Abstract
The earth-bound nature of much ecological thinking presents challenges for posthuman life writing in the Anthropocene: underwater subjects exist in a different element, with less knowability. Sea squirts have a cultural history featuring human-centred language; as pest, food and pharmacopeia, they are exploited for human ends. But using underwater life narrative and photography to explore conventions of looking creates different possibilities for relationships between humans and sea squirts. Aesthetic categories like wobble, swerve and atmosphere can make marine lives, even small ones, significant on their own terms and enable more attention and sentient care from humans. Combining ecopoetics and self-aware life writing can bring sentience to, for and from sea squirts—and the oceans.
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Notes
- 1.
Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 169.
- 2.
Karpiak, “Donna Haraway’s ‘Critters.’”
- 3.
“Small lives” has a symmetry with the “small stories” model which has proved useful to analysis of digital narrative. See Georgakopolou, “Small Stories Research,” 2016.
- 4.
Miller, Why Fish Don’t Exist, 12.
- 5.
See many examples in Rotman, Underwater Eden. David Liittschwager makes contingency beautiful in A World in One Cubic Foot, where he photographs the miniscule life forms found in one cubic foot of selected habitats.
- 6.
Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 72.
- 7.
Latour, Down to Earth, 81.
- 8.
“We are humus, not Homo, not anthropos; we are compost, not posthuman.” Haraway, “Tentacular Thinking,” Chthulucene section.
- 9.
Huff, “After Auto, After Bio,” 279.
- 10.
See Tsing, Mushroom; Probyn, Ocean; Sheldrake, Entangled.
- 11.
The original, often misattributed, is from Sir Walter Scott, Marmion, 1808, Canto 6, stanza 17.
- 12.
See Cappelle, “Is Out of Always a Preposition?,” 315–328.
- 13.
Serres, Incandescent, 174.
- 14.
Ibid.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Jansson, Finn Family Moomintroll, 74: “the thundery weather has electrified them – that’s why they shine so.”
- 17.
Clava in its diminutive form in Latin, clavella, means club or hammer, while the Latin ending -ina means similarity. The Greek lepados, genitive of lepas, means bowl-shaped shell. Forma is Latin for shape or form. See https://www.vattenkikaren.gu.se/fakta/arter/chordata/tunicata/clavlepa/clavlene.html. The best image I have seen is Bernard Picton’s photograph at http://www.habitas.org.uk/marinelife/species.asp?item=ZD60.
- 18.
Clavelina lepadiformis on https://www.marlin.ac.uk/species/
- 19.
Naylor, Marine Animals, 200, describing the gooseberry sea squirt Dendrodoa grossularia in its larval form.
- 20.
Holland, “Tunicates,” 147.
- 21.
Palomina-Alvarez, Moreira Rocha, and Simões, “Checklist of Ascidians,” 2.
- 22.
Pennant, British Zoology, IV, 40.
- 23.
Peckworth Woodward, Mollusca, III 332.
- 24.
Darwin to Edward Cresy [12 November 1860]; see https://darwinproject.ac.uk/; DCP-LETT-2620.
- 25.
Kirby, Power, I, vi. 192.
- 26.
- 27.
Rich, “Diving into the Wreck.”
- 28.
For an overview of taxonomy, systematics DNA technology and barcoding, see Duszynski and Couch, Biology and Identification, 1–15.
- 29.
Naess, “Population Reduction,” 307.
- 30.
- 31.
Ibid., 4.
- 32.
Ibid., 29.
- 33.
Davis and Thompson, “Colonizer,” 226–230.
- 34.
- 35.
Colautti and MacIsaac, “A Neutral Terminology,” 136.
- 36.
See Lassuy and Lewis, “Invasive Species”: “The spread of invasive marine tunicates to the Arctic could interfere with access to benthic food sources for already endangered marine mammals like benthic-feeding whales and pinnipeds,” 529.
- 37.
Serres, Incandescence, 92.
- 38.
Ibid., 93.
- 39.
Ibid., 116–117.
- 40.
- 41.
Lazar, “This Terrifying Sea-Creature.”
- 42.
- 43.
Rohmah, “Ascidian Tunics Carotenoids,” 22–29.
- 44.
See Kumagai et al., “Soft Tunic Syndrome,” and Kumagai, Ito, and Sasaki “Detection.” The same expert(s) ascertained the wild population off Japan has been infected, probably linked to aquaculture there.
- 45.
- 46.
Respectively, Dendrodoa grossularia and Actinothoe sphyrodeta. Analogy here is purely visual; neither count as food, even for hungry divers.
- 47.
Watters, “Ascidian Toxins,” 162. The symbionts of ascidians also have properties with potential for human drug use.
- 48.
Ibid.
- 49.
Imperatore et al., “Alkaloids from Marine Invertebrates,” 20,392.
- 50.
Rinehart et al., “Ecteinascidins,” 4512.
- 51.
Imperatore et al., “Alkaloids from Marine Invertebrates,” 20,406.
- 52.
Manning et al., “ET743,” abstract.
- 53.
- 54.
Meeder and Parkinson, “SE Saline Everglades Transgressive Sedimentation,” abstract.
- 55.
Raijman and Shenkar, “From Tropical to Subtropical.”
- 56.
See Delighta Mano Joyce et al., “Evaluation of Anti-Inflammatory Activity.”
- 57.
See Gomathy, “Chemical Screening,” abstract. http://depts.washington.edu/ascidian/AN73.html.
- 58.
Heller, Beiträge, 99.
- 59.
The figurative sense is used in fish nomenclature, for example, for a blenny, Clinus exasperates. See Holleman, Von der Heyden, and Zsilavecz: “referring to ‘numerous, unsuccessful attempts by the second author to obtain additional specimens’ (described from only one specimen)”: https://www.etyfish.org/blenniiformes3/.
- 60.
Bailly, “Anticancer Properties of Lamellarins,” 1105.
- 61.
“Ascidians (Phylum: Chordata, Subphylum: Tunicata, Class: Ascidiacea) have been used as model species in development biology for over a century. These species offer attractive experimental features, including a compact genome (e.g. Halocynthia roretzi’s genome is around 170 Mb with about 16,000 protein-coding genes), invariant embryonic cell lineages, small embryonic cell number, and translucent embryos, which allow the description of developmental processes with a cellular level of resolution. Fifteen years ago, the complete genome sequences of two ascidian species, Ciona robusta (formerly Ciona intestinalis Type A) and Ciona savignyi were assembled, annotated and made publicly accessible through genome browsers. Since then, the genomes of additional tunicate species have been sequenced, partially annotated and publicly released, opening the way to a study of the evolution of ascidian coding and non-coding genetic elements. It is generally considered that ascidians are subject to rapid molecular evolution, in both coding and non-coding sequences.” Wang et al., “Genome-wide Survey.” See also Dauga, “Biocuration,” 137.
- 62.
Naess, “Sustainability! The Integral Approach,” 299.
- 63.
Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics, 13.
- 64.
Ibid., 98.
- 65.
- 66.
- 67.
See https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Wibbly_wobbly,_timey_wimey. The tenth Doctor Who was played by David Tennant, 2006–2008.
- 68.
The original theme can be heard at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NPJ6GMXM3E.
- 69.
Dhanawade, “Good Vibrations.” His final section discusses jelly in relation to digital as a medium.
- 70.
Ibid.
- 71.
https://www.londonperfect.com/blog/2013/09/hampton-court/. Post by Zoë, September 18, 2013; includes image (italics in the original).
- 72.
Paradigms and patterns of underwater visuality will be further discussed in my forthcoming book, Underwater Lives.
- 73.
See https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2JJ8c47NmvSnM8F6pXNWPTS/trying-to-film-penguins on suitable cameras attached to penguins; not quite bird’s eye perspective, but certainly not a human point of view.
- 74.
- 75.
Ibid.
- 76.
Ingold, “Religious Perception,” 3 (italics in the original); the phrase “education of attention” is J. J. Gibson’s.
- 77.
Ingold, Perception of the Environment, 22.
- 78.
Ibid., 24–26 (italics in the original).
- 79.
Böhme, Atmospheric, 62 (italics in the original).
- 80.
See Esposito, Pezzotti, Branno, Locascio, Ristoratore, and Spagnuolo, “Ascidian Pigmented Sensory Organs.”
- 81.
Berry, “Ecozoic Era,” in Sheley, Environment, 361.
- 82.
Ibid., 360.
- 83.
Van den Hengel, “Zoegraphy,” 2.
- 84.
Ibid., 8.
- 85.
See the journal Society & Animals (1993–); see also Driscoll and Hoffmann, “Introduction,” 1–13.
- 86.
Naess, “Deep Ecology,” 311 (emphasis added).
- 87.
- 88.
See Dewar-Fowler, “Uptake and Biological Impacts.” She looks at Ciona intestinalis.
- 89.
Moran, “New Nature Writing,” abstract.
- 90.
Hornung, “Ecology and Life Writing,” x.
- 91.
Moran, “New Nature Writing,” 49.
- 92.
See, for example, Helen Macdonald, H Is for Hawk (2014); Amy Liptrot, The Outrun (2016); Horace Clare, The Light in the Dark: A Winter Journal (2018).
- 93.
Stenning, “Interview,” 81.
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Brant, C. (2021). The Sentience of Sea Squirts. In: Batzke, I., Espinoza Garrido, L., Hess, L.M. (eds) Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77973-3_5
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