Over the past 25 years, C. Drew Harvell has meticulously
recovered more than 200 models in a mostly forgotten collection of 570 glass
sculptures created by a pair of father-and-son glassmakers, Leopold and Rudolf
Blaschka, in the 1860s.
It sat stolidly in the light of the camera, 30 feet below
the surface, unfazed by the attention. I reached out a finger and it touched me
with its suctioned tentacles. When it scuttled in the other direction, I herded
it between my cupped hands as it watched me attentively with searching golden eyes.
As if levitating, it smoothly lifted off and tried to jet
over my head, but slowly enough that I could catch it gently in midair — like
handling a large bird, albeit one with eight sticky tentacles. Holding it at
eye level, I looked into its eyes. I felt connected, sort of an octopus
whisperer.
Then a tentacle slapped the front of my mask. The octopus
crawled up my arm and vanished into the night.
I’ve been a marine biologist my entire professional life,
spending more than 25 years researching the health of corals and sustainability
of reefs. I’m captivated by the magic of sessile invertebrates like corals,
sponges and sea squirts — creatures vital to the ecosystem yet too often
overlooked in favor of more visible animals like sharks and whales.
The filmmaker David O. Brown and I want to change that. To
make a documentary, “Fragile Legacy,” we are on a quest to lure these elusive
and delicate invertebrates in front of the camera lens.
Our inspiration springs from an unlikely source: a
collection of 570 superbly wrought, anatomically perfect glass sculptures of
marine creatures from the 19th century.
These delicate folds and strands of glass make up the
Blaschka collection of glass invertebrates at Cornell, of which I am the
curator — enchanting and impossibly rare jellyfishes of the open ocean; more
common but equally beautiful octopus, squid, anemones and nudibranchs from
British tide pools and Mediterranean shores.
They are the work of an extraordinary father-and-son team,
Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. Leopold Blaschka (1822-95) was a Czech immigrant
to Dresden, in what is now Germany; on a trip to America in 1853, his ship was
becalmed and he was enchanted by a spectacular display of bioluminescence from
a type of jellyfish called a siphonophore.
He decided to study the jellyfish more closely and create
their likenesses in glass. His first works were a set of anemones for the
Dresden Natural History Museum in 1863, inspired by the naturalist Philip Henry
Gosse’s “British Sea-Anemones and Corals.”
Leopold’s son, Rudolf (1857-1939), was a keen natural
historian in his own right, and an ardent aquarist, or aquarium keeper. He
followed his father’s lead, expanding in biodiversity to reach the edges of the
animal kingdom. (And beyond: Later they created a comprehensive collection of
flowers that is now on display at Harvard.)
The marine biodiversity recreated by the Blaschkas is a
phantasmagorical view of life in the oceans. For they were artists as well as
keen natural historians, with an eye for the forms that would enchant in glass
and that were too rare or fragile to be seen readily. They were also superb
teachers, eager to share the wonders of nature with students.
Their favorite subjects were the ephemeral, translucent,
bright forms of the Cnidaria (anemones, jellyfish, corals), unshelled mollusks
(nudibranchs, octopus and squid) and brilliant tentacled worms. Some of their
most brilliant creations are of the different species of cephalopods, like the
ornate octopus.
David Brown and I came to Hawaii with the goal of making
videos of as many Blaschka cephalopod look-alikes as we could find. (The ornate
octopus we found was not an exact match with the Blaschkas’, but the common
octopus was: Our glass counterpart still sits dusty and broken in its original
shipping box, soon to be restored by Elizabeth.)
Our quest is also to use the Blaschka collection as a time
capsule, to take a snapshot of change. How many of these creatures that were so
common 150 years ago can still be found today?
The oceans are changing rapidly, with a 30 percent increase
in acidity in the last 200 years, lethally stressful warming in many tropical
seas, and significant coastal pollution and overfishing just about everywhere.
If ever there was a time to compare the plentiful past with an ocean in
jeopardy, that time would be now.
The chances of finding cephalopods are much improved while
they are out foraging at night. So we did a series of night reef dives,
followed by a “black water” dive three miles off the Kona coast.
That one put us in 1,000-foot-deep water, well after sunset,
with the very real possibility of encountering tiger sharks and great white
sharks. Floating in the current, the captain turned off all the boat’s lights,
the better to see bioluminescent “black magic.”
We clipped onto our safety lines and slipped below the
surface without lights, into darkness punctuated by bioluminescent splashes. We
had to drift close to identify whether these splashes were from jellyfish,
ctenophores, salps or squid. As we settled into our depth at 50 feet below the
surface and turned on our dive lights, the sparkles of bioluminescence turned
into a stream of tiny plankton floating by.
What I really hoped to see were siphonophores, the creatures
that created the mid-Atlantic bioluminescence that so inspired Leopold Blaschka
in 1853 and whose models are some of the most intricate in our collection.
For example, the glass model of Apolemia uvaria has the
basic form of a siphonophore that I could see before me — the large swimming
bell, its powerhouse for fast movement, and the long dangling tentacles — each
capped with a deadly harpoon loaded with neurotoxin — that are death traps for
all manner of small shrimp and fish.
And the siphonophores put on quite a show for us, even if
they were small and wickedly hard to film. They stretched out those long
tentacles, hauling them in rapidly when prey arrived.
And when they encountered danger, their nervous systems
fired a signal to muscles that zipped up the tentacles and powered the swimming
bell to high speed. A three-foot-long string of stinging tentacles contracted
in a flash to a three-inch stream of jet propulsion. (Somehow, the term
“jellyfish” doesn’t capture the extravagant evolution and biology at work
here!)
Then I heard an underwater shout from David as he caught a
picture of an exquisite tiny octopus zooming past.
The next stop in our quest is the Mediterranean, ground zero
for Blaschka subjects. This month I head to Italy, to the Naples Marine
Station, which supplied the glassmakers with many of their live animals.
Perhaps we’ll find exact matches for such spectacular
invertebrates as the curly tentacled octopus (Eledone moschata) and the giant
siphonophore Apolemia uvaria, which at 20 feet long can dominate a
Mediterranean food web. At any rate, we hope to find out whether they are
surviving in the sea as magnificently as they do in glass.
C. Drew Harvell is the associate director for environment at
the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future at Cornell, and curator of the
Cornell Collection of Blaschka Invertebrate Models.
by Jeffery DelViscio
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