Deep-Sea Denizens at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Evoke Awe and Wonder

The bloody-belly comb jelly is a wonder of a fish, a flower-like creature that appears to be executing a choreographed dance in a diaphanous dreamscape. 

The reality couldn’t be more different. This heart-breaking beauty lives in frigid waters as deep as 9,800 feet (almost 2 miles) below the surface of the North Pacific Ocean where oxygen is low and acidity high, with a crushing pressure of 4,500 pounds per square inch (psi). (For comparison, pressure at sea level is about 15 psi.)

So how was I able to see this imagination-defying denizen of the deep sea? At the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Santa Cruz County, about 70 miles south of San Jose, that’s how. Thanks to the more than 5 years of painstaking effort and wizardry by scientists at the Aquarium and its Research Institute affiliate in recreating their complex habitats, wonders like the bloody-belly comb-jelly, porcupine crab, predatory tunicate, abyssal comb jelly and droopy sea pen that roam the deep dark are there for us to marvel at. Scientists have even found what they think is a new species of flapjack octopus that awaits a scientific name. “Into the Deep: Exploring Our Undiscovered Ocean” is the only exhibition in the world to offer this opportunity of a lifetime.

Seeing these sublime bioluminescent creatures filled me with a sense of the inexorable drive of life and the relentless flow of time. As the comb-jelly and its cousins ascended and descended in their respective aquariums, responding to the ancient rhythms of the sea innate in their essences, I felt in a visceral way the convergence of the streams of life and time. I remembered the stirring questions pioneering ecologist and marine biologist Rachel Carson asked in her lyrical book, The Edge of the Sea. Writing about the shell of a type of clam called Angel Wing that glows with a strange green light, Carson asked: “Why? For whose eyes? For what reason?”

No matter how much we study and observe creatures of the deep sea, answers to such questions will forever elude us.

The world is a mess now. On any given day it appears to be on the verge of collapsing. Covid, climate emergencies, including degradation of marine habitats, the exponentially rising cost of living, global food shortage, a genocidal war and an epidemic of gun violence have intensified our collective despair. Under such conditions, is there any room for beauty, mystery and wonder in our lives?

It is a valid question. Einstein provided an answer. “The most beautiful thing we can experience,” he wrote, “is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.”

Another answer came from Thoreau: “We are surrounded by a rich and fertile mystery. May we not probe it, pry into it, employ ourselves about it, a little?”

So yes, we need to set aside moments for beauty, mystery and awe to remain human during turbulent times, especially during turbulent times. The good news is that we don’t have to travel far and wide to experience the mysterious. It is available when we employ ourselves a little, as when we take the time to observe a bluebird family raising its brood in the cavity of a tree, or a family of ducklings taking to the water with much quacking, or an egret patiently waiting for a meal at the edge of a pond, or observing the “morning star” Venus glowing with blinding brightness in the pre-dawn sky.

Or, if we are lucky, to observe the miraculous deep-sea denizens in a unique aquarium.