| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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Reviews The Kraken Wakes The Search for the Giant Squid: An authoritative look at the biology and mythology of the world's most elusive sea creature, by Richard Ellis. The Lyons Press, New York, 1998, 320 pp., $35.00 cloth.
"The Kraken" Poems, Chiefly Lyrical 1830 It is laudably impressive to write a fine lyric poem inspired by a monster, but imagine the passion, the scholarship–the chutzpah–it must take to write a 320-page book about a single species of invertebrate that no one has ever seen alive. I can think of only one other book that features a single species of marine invertebrate: William W. Warner's Pulitzer Prize winning Beautiful Swimmers, which is about blue crabs and their Chesapeake Bay fishery. But now comes another book featuring a spineless creature. Richard Ellis's subject may lack vertebrae, but it is as awesome as the sperm whales that strive to eat it, and I admire Ellis for producing this authoritative, entertaining, and useful book. Of course, this is not just any squid. It's not the delicious Loligo opalescens that graces the tables of San Francisco restaurants as fried calamari. Nor is it the "giant" (1-2 meters long) voracious Humboldt squid, Dosidicus gigas, that lives off Peru. Ellis presents to us the real giant squid–the "kraken" of legend, the Architeuthis of natural history museum models, the unsuccessfully sought prey of National Geographic expeditions; the mysterious monster that we know only from carcasses rarely washed ashore, from a flash of a sighting at sea, from the sucker scars on a sperm whale, and–I learned from Ellis–from two juveniles smaller than my hand, taken from the stomachs of the midwater, predaceous lancetfish, Aleposaurus fero. The book's title implies, and the text demonstrates, that far more human thought has been devoted to the mythology of this creature than to its biology. A fascinating addendum is the "detailed table of sightings and strandings of giant squid." Containing 164 records with date, location, size, and author, the list spans the period 1545 to 1996. After his book went to press, Ellis wrote an account in The New York Times of a recently collected specimen, which now rests in the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. The squid was caught by commercial fishermen at a depth of about 2,000 feet off New Zealand in December, 1997, frozen, and flown to New York City. The 25-foot (youngster?) joins the museum's 46-foot model of an adult giant squid. As Ellis demonstrates thoroughly, this animal has been fascinating to people for millennia. He reviews stories and accounts by Alfred Lord Tennyson, Jules Verne, and Peter Benchley, and makes the case that the monster Scylla, who almost put an end to the travels of Odysseus, as related by Homer centuries ago, was likely based on a giant squid. Ellis's modus operandi is to search exhaustively for every bit of information on his subject–from scientific journals to old correspondence and folklore–and then consolidate it into a well-written text filled with information and human stories. Some sources are arcane, some are mainstream, but all can prove useful to readers interested in the subject. A recent New York Times review of Ellis's other new book, Imagining Atlantis, referred to the author's "slightly baggy prose style." I concur with that description, and I mean it to be complimentary. A favorite pair of khakis and a spacious sweater are "baggy," too. Like Ellis's prose they are comfortable, informal, and fun to spend time in. Ellis does not speed through the sea in a sleek, high-powered yacht. Rather, he leisurely pokes along in a comfortable skiff, rowing into back-waters, coasting in main channels, sharing discoveries, wonders, curiosities, and musings with his reader. For those who can't–or don't want to–slow down and who may skim The Search for the Giant Squid while enjoying a third latte, I have some tips for getting the best from this book in ten minutes–but you will be missing a lot. The two chapters entitled "The Biology of Squid, Giant and Otherwise" and "What Do We Know About Architeuthis?" contain the "science" of the book. You will learn more in them–but the other chapters are more fun. Order a decaf and keep reading. As enjoyable as it is, Giant Squid has a serious purpose as well. It is a widely held tenet among marine biologists that the sea still holds many secrets. Ellis shows us how such secrets eventually can become part of the body of scientific knowledge as well as part of our human culture. Besides Architeuthis, countless animals that we have never even glimpsed live in the deeps. Rarely, serendipitously, we catch one or see another. One example with which I am personally familiar is the discovery of megamouth, a large (4.5 meter) never-before- seen shark captured near Oahu. The shark was so obviously different from all other known species that it required a new family for its classification. Its unique method of feeding on tiny midwater animals gave new insight to oceanic ecosystems. If it is the task of the scientist, the scholar, the artist, and the child to make sense of the world and to tell others about it, Ellis has taken all four roles in producing this book–the objectivity of a scientist, the thoroughness of a scholar, the appreciation of an artist, and the excitement of a child–to produce the joy of discovery that all four share. –Leighton Taylor © Copyright 1998 by Leighton Taylor. Text and photographic images are intended solely for on-screen viewing by individual user. The video screen content is not to be used for any purpose other than individual print out without the written permission of the copyright holder.
Recommended Reading Flower Watching with Alice Eastwood, by Michael Elsohn Ross, Carolrhoda Books, Minneapolis, MN, 1997, 48 pp., $14.95 cloth. Alice Eastwood, early California botanist, curator, and adventurer, is the subject of this biography for young people. Eastwood is an heroic character in so many ways. She saved the Academy's botany collection from the fire that devoured the institution's downtown site after the 1906 earthquake. She tirelessly collected many of the state's early plant specimens, inspiring many of the twentieth century's most important botanists, and she was pivotal in saving Marin County's Mount Tamalpais from development early in the century. This book is both a good introduction to her life story and to "flower watching" itself. Chapters about Eastwood's life are punctuated by illustrated sidebars about the basics of botany, how to identify plants, how to keep a botanical journal, and profiles of a variety of Eastwood's favorite flowering plants. Encompassing Nature: A Sourcebook. Nature and Culture from Ancient Times to the Modern World, edited by Robert M. Torrance. Counterpoint, Washington, D.C., 1998, 1,248 pp., $46.00 cloth. This ambitious anthology begins at the very beginning of recorded accounts and lets off in the romantic period of the late eighteenth century, where most anthologies of nature writing start. Working through the hymns, myths, and songs of ancient Chinese, Sumerians, Greeks, and Jews and traveling, too, through Mesopotamia, India, Japan, Northern Europe, and America, the classicist and translator Robert Torrance shines light on the almost incredible variety of literary expressions of the relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world. Torrance's introductions to the selections place them in historical and literary context, making the work a literary tour of world civilizations with a focus on nature. National Audubon Society Field Guide to California, by Peter Alden and Fred Heath, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1998, 448 pp., $19.95 paper. If your preparation for an outing in the Golden State includes rounding up the usual suspects of field guides (birds, mammals, plants, and insects), you will appreciate the National Audubon Society's new Field Guide to California. Instead of cramming your glove compartment full of references, you may want to take along this single, compact guidebook. One of four regional guides just released by Audubon, the Field Guide to California offers both an overview of the physical and biological attributes of the state as well as a guide to its flora and fauna, everything from fungi to large mammals. Included in the overview are summaries of the topographical and geological features of California, its diverse habitat types, and some important conservation and environmental issues, including the effect of introduced species on native animal and plant communities and profiles of endangered species. Particularly informative are sections on rocks and minerals, fossils, ocean and coastal topography, and tectonics. Maps of the night sky for throughout the year are provided, as are seasonal weather patterns and cloud types. In a style familiar to users of Audubon's field guides, the animal and plant sections feature photographs with accompanying brief descriptions and range information. This section is in no way an exhaustive treatment of each organismal group, but is a good reference for the species most frequently seen in the state. The back pages are devoted to a region-by-region summary of parks and preserves, including descriptions, directions, and contact numbers. This guide is appropriate for the beginning naturalist and as a handy reference on family excursions. About this Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory, by Barry Lopez, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1998, 273 pp., $24.00 cloth. In an essay titled "The American Geographies," Barry Lopez writes that, "It has only been in the last few hundred years or so that a people could afford to ignore their local geographies as completely as we do and still survive." This may be the central theme of this collection, but Lopez plays it in such a variety of ways that it is seldom recognizable as a theme at all, and it is never played as a dirge. In fact, he pays closest attention to people who are extremely aware of their local geographies. For example, he writes of potters who have created a special kind of tube-chambered, wood-burning kiln that relies completely on local materials and is dug into the hillside, to create ceramic work that is regionally unique. "The wood's stories would debouch in the kiln. What had happened to the trees would imbue the pots," he writes. But my favorite essay in the book is titled simply "Flight," and is a strange and wonderful look at the air-freight industry. Lopez logs hundreds of hours flying around the world on freight carriers, trying to get some perspective on the meaning of the expression "global economy." Every sentence in this book is measured and carefully rendered. Lopez is nothing if not considerate, and these essays represent well both the spectrum of his concerns and the range of his talent. |
Fall 1998
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