers the steep sides of offshore banks and ridges, where the currents are strong and turbidity is low.”

Walter rubbed his chin. “We’ve narrowed our area of interest to a number of sites on Cochrane Bank.”

She tapped her keyboard. “Give me a minute.” She took five. She moved back to the map. “All right, those are your best bets.” She pointed out a pinnacle and a stretch of reef.

“There, and not elsewhere?”

“There, and not elsewhere…probably. I’m going by a database of marine species that’s still a work-in-progress. It compiles reports from scientists, divers, what have you. I’ve pulled up references to Stylaster on Cochrane Bank. It’s been reported there, and not elsewhere.” She added, “I realize this is somewhat inexact for your purposes.”

“It’s most helpful,” Walter said. “We work with inexact often enough.”

I said, “Much preferable to no freaking idea whatsoever.”

She laughed, a rich bell-like laugh.

Tolliver said, “What about something to give you geologists a better look at the coral? That scope you needed before, the electron scope?”

Russell said, “We have one here at the university. I could try to get you time on it.”

I said, “Thanks. If we need one, there’s a guy in Morro Bay with a lab and….”

“Oscar Flynn.”

“Oh, you know him?”

“Just in passing. He once consulted me about, actually, the subject we were discussing — algal blooms. He volunteers for an organization that monitors their effects. He wanted to educate himself further on the topic.”

Tolliver and Walter and I exchanged a glance. Small world.

“I wouldn’t rely on him, though. He’s something of a rogue wave.”

“How so?”

She took a moment. “Well, rogue wave is a bit theatrical. My take is he can't stand not being the expert in the room. He's something of a know-it-all.” She gave a brief laugh. “As am I, I'm afraid.”

“Nah,” Tolliver said, “you just really know your stuff.”