Description
It smells like sex. I could’t shake that somewhat disturbing thought as I floated at the surface, watching the moonlight glisten off the ever-widening slick’the residue of the night’s intimacy. The distinct, musty odor was undeniable. I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised. I had just spent the past two hours watching corals spawn. But that event looked so unlike sex that I never expected the aftermath to smell like it.
As I pulled strands of mucous-y coral goo out of my hair, I caught the eye of the other researchers similarly engaged in de-spawning themselves. We smiled at one another with a knowing look. There is a certain level of bonding that occurs when floating amid the leftovers of one of Nature’s biggest orgies.
That’s the thing about sex in the sea. It is at once utterly foreign, yet there are hints of the familiar but only just. For the most part, sex beneath the waves looks nothing like what we think of as intercourse. That’s what happens after several hundred million years of intense battles over who can reproduce the most evolution gets a little funky.
From the highest reef crests to the deepest trench in the sea, getting laid and not getting eaten are the two biggest concerns for nearly every animal on the planet. Thus Nature invests heavily in the art of both sex and survival. Life’s great purpose to successfully pass along to future generations one’s good looks and all the genes that go with it’s relies on both skills. But not equally. A deft survivor that lives a long but celibate life loses the evolutionary game; a great lover, adept at attracting and securing a mate, needs only to survive long enough to get the deed done.
In the end, it all comes down to sex.
Thus the mind-boggling array of ways to seal the deal in Nature. And I’m not talking Kama Sutra style creative contortionism here. That’s just a bunch of minor postural adjustments. Real sexual innovation occurs in the wilderness, and nowhere are things more wet and wild than in the ocean. After all, that’s where sex was invented. That’s where Mother Nature has been practicing her procreative creativity the longest.
Under the sea, the missionary position is in the minority. Even the images of mating animals on land most familiar to use the neighbor’s dog aggressively humping your legal are outliers. Instead, sex may look like a handshake; an interlocking ring of multiple individuals forming a closed loop of lovers; or it may be a microscopic male squeezing out sperm while living his days inside his giantess mate’s kidney. Peek below the shimmering surface of the sea and witness worm penis jousting matches, full-moon sex parties, sunset spawning blitzes, and likely the biggest threesome in the world (with the lovers holding their breath the entire time).
Each of these strategies suits the location and the lifestyle of the species: cold, dark, deep-sea love dens versus warm, bright, reefy love nests; the social, vocal pods of whales contrasted with the independent, silent life of sharks; the microscopic quest and size of copepods compared with the epic journeys of giant bluefin tuna; the daily spawning rush of wrasse alongside the once-a-lifetime sex fest of salmon. Every version has been honed to maximize the chance of successful reproduction. It’s a salty symphony of sex that ensures the big blue sea stays bountiful year after year, age after age, right up to the present day. Almost.
Over the last century or more, those myriad instruments of sex have started to, well, go a bit off-key. This is bad news not just for horny halibut, but for us as well.
The way marine life gets busy in the deep matterse it matters for food security, human health, coastal development, climate change, and other global issues. Take food security. Nearly three billion people rely on fish as a major source of protein. Half of that fish comes from the sea. To feed that many people requires a lot of fish successfully making a lot of baby fish every year.
But that’s not the only reason the sex lives of snapper and sardines are of interest.
Beachgoers and coastal homeowners take note: like the great walls that defended medieval cities, the mighty underwater reefs built by millions of oysters or corals protect and stabilize the shores. These natural barriers break up wave energy, helping to guard the coastline from storms and heavy surges. And because they are living walls, they can grow rather than erode a over time, rising even as sea levels do. Lose the reef builders and it is not long before the sand starts slipping back into the sea.