Learning to appreciate the little things
When I was 10, I was obsessed with sharks. During shark week I had the tv on every second of the day, whether I was eating, practicing multiplication tables, or going to sleep. Sharks were the coolest thing I could imagine, and I wanted nothing more than to swim with them in person. To this day, I still love sharks (even after I realized shark week doesn’t portray them the best), and I view a shark sighting as an ideal trip to the beach. However, their place on top of my favorites list might be slipping.
During a recent vacation, I got back into diving after a two-year hiatus, and I hoped to encounter one of these long-lost friends. I joined a dive group and went on some underwater tours throughout the week with a French dive guide named Ben who led us through the water and pointed out unique wildlife while we followed. During our second dive, he waved me over and pointed at two tiny bulging eyes peeking through a pore in the coral. The creature was smaller than my pinky and its little yellow eyes stuck in my mind. I asked Ben about it as soon as we made it back to the boat while the others talked about the turtles and rays.
Ben rushed to the front of the boat and pulled out a stack of Caribbean species ID books that had years worth of water damage. He immediately flipped to the page of the little fish we had just seen — a secretary blenny. Then he told me about a cousin of the secretary blenny, and then he moved on to a book about marine snails, and then to a book about marine worms, and so on. I sat and listened to his thick French accent while he went through his guidebooks and relived his rare encounters with tiny organisms.
He told me about how he saw one of the rarest marine snails in the Caribbean a few weeks ago while leading a dive. But, when he pointed it out to the group they shrugged it off and went swimming after a stingray instead. He shook his hands and yelled “but this is rare” to me as if I were the one who ignored his precious snail. Then he muttered a few more things under his breath before trailing off while looking at his feet.
When the boat stopped at our next dive spot, Ben had to wrap up his ID lessons and put his books away to prepare for the next tour. On this dive I spent less time staring at the open water, hoping a shark would appear, and more time peeking into holes and crevices in the coral. At first I did this to shield myself from Ben’s disappointment, but after finding a couple blennies of my own and a sea snail, I couldn’t stop. There was so much life to discover in such a small radius. An area the size of my living room could have kept me entertained the entire dive.
I couldn’t believe I had wasted so much time waiting for sharks and turtles to swim up from the abyss when there was ten times as much life right below my eyes. This revelation reminded me of a thought I had during graduate school — that small things run the world. There would be no sharks without the tiny fish, phytoplankton, and algae that make up the bottom of the ocean’s food web. Just like there would be no bears or tigers without plants and insects. I know charismatic carnivores play important roles in shaping their ecosystems, but there would be no ecosystems for them to shape without the little beings that form them.
Over time my research interests shifted from bears and tigers to plants and insects, and now my diving interests have begun to shift as well. I still appreciate the sharks that got me interested in ecology as a kid, and my pupils still double in size when I see one, but the little things are starting to surpass them.
