How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Imbler Sabrina

Author:Imbler, Sabrina [Imbler, Sabrina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science, Adult
ISBN: 9780316540537
Amazon: 0316540536
Goodreads: 60769830
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2022-12-06T08:00:00+00:00

Lately I have been fixated on a butterflyfish. It lived sometime in the 1970s just south of Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef. It swam in the company of two others: gold-striped butterflyfish whose shiny bodies looked like someone had placed a dime on a pat of butter. The smallest butterflyfish, my butterflyfish, was half the size of the others but led the trio as they foraged on the reef. When other fish strayed close, my butterflyfish tilted its head toward the sand and prickled its spines in aggression, a guardian. It was the most aggressive of the three toward others, the most on edge toward strangers.

The three fish swam like this for two hours, which we know because a marine biologist followed the trio and wrote down what he saw. After two hours, the marine biologist photographed my butterflyfish and then shot it with a .303 powerhead, an explosive device that concusses the fish to collect it as a specimen. This was, and often still is, common in conservation biology. Scientists could not fully study a fish through a photograph or a tiny sample of its fin, so they had to take the whole fish, dunked into ethanol to ensure it would not rot. It was taken because it looked different, not like a known species but a blend between two different ones, like a hybrid.

I learned about my butterflyfish in a scientific paper from 1977. The scientists described five hybrid butterflyfish, each the offspring of a different combination of species. Each hybrid’s headshot was accompanied by photographs of its putative parents and a chart comparing its measurements: length of head, depth of body, number of spines, and so on. I read about the first four hybrids impassively, flipping through photos of the fish to see how the spots and stripes of their parent species shrank, blurred, or were lost altogether. All described the hybrids after death, except for my butterflyfish, whose description included a brief observation of how the fish swam that day on the reef, guarding its companions. It was the only instance in the study that seemed concerned with the actual living fish, not just its appearance or parentage or hypothetical fertility. The description caught me off guard, and I found myself wanting to know more about this small, headstrong butterflyfish. I wanted to know why it was so much smaller than the others. I wanted to know how it came to keep the company of two gold-striped butterflyfish, if they were related or simply happened upon one another on the reef. I wanted to know more about how it had lived its life.

It feels risky, even objectionable, to identify with a hybrid fish, considering how a century ago I might have been considered a hybrid too, how recently Western science attempted to split human races into separate species, how miscegenation laws were only ruled unconstitutional in 1967, how many people on bleak corners of the internet might still leer at my birth. But sometimes what is uncomfortable can also be what feels most familiar, and the closest to home.

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