The Abyss Stares Back
Encounters with Deep-Sea Life
as excerpted from The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters with Deep-Sea Life
by Stacy Alaimo for World Ocean Forum
We are suspended over the abyss of the impending absence of nature, but this suspense, in turn, gives way to exhilaration and movement.
— Bonnie Mann, Women’s Liberation and the Sublime
Philosophy, science writing, critical animal studies, and the post-humanities have debated the question of what makes particular animals valuable — or, in other words, what makes them deserving of human concern. Such assessments have turned on whether nonhuman
animals can think, suffer, feel, communicate, recognize themselves, imagine the perspectives of others, care for their young, create music, perform mating dances, create their own cultures, create and use tools, serve as companion species to humans, provide food, fiber, or entertainment for humans, serve as keystone species or ecosystem engineers, or perform other vital ecosystem services. The calculation of the value of various species confines the recipients of such assessments within circumscribing, distancing, and sometimes denigrating frameworks. The aesthetic — wispy and inconsequential as it may seem — suffuses viewers with awe, wonder, desire, empathy, exhilaration, and196 d Epilogue other cognitive, emotional, and/or embodied responses, which lure us away from human exceptionalism and the capitalist objectification of other beings.
Rather than homogenizing abyssal life or deep- sea creatures into one category, it is vital to speculate across a multitude of singular
species, their beings, and their life-worlds. The multitude of deep-sea species — many of which have only been recently discovered, many of which confound our sense of what an animal can be or do, and many of which provoke an aesthetics of the surreal — invite fabulously divergent speculations. Chemosynthetic life; diurnal vertical migrators; extremophiles; piezophiles; slow, sessile animals of the seafloor; “living fossils” that endure across geological epochs; pelican eels with gigantic mouths; anglerfish sporting their own lures; a multitude of glowing, pulsing jellies; and salp, with their complex life histories that include “sexual reproduction, asexual budding, solitary individuals, and chains of clones”.
In an era of accelerating extinctions, what does it mean to discover thousands of new species in the deep sea?
All these can lure us away from monotonous, flat, manufactured anthropogenic and anthropocentric landscapes of the Anthropocene. Moreover, delighting in the breathtaking biodiversity of abyssal life veers away from xenophobia and toward an embrace of alterity and queer ecologies.
Aesthetic encounters with deep-sea life can evoke mediated modes of intimacy with a kaleidoscopic abundance of life, underscoring that
the largest ecosystem on the planet warrants protection. Moreover, the sheer number of vertiginously diverse abyssal species — stunning
in their distinctive shapes, forms, colors, textures, and patterns — implicitly declares that biodiversity is vital for environmental visions.
Aesthetic encounters with a creaturely abyss, seemingly at hand, may, one can only hope, help avert the destruction of species and ecosystems, a future already too close at hand. Bonnie Mann, describing an encounter with a wild turkey, not an octopus, coral, or siphonore, writes that the “experience of nature is plagued by the terror of non-existence, the fear that natural beauty will be forever stamped out…
We are suspended over the abyss of the impending absence of nature, but this suspense, in turn, gives way to exhilaration and movement.
We are exhilarated… Such beauty still exists!”16 Aesthetic recognition may seem too delicate, too frivolous, or too ineffectual to provoke the immense ethical, political, and economic transformations necessary in this moment of accelerating extinctions, but how else can the jellies, squid, siphonophores, hatchetfish, lanternfish, isopods, barreleye fish, harp sponges, anemones, feather stars, fire stars, corals, octopuses, tubeworms, dragonfish, sea pigs, and lumpsuckers catch the attention of those who need persuading? Shimmering, glowing, gliding, darting, undulating, pulsing, and fluttering — with or without eyes — the abyss stares back, in suspense.
Excerpted from the “Epilogue: Who Cares? Calculating the Value of Abyssal Life” to The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters with Deep-Sea Life by Stacy Alaimo. Published by the University of Minnesota Press. Copyright 2025 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. Used by permission.
