With Turtles
The Dance for Existence: Meditations on Bahia Magdalena
Kelley Swain
The sea reveals
her secrets through the tides. Like a flamenco dancer, when the twirl
of a ruffled skirt allows the glimpse of a buckled shoe, a slender ankle,
the tides lift the hem of the sea to discover a beauty and variety unguessable.
The mood of the sea varies hour by hour, minute by minute, always reflected
in its surface. Sometimes it is polished hematite, smooth, black, hard.
Sometimes it responds to the wind’s
tickle, and thousands of tiny ripples dance laughingly into the distance.
More often than not, it stretches, unbroken, to the horizon. But sometimes
a sleek black cormorant breaks the surface, long-necked and gleaming;
sometimes the glossy gray back of a bottlenose dolphin slices the waves;
sometimes the gasp of air shoots from the lungs of a gray whale; sometimes,
elusively, a smaller whoosh comes from the lungs of a sea turtle.
What we
see of the sea is often immense, intimidating, and empty, but the small
glimpses beneath the ruffled edge, the “refuse” pulled
onto decks of fishing trawlers, and the stranded castaways tumbled upon
sand dunes tell a very different story: what we see and what is really
there are two very different things.
~~~~~~~
“Seek and you shall find” is not always true in field
studies. I originally hoped for sea turtles: many sea turtles, since we
were traveling to Baja California Sur. The thought of seeing sea turtles
was a tantalizing daydream, but strangely, the more I read and learned
about sea turtles, and the clearer my understanding of them became, the
more certain I was that I would not see any whilst in Bahia Magdalena.
Perhaps stranger still, my level of disappointment at this lessened the
more I learned.
We went to Puerto San Carlos at the beginning of January;
nesting season for sea turtles is around September and October. Though
five of the seven species of sea turtle can be found in Baja,
even scientists seeking them out can have a hard time of it. The School
for Field Studies will set up turtle nets for two hours at a time for tagging
and monitoring, and even they sometimes catch no turtles over the course
of a night. In fact, I came to expect that the most likely chance of seeing
a turtle would be to see one dead on the beach.
~~~~~~~
The loggerhead was “still fresh,” according to Laura, the
German graduate student visiting the SFS center. Its sand-colored carapace
blended in with the dunes, but it lay just at the high-tide mark, washed
up with the other debris left with a recent tide. The square-shaped head
dangled; much of the body tissue was eaten or rotted away. I was pleased
to be able to identify it as a male from the sharp claw on the right
fore-flipper. Males use the claws to help latch on to a female during
mating; this one wouldn’t be needing it. Laura’s research
on stranded marine mammals didn’t stop her from seeing plenty of
stranded marine reptiles—specifically, sea turtles. This loggerhead
may have seemed a sad case to those of us not used to strandings, but
Laura routinely had to count dead and dying dolphins, whales, and sea
lions along this golden coast, and the numbers were a very small percent
of the actual populations, most of which we didn’t see. Some whales,
she told us, were only known to science because of strandings.
So the only members of some populations that had ever been seen by humans
were washed up, dead, on the beach. Another glimpse beneath the hem:
but now, an understanding that the dancer may be bruised, sore, worked
overtime—what metaphor is best? Abused?
She, the sea, is routinely
abused by all of mankind. I ate more seafood in the month of being at home
in Rhode Island and being in Baja than I ever have, but afterwards I thought
I would cut back a lot. The biggest reason was learning about shrimp trawlers
and bycatch. These boats drag huge nets along the ocean floor, the equivalent
of clear-cutting the rain forest, except underwater, so not as many people
notice or care.
Pictures show a sea floor teeming with coral, fish, arthropods,
mollusks; after the net goes by and the dust settles it may as well be
a dirt parking lot. That’s not to mention the tons of species pulled
aboard by trawlers, only to be dumped back into the water, dead, for not
being the one species that the fishermen are looking to sell. I criticize
this, but its all about survival, and not just for the fish.
~~~~~~~
Coming upon the tiny fishing village on Isla Magdalena, I could
see why the men who worked for a living here would not be immediately concerned
with saving the seafloor, or sea turtles, or whales. About twenty shacks
dotted the edge of the bay, with one restaurant, closed until whale-watching
season provided enough tourists to make opening worthwhile. Was it a
scrape-by, bored-to-the-teeth existence? I wondered. As we walked through
the town (which took two minutes) to begin our hike into the mountains
across the island to the Pacific, a woman waved vigorously to us, shouting “Hola!” Hours
later, when we returned, she was there again, waving. Meanwhile, a little
boy played in the dust beside the house, staring wide-eyed at the pale
strangers.
They would stay here, this woman and her child, waiting, every
time the father, the husband, went out to sea to fish with big nets.
He could afford a boat no bigger than the pangas in which we
rode, and possibly one not as sound. There almost certainly would be
no navigational equipment. I was surprised to read that many of the men
could not swim, and wondered if that fact was true. So he would go out
to sea, this father who perhaps could not swim, in a small fiberglass
boat; its hull would be filled with barnacle-and-scallop-encrusted nets,
and he would bob out there, alone, for a day, perhaps two, praying that
he could pull in enough marketable fish to feed his wife and boy. Did
the dark giants who breathed the stench of fish through the night terrify
him? When he pulls up a hard-shelled, flapping green reptile, is it no
wonder that he takes it home, illegally, for soup, rather than cut his
precious, expensive net, to set the creature free?
Or perhaps the fisherman
understands the plight of the tortugas and
he takes care to set them free. Perhaps the School for Field Studies
has helped to teach him that it is a critical time for the existence
of all tortugas. Perhaps the mother does not wait, bored, for
tourists at which to wave, but rather sits and watches las ballenas
grises as they come into the bay to give birth to enormous calves,
and thinks of these mothers caring for their young as she cares for hers.
Perhaps the boy will grow up to invent fishing nets with better bycatch-release
systems, so he can harmonize his fishing heritage with his environmental
understanding.
~~~~~~~
The dark-haired, dark-eyed little boy who tumbles into the turtle
cemetery as we are leaving does not have much respect for them. He runs
up to the bleached, domed shells, and stomps on them, trying to break them
apart. This might explain why so many are flattened into the ground.
The place is located behind the field station, an unofficial burial site
with no real burials. Fifteen or twenty sea turtle shells, most likely
from black, loggerhead, and perhaps hawksbill turtles, are scattered
among sand, sparse grass, and twisted vines. Bushes are growing over
and around the shells, embracing them, breaking them apart. Most of the
shells are the color of bone, but some still have peeling keratin patterned
in black and brown flaking off, dry and shriveled from the sun.
We come
to this quiet place and lift up shells, poke around bones. I know the carapace
of a turtle grows directly as an extension of its ribs, but here I can
really see it. The ivory-colored collapsed shells sprawl flat and look
like ribs, except each “rib” is consecutively
shorter and together they form an oval shell. Some are smaller, some
larger, some highly domed, some more flat.
We lift them and they are heavy:
not surprising for a reptile that spends most of its life in the buoyancy
of water and can grow up to hundreds of pounds (in the leatherback’s case, up to 2,000 pounds!). In
the dark, moist dirt under the shells we hope to find scorpions, and
are disappointed but relieved when we don’t. Ants, centipedes,
millipedes, and other multi-legged creatures make their homes here instead.
We put a scapula beside a large shell for a “flipper” and
a sea lion skull in front to make a sea monster. One shell, possibly
the one that has sat here longest, has been reduced to a pile of bones,
bits of carapace broken into jagged puzzle-like pieces. We tip over big
shells.
Do we desecrate something? I feel like I investigate rather than
desecrate. The boy is really not harming anything either when he follows
behind us, when he dances atop the shells. At least he knows that they
are there at all.
~~~~~~~
The mystery and fragility of the sea are not always the consequence
of human actions, however. We visit an aquaculture site where a lone
man lives, farming sea scallops and spending time informing visiting
students about his work. He shows us the wide, white lion’s paw
scallop, and the giant, dark axe scallop, which lives up to its name.
He sells these for eating, and most of his own diet is seafood: high
in healthy omega fatty acids, high in unhealthy cholesterol. He works
harder than most people with cholesterol problems, I’d wager. He
tells us that when they are big enough, he takes the scallops out of
plastic crates and puts them into nets, where they can grow imbedded
in the sand. The axe scallop digs itself into the sand until just the
top sticks out. It is representative, again, of showing only very little
of what is there. Who would guess that a sharp, black, crusty thing sticking
out of the sand, underwater, about six inches across, maybe two inches
out of the sand, could be dug up to reveal a blade of a shell over a
foot long with delicious white meat and a beautiful, pearly-black nacreous
layer inside? To add to the fragile beauty of the shells, the scallop
farmer tells us that these shells disintegrate in the sunlight. He is
right; bits and pieces of black pearly shell litter the beach, but if
you try to pick up a whole shell, it crumbles.
There are thousands and thousands
of shells on every beach we see. Every shell is different, and they range
in color from pink to brilliant orange, red to brown, pearly white to
pearly black, even purple. The shapes vary just as much, meaning the
species vary widely too. It is easy to forget what once lived within
that shell on the back of the toilet, but it didn’t
just spontaneously appear on the beach, polished, pink, and empty. A
bivalve may have lived inside, with a fleshy mantle that could become
irritated if sand worked its way underneath. Then it might make a pearl,
not the perfect round kind sold in stores, but irregular, lumpy, small,
and iridescent. This could take years, with the creature secreting fine
layers, one after the other, over the grain of sand to soften it. Inside
every pearl is an irritating piece of grit. This bivalve would have had
a thick, meaty adductor muscle that snapped its shell shut against provocation,
and a tubular foot that crept along the seafloor or dug into the sand.
Another
shell, spiraled, perhaps housed a hermit crab with hard claws and eyes
on stalks, or a gastropod, slug-like, with tentacles and a thick foot
to pull itself along the ocean floor. Both could pull themselves into
their protective houses; a big difference is that the hermit crab only
rents, while the gastropod owns. The hermit crab chooses a shell to its
size and liking and pops itself in, dragging its house like a long-traveling
backpacker carrying clothes, stove, tent, and all. The gastropod, on
the other hand, secretes the shell; it oozes from its back, hardening
and thickening, building into a swooping domed cathedral or small brown
hut, or anything in between. Some homes are fortified with spikes and
spines. A “left-handed” gastropod’s shell
spirals sinistrally, to the left, while a “right-handed” gastropod’s
shell spirals distally, to the right.
We can see cycles in action wherever
we look. One out of a hundred scallops makes it onto the beach with spines
intact: thus we learn that scallops can and have evolved this predatory
defense. We walk atop soft sand dunes, hearing the crunch of shells and
sand dollars a few inches underfoot, and imagine the slow compression
of calcium layers; in a few million years, these will become the towering
cliffs we see farther along the beach, hard-packed and crumbling with
strata of barely-identifiable shells, withstanding the hard battering
of waves when once they would have scattered in a breeze. A loggerhead
lies rotting on the beach, flippers and head dangling from the carapace,
and next to our bunk huts years-old loggerhead shells turn white and
collapse into piles of bones. An axe scallop grows tall over two or three
years, but turns to shiny dust with a few months’ sunshine.
~~~~~~
We can look at the sea as a flamenco dancer, drumming up storms,
clacking sea scallop castanets, the coastline the hem of her dress, the
tidal line on the beach strewn with shells the border of her skirt. The
stranded animals the debris she kicks aside. She dances out a story of
life and death, of competition, with winners and losers, of mysterious
things discovered and more mysterious things unknown. She is applauded,
worshipped, watched, and over-stressed; sometimes, she is outright harmed.
She is millions of individual lives and she is one enormous life, her breath
the rise and fall of waves. The sea is more than she seems, and is not
to be taken for granted, but, I believe, still is. Too often do people
take and take, and rarely do they give. When natives collected every
sea turtle egg from a beach in mainland Mexico for years in a row, they
began to wonder why turtles stopped returning: the fact was there were
none to return.
Species evolve and disappear. They do not carry out the
peaceful existence one might expect when watching the orange sun quietly
set over the bay. I
know I am a part of all of this. I am not just watching the push and
pull for existence. I am dancing, too.
~~~~~~~~
Copyright © 2008 The Author. All rights reserved.
