We Live Beside Aliens

Words by Shanti Mathias | She/Her

It finds a nearby jelly creature and hollows it out. The mother wriggles herself into the corpse and lays her eggs. Then she paddles along, her eggs getting all they need, and well protected too.

“It’s a little morbid, but I love it,” says Hiromi Beran, a marine biology student. She is describing a barrel shrimp, a species she had considerable experience with as a BLAKE ambassador aboard NIWA’s Tangaroa research vessel last summer. Hiromi is showing me the list she keeps of the weirdest watery things she’s heard about since she started her degree, and she’s been scrolling for several minutes.

Fish that hack into electric fields. Abyssal rivers of dense salty water, pooling, and coiling beneath the waves. Valuable minerals clustered around hydrothermal vents. This is a world totally foreign to us, yet it all exists in the ocean.

Underwater, anything is possible. The requirements of gravity and pressure shape a different sort of life. Far beneath, animals scrounge for nutrients falling from far above: the carcass of a dead whale, flakes of long dead things, or sediment peeling off the land. This is life, too, no matter that it is difficult to recognise as kin to us.

Humans may never know if there are real aliens, life we can recognise beyond our atmosphere. The marvellous unfamiliarity of the ocean is a reminder of this: a certain alien world.

It’s often said that humans know more about space than the ocean. While this claim requires many qualifications to be accurate—space could be infinite, for one—there is a truth to this: high powered telescopes offer more information about the surfaces of other planets than the ocean floor, most of which is only mapped at a 5 kilometre resolution.

This is something that the Moana Project is trying to change. The project, funded through MBIE and operating through MetOcean, is a research team using a number of methods to understand the ocean. In particular, they’re looking at how ocean heat waves will affect the seafood industry. The project wants to map the waters around New Zealand to a resolution of 1km instead of 5km, which is the international default.

The appropriately named Assistant Professor Ocean Mercier (Ngāti Porou) is a leader of the He Papa Moana Team of the Moana Project. She’s also the Head of the School of Māori Studies at Victoria University. Through her work, she seeks to centre mātauranga, or Māori knowledge beside Western perspectives of science.

Aotearoa, as an island nation, is particularly intertwined with the ocean, and the stories of this place reflect that. The ocean is how people reached this island—the North Island, Te-Ika-a-Māui, was fished out of the sea. While different iwi have different versions of the story, Dr. Mercier tells me that an older name was “Te Ahi no Māui”, where ‘te ahi’ means ‘dolphin’.

However, there’s no definitive species of fish recorded in the story. “There’s a nice uncertainty, a fuzziness there,” says Mercier. “We don’t know for sure; that’s a feat particular to our demigod ancestor.”

Pākehā often think of the sea as something that separates people. For Māori, however, the ocean is a connector, a viewpoint bound to the Pacific. “The sea was the highway back to the Pacific, to the homeland, to Hawaiki,” says Dr. Mercier. Māori have a complex spiritual entanglement with the ocean. “When we pass away, our wairua goes on its way up the island, along the spine of the fish, over the oceanic highway and back to Hawaiki… The vast expanse of ocean was no impediment to our wairua.”

Stories are one vital part of the human relationship to the sea, and science is another. Dr. Mercier says that the Māori relationship with the water can—and should—shape ocean science. “As the Māori team in [the Moana Project] we are super aware—if mātauranga is part of that project, how is it being protected? […] The last thing we want is to be involved in something that colonises our knowledge further, as if that hasn’t happened enough already.”

The process of decolonising marine science is a slow one. For Dr. Mercier, it is crucial to show that “there are many ways that [Māori] connect to the sea; some are esoteric, some are just about getting kai on the table.”

As a source of food and minerals, the ocean helps millions of people around the world get kai on the table. There is considerable financial investment in the sea. The UN estimates that the global fishery industry was worth $402 billion USD in 2019; Seafood New Zealand reports that the seafood exports were worth $1.8 billion NZD in 2018. 

Deeper beneath the waves, there are mineral resources under the sea, particularly oil but also many kinds of rare metals. As humans churn through resources on land, turn to increasingly destructive mining techniques, including tar sands, fracking, and open-cast mines—the sea looks more attractive. 

“Underwater mining can produce resources that humans need,” says Professor Ashley Rowden, a deep-sea biologist who teaches at Victoria University. There’s a cost-benefit analysis, a way to weigh these different priorities; it is possible that mining in the sea will have less impact than on land. Although, as with all things in the ocean, an information deficit makes it hard to know what will make a difference. “There are destructive practises on land for resource use, it might be less so in the sea,” says Rowden, optimistically.

After all, the deep ocean is not just home to resources, but to living things that have evolved totally differently to terrestrial life. Hiromi points out that denizens of the deep are photographed like astronauts or planets, surrounded by blackness without any sense of scale. The weirdness is emphasised by the fact that these animals are often seen out of context: the glum blobfish is floppy at surface level because it is adapted to survive immense amounts of pressure.

Ashley Rowden, a professor of biology who has studied the deep ocean for decades, tells me that the weirdness of the deep sea is an anthropocentric category. “The concept of alien is really just about showing we’re not familiar with something…They’re not weird or bizarre where they live, they’re just adapted for those places.”

While sampling, he has pulled up enormous amphipods (a species like a giant sandhopper) from the depths of the Kermadec Trench. He is reluctant to label them as weird, only surprising; every part of their body was designed to maximise survival in their environments. Ocean animals’ bodies may be illegible to humans, but that doesn’t mean they don’t make sense.

Siobhan O’Connor, an environmental innovator and ocean enthusiast who is involved in myriad ways with marine education says “in Aotearoa we are surrounded by oceans, yet the majority of us are emotionally and cognitively disconnected from it.” Creating connection to the sea drives her. “It’s incredible connecting people to something with such spiritual, physical, economic, and political depth.”

The majority of humans never go deeper than perhaps three metres from the surface. To go beyond the surface requires experience and equipment. Snorkels, wetsuits, and diving gear are expensive—a scuba course even more so, not to mention a prohibitively pricey submersible (it is notable that one of the few humans ever to descend 11 kilometres under the sea to the bottom of the Mariana Trench was James Cameron, on a personally funded expedition).

To go into the open sea, beyond the couple of kilometres possible in rowboats or kayaks, is again expensive—yachting is an elite sport for a reason. It is difficult to access the ocean because it is a world that humans cannot survive without equipment and knowledge. We cannot breathe water, or drink salt. No wonder the ocean stays so abstract, when even reaching the surface of it is so difficult. It’s unsurprising that for many New Zealanders, fish are more recognisable deep fried than alive.

The strangeness of the ocean is compounded by the many ways that it is threatened. The ocean today is changing, and changing fast. On land, it is complicated, but often possible, to quantify the impact that humans have had on the environment. In the sea, it is often near impossible. Dr. Mercier says that a “healthy baseline” for the ocean is often taken at the start of a scientist’s career, when considerable damage has already been done. Here, mātauranga is crucial “because it can provide a true baseline.”

Environmental damage on land is distressing enough, and it is equally hard to accept the amount of damage being done to the sea, often invisibly. Often, this operates on the same analogies we use to make sense of the sea. 

Kelp, technically a kind of algae, can be compared to a forest. But the analogy doesn’t quite hold up. “The kelp is the habitat and the food for the species that live there,” says Dr. Chris Cornwall, who specialises in kelp ecosystems. If this is a forest, it is one where everyone is eating the trees. Deforestation on land is particularly damaging to these forests of the sea, as it causes more terrestrial sediment to erode into the water, so the kelp have less light to photosynthesise with. Just as forests encounter wildfires worsened by climate change, temperature-sensitive kelp loses its range as ocean heatwaves race through the water. Kelp has unique threats, too; an invasive sea urchin from Australia which can create “barrens” is expected to increase in the North Island, says Cornwall.

The ocean is completely entwined with the life of the planet as a whole. Currently, the ocean absorbs about 40% of CO2, one of the chemicals causing anthropogenic climate change. This makes the waters more acidic and is killing, or inhibiting, the growth of creatures with hard exteriors, from coral to shellfish. Furthermore, colder water can hold more carbon. The temperature of the ocean regulates the climate system on land, producing rain and wind, which life on land depends on. From kelp forests to climate conditions, there are links between land and sea, sea and land.

Despite the importance of the ocean, humans know very little about it. For Siobhan, this is invigorating. “There’s something about the unknown that inspires a sense of adventure, mystery, and growth. I’ve learnt so much about myself through the ocean—whether it be through scuba diving, science, and everything in-between,” she says.

Sometimes, scientists—marine biologists desperate for funding, perhaps—suggest that humans shouldn’t spend resources on going to space when there is so much unknown within the ocean. Dr. Mercier rejects this. “It’s an uncomfortable framing as a Māori person because we have tapu, we have stories and traditions about how not all knowledge is for everybody, not all knowledge is there for the taking; maybe it’s for some people and maybe it’s for no one at all.”

For non-Māori sea-lovers, it is also essential to acknowledge the unknown. “For so long our relationships with the ocean has been dependence and enjoyment and mystery, there’s so much mystery,” says Hiromi. Though she says “of course I’d like to know more,” she likes that the ocean will never reveal all its answers.

Ultimately, the desire for the ocean to both offer secrets and answers is superseded by a bigger question: that of how we relate to it. “How does that shape our relationships and our sense of obligation and responsibility to the moana if we see the deep sea as an alien place because it’s so removed, and nothing we do will touch it, it is completely resilient—that’s super super dangerous,” says Dr. Mercier.

“While the ocean may appear alien, it is in fact our home,” says Ben Harris, who studies organisms that live on or near the seafloor. He tells me about the mammalian dive reflex, the fact that when entering water our heart rate will slow down so it is possible to stay underneath for longer (this is why all breath-holding records are set underwater), and the layer of fat that allows humans to stay warm in the water. All life evolved from the ocean, and our lives are inevitably entangled.

“Once you spend too many days in a row diving or snorkelling, you start dreaming about the ocean,” Dr. Cornwall says. He sends me pictures of some of his field sites, tidy pink lace of coralline algae, cascades off of waterfall reefs. “There’s nothing on land that can compare.”

Hiromi and I share a moment of recognition when we realise that we were obsessed with the same books as children—The Ingo Chronicles by Helen Dunmore, where two children find that they can breathe underwater. Belonging to land and to sea Hiromi grew up in the warm waters of Whāngerei Heads, where she dreamed of underwater cities; I grew up far from here, 2000 kilometres inland, pressing my legs together in the bright stink of chlorine pools and wishing I was a dolphin. Yet we both reach for stories about the sea, the way it teaches us to be more than who we thought we were.

I cycle to Island Bay once a week to babysit. Suddenly, at the crest of Adelaide Road, it appears: that shimmering surface, a reminder of possibilities reaching beyond me. I am sweaty and out of breath, gasping air made by the ocean, salt on my skin a reminder that as the water waits, so does the mystery.