Deep Blue Home by Julia Whitty

Author:Julia Whitty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-11-10T16:00:00+00:00

I have often seen them emerge from a wave, fly across the trough and enter the next wave without apparent change in their method of propulsion. Again I have seen them come out of the water flying, only to plunge down into the water and continue the flight below the surface. On the surface they paddle along skillfully like little apoplectic short necked ducks and their small orange red legs are plainly visible. 2

On the edges of the puffin flocks, common murres ( Uria aalge; Red List: Least Concern 2008) raft by the hundreds, birds sculpted as starkly black and white as if lit by stage lights, even in the fog. They share a proclivity for facing into the wind, afloat on their white bellies, loonlike bills tipped into the air—a tableau of wind barbs on the weather map of the sea. Their hunting strategy involves diving the edges of the capelin school all the way to the bottom of it and attacking fish on the flight up—a method more strenuous than the puffins’, yet infinitely easier than their own arduous work earlier in the breeding season.

Prior to the scull, in the spring months while the murre chicks are brooded and hatched, the adults await the capelin, who are waiting for the sea-surface temperatures of Newfoundland’s shores to warm to at least 42 degrees Fahrenheit. The capelin bide their time in gender-segregated schools—the males inshore, the females offshore in a stratum of the Labrador Current known as the Cold Intermediate Layer. Massed by the millions in water hundreds of feet deep and colder than the freezing point of fresh water, the females slow their metabolic rate and enter a state akin to torpor. The chill acts as thermal camouflage, hiding them from their primary piscine predator, the northern cod ( Gadus morhua; Red List: Vulnerable 1996), whose reflexes and drive are likewise slowed by the frigid temperatures.

But not so for the murres—warm-blooded, limber of muscle, speedy of thought, even in the bitter water. Somehow, in the course of the long evolutionary rally between predator and prey, common murres discovered the schools of female capelin assembled in the dark in the freezing cold on the bottom of the sea on the Grand Banks. Someway the murres trained themselves to perform the Olympian dives required to descend 500 feet and remain below for three and a half minutes in pursuit of difficult-to-reach fish trapped in a barrel of cold and black. By some means, the impossible was perfected—a perfection contributing in part to the extraordinary ecological success of this species, as measured by its abundance.

Twenty-one million breeding common murres inhabit the northern circumpolar crown of the deep blue home, along with uncountable millions of their young, who, en route to sexual maturity, as late as their eighth year, must learn the impossible for themselves.

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