The Last Word On Nothing

Anyone else having trouble focusing? Me, too. This week, while trying to write this blog post, I spent an inappropriate amount of time looking at prepared meal delivery services with no plan to purchase anything. The food just looked so calm and pretty in its little jars.

So I do what I often do when I get stuck: I texted Helen to ask what she thought I should write about.

She responded almost immediately. “Something nice and small that knows nothing about the absolute [redacted] chaos around it.”

So, my friends, let me introduce you to Delectopecten thermus.

This new species of scallop has a shell that’s 20 millimeters long, about the size of a shell-less peanut. This scallop has a shell: “translucent, pearlescent, rayed, fragile,” the researchers write. Beautiful. At 962 meters underwater, it was spotted clinging to the rocky substrate in the northern Okinawa Trough, where the vents in the Higashi-Ensei vent field burble out hydrogen sulfide.

The researchers collected one of these pectinids, or scallops, using the remotely operated vehicle KAIKO. Back on the surface, they sequenced its mitochondrial genome, finding it to be much larger than that of other scallop species. They also noticed big shifts in the order of genes that encoded proteins, compared to scallops found in shallow waters—suggesting to the researchers that many genes had to shift and rearrange in order for scallops to be able to live in the ocean’s depths.

At this point in a blog post, I would usually downshift into the metaphorical. Instead I re-read some old posts about the pandemic. I got up and had some banana bread. I checked my texts. I looked at plane tickets. I found the food delivery site again and looked at all those jars of food and imagined another life in which I might eat chia pudding with pink pitaya, then lemongrass and ginger tempeh.

What can we learn from this creature living in what seems, from here, like the chemical chaos of a hydrothermal vent? Would a scallop consider a vent chaotic? Does it want, like me, to escape in any way it can? Has it adapted so well that it doesn’t even notice? Should we adapt so well to our own chaos that we don’t notice either? What essential, innermost part of us would have to change to do this?

Oh, my calm, pretty jars of metaphors. They are transparent and full of wonder, like the scallop. They are also fragile, out of reach. But somehow, I am comforted to know that somewhere very far from the surface world, there are many strange, miraculous creatures that live without a thought of me. Their existence is enough, and enough to get me through another day. Hope it helps you, too.

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Image of D. thermus courtesy of Yi-Tao Lin