NAVAL GAZING by Danielle St-Amour

Save space by optimizing storage

Of the spider crab’s adornment practices, one hypothesis suggests that they began as a ritual of sustenance. Consider two ancient members of the Inachinae family, Erileptus spinosus and Stenorhynchus seticornis. Observed at rest, they were seen to spread their long limbs in the shifting currents of mesoscale eddies, the tiny hairs on their legs capturing particles that they plucked and ate.

Majid crabs began, at some later but unknown point, to actively gather food and attach it to their hooked hairs, saving it for later consumption. Species like S. seticornis, Camposcia retusa, Pugettia prodigiosa, Podochela hemphilli, and Microphrys bicornutus have each demonstrated this behavior, turning their bodies into elaborate, living pantries.

Detach the spectator from the scene

Loxorhynchus crispatus is also called the moss crab, the masking crab, or the decorator crab. Their adornments aren’t intended for consumption by themselves or their predators. With bits of flora and fauna, flotsam and jetsam, human and non-human detritus, they interpret and mimic the ocean floor. An early study showed that even when their eye stalks were severed, or their retinas rendered opaque with thick paint, they were able to tell when they were uncovered. [1],[2]

Benthic ravers

Researchers exploring an underwater mountain off Panama's Pacific Coast found a dense cloud of sediment being booted up into the sea by swarming red crabs. They captured images and videos. In the densest areas, they recorded over 70 crabs per square meter. These 2.3 cm crabs moved together, jumping or swimming out alone or in pairs before rejoining the group. After hours of human observation, there were only two theories put forth on this phenomenon: the crabs were either mating, or eating.[3]

Naval-gazing 

The benthic region is a midway point, where the heavy pressure of water meets the underneath, the earth. One can penetrate it at shallow depths, unadorned, or attempt to go deeper, in little metal ovals equipped with mechanized plucking claws, and spotlit, high-powered lenses. In both cases, however, visibility is poor; the light one desires is either heavily refracted, blurring, or too bright, rendering reality too sharp, forming a reflecting pool in which one might, and often does, lose track of the narrative.[4]

Flotsam, Jetsum, Lagan

[5] It’s possible that everything is becoming a crab. But as biologists will tell you, “not every crab is a crab.” There are false crabs and there are true crabs. Meanwhile, hubris-wrought vessels are imploding, voyeuristic eye-stalks are severing, and heavy, sea-bound vessels are capsizing, chomped and whacked at stern and bow, rendered moot by “unpredictable, unprecedented” activities of play—casings shed, becoming landscape. 

The shell dissolves.

[1] Utopian Ernst Bloch, in response to a suggestion that art should reflect some kind of “unified reality,” responded with the question, “what if authentic reality is also discontinuity?”

[2] What if everything is becoming a crab? Carcinization is when a non-crab crustacean evolves into a crab-like form, which is an example of convergent evolution. It was introduced into evolutionary biology by L. A. Borradaile, who described it as "one of the many attempts of Nature to evolve a crab.”

[3] In the Puget Sound area of the northeast Pacific, a female orca from a group called “k-pod” was seen wearing a dead salmon around on her nose. Within weeks the behavior spread, with orcas from her own and two other pods wearing dead salmon hats. The fad ended abruptly. In “The Admission of the Inhuman” (Lana Turner Journal no. 7), Andrew Jorun asks, “Can anything cross the divide between nature and culture without being reduced to one or the other?” Jorun continues, “to the extent that not all social action is driven by self-conscious intentionality […], something of nature seeps, and even surges, through culture.”

[4] Stacey Alaimo writes, the “very eye that has opened up [this] world to the human species, has also allowed the human species to fold the world around its own, increasingly myopic, point of view.”

[5] Jorun closes, “Unless it opens to the unnameable, untameable flux of the Inhuman, text-centered practice cannot avoid systemic closure, cooling toward stasis and sterility.”