The Shark, the Remora and the Infants in the Freezer.

The Inuit call me Eqalussaq.

I am 400 years old more or less.

You would be made famous in some circles just to glimpse me. I saw her! you would trumpet and they would be envious.

Few of you will have that chance. In these Arctic waters I aim my blunt snout downward through the ice-flecked swell, toward 2000 meters.

I drift and roll with other near blind and fantastic creatures, the chimera and hydra, the kraken and squid. We are wonderful. Truly fabulous. Nothing in your human fantasies near approaches us in our extravagant forms. We glow, our tentacles coil, scilla whirl, gills ripple. Mouths and funnels agape we gulp water rich with krill and plankton.

We consort with dragons and monsters. Mer-people and sirens, the six headed Scylla, the Leviathan and sea serpents are all my kin. They are a bestiary of marvels and I am smitten with every one in all their wild and briny forms. Neptune and Poseidon watch us. The Megaladon lurks in the gloaming and the lovely Selkie comes and goes at will.

I am reclusive, slowly scavenging in the murky gloom.

Men, it’s is usually men, search for me. They want to know how and they want to know more.

You want to know, I can feel the prickle of your impatience, as I feel things you never will. I will tell you how they defeated Marc Antony, my little hangers-on, my cohorts and attendants.

The Defeat of Marc Antony

“The lazy remora’s inhaling lips, hung on the keel, retard the the ships. ” Erasmus Darwin, 1830.

In Ancient Rome Marc Antony was thought to be an invincible leader who no mortal could defeat in battle.

Pliny blamed remoras for the defeat of Marc Antony at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC.

Remoras are fish which use sucking discs to attach to a host, removing parasites and scraps to the benefit of both. When Marc Antony and his Queen Cleopatra were defeated in battle against the Roman leader Octavian, his citizens searched for an explanation. So it became legend that the remoras attached to Antony’s ship slowing it down so much it was overtaken by the enemy.

In Latin the word remora means delay, and the scientific name Echeneis is made up of two Greek words, echein (to hold) and naus (a ship).

Thus a myth was born that was so influential it lived in the consciousness of sailors for nearly 2000 years.

There is is, so it was, or might have been. But there is stranger to come ….

The Infants in the Freezer.

I and my kind are often near blind, the result of a parasite partial to our eyes. Even so the eyes of Greenland Sharks have unlocked mysteries.

Yes I am a Greenland Shark.

The age of sharks is usually calculated by counting the rings in the ear bone, a bit like counting the rings in a tree trunk. Greenland Sharks are all soft, there are no hard parts to store the layers.

In 2008 a Danish physicist found that the protein in a human eyeball could be carbon dated.

Nothing to do with sharks. Yet.

It later occurred to him this might be useful technology for forensic science. Police eventually used this method to solve a murder involving a mother and three infants found in her freezer. (Need I point out that you believe sharks are more monstrous creatures?)

Years later biologists used this same technique on the eyeballs of 28 Greenland Sharks, caught as by-catch in the nets of trawlers, to estimate our age. Of course we would rather have our lives than know our age, but men continue to have their way.

I was born during the reign of James 1st, I was young when Rene Descartes set out his rules of thought and the Great Fire of London raged, I saw my adolescence when George 11 ascended the throne, reached adulthood during the American Revolution and have lived through two World Wars.

Five million years ago most of the dinosaurs were wiped out but we sharks lived on. We had already survived four other catastrophic mass extinctions.

The Ampullae of Lorenzini and other beautiful things.

I have been described as grey and lumpen, an eater of scraps and a cold blooded beast. All true things but not all of the truth.

You think we are dumb beasts but we are intensely alive to our life and our world. We thrill and vibrate to the movements of the ocean, the tides, the pull of the moon. Our skin tingles with the sensations of life and of the very earth itself. We taste, smell, sense and feel with an intensity and delicacy you cannot imagine.

I can feel your awkward thrashings as you struggle to navigate the water. You call it swimming! Ha! I feel your every move along my rough flank. Your boats rake me with their painful roar.

In my snout a delicate array of receptors transmit a tapestry of sensations and information. You have a lovely name for these, the Ampullae of Lorenzini.

The syllables roll like waves.

When we hear the whales their songs flow around us like silk in the currents. If there is a kill we smell the sweet thick blood and swoon. The soft buzz of a million decapods is the music of our days.

I travel under the ice floes to read the cipher of walrus and narwhal engraved under the burgs with tusk and horn. Sometimes I have no other desire but to let the currents rock me while I watch the jellyfish pulse and float.

When I feel the aurora, I rise up to bathe in the throbbing curtains of color, my heart matching the beats. Yellow violet blue green dreams visit me. The pale Beluga come like white comets in the midnight water calling to each other. This is where I belong.

Like octopus; fiction and truth, beauty and monstrosity are shape shifters, subject to perspective and the way the light falls. We see what we choose to see and don’t always believe what we see.

You may not find it in your heart to love me, just know I have my own dark beauty and remember the rare wonder of my existence.

We are different, how dull would the world be if we were not. We are inexorably linked, and on that our survival depends.

With the power of soul. Anything is possible, with the power of you. Yeah. And look around you and see all the jellyfish. You sayin’ floatation is groovy baby……and the floatin’ around even a jellyfish will agree to that …. With the power of you with the power of love baby. Anything is possible anything you want to do. from - Power of Love. Jimi Hendrix

It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat itself is rather to life itself” Rachael Carson - The Sea Around Us.