[Lyric] Beyond Flotsam and Jetsam Chapter 13 (Dr. Sylvia A. Earle)

Piles of seaweed on a beach have a concentrated sea essence, the potent perfume version of the tantalizing ocean cologne sensed from afar when approaching a healthy beach or bay or marsh. For much of Florida, however, and for coastal areas everywhere, that essence has changed, and today I would not welcome the comparison to coastal aromas.

Heaps of decaying seaweed along beaches worldwide are mixed with a bizarre array of new ingredients. Some, such as tarballs and sewage, have distinctive signature smells. Most plastic goods that are cast ashore have no detectable aroma, but by tangling, snaring, or choking birds, fish, seals, dolphins, and even whales, their indirect impact can be powerful. They bring to the sea the smell of death.

The first time I picked up a piece of junk underwater, an old jar, I discovered that it was occupied by a disgruntled little toadfish who, without pause, slithered away to avoid further attention from the huge predator I must have appeared to be. The jar, snuggled down among sheltering blades of Gulf of Mexico sea grass, was definitely not one of those fine old glass pieces sometimes discovered along Florida’s west coast, tossed or lost overboard during centuries of pirate-studded sea trade. Rather, it appeared to be exactly the kind of container then in the refrigerator at home, filled with mayonnaise. This jar, however, was a jar transformed.

Fronds of pale hydroids, small animals resembling a diminutive flowering of baby’s breath, sprouted along the rim. The shaded sides bristled with clusters of a tiny plant that seemed to be constructed of pink crystal beads strung end-to-end. Firmly cemented to the smooth topside were white hollow curls of tube-dwelling polychaete worms no larger than the capital C’s in this book, sharing space with a lacework of encrusting animals---bryozoans and orange sponge. A flat brown crab, several pale, curved crustaceans, and an urchin the size of my smallest fingernail clung tenaciously to a patch of green turflike algae. So robust was the community camouflaging the fish’s glass cave that I might have regarded it as a curiously shaped rock, but for the anomalously perfect round entrance that caught my attention. The jar, though aesthetically out of phase in the otherwise pristine submarine forest, was arguably doing no harm. Like most human debris in the sea up until that time, from bottles and cans to sunken cities and shipwrecks, the bit of glass had experienced a sea change into a miniature metropolis...a natural work of art...a fish’s lair.