Another beautiful day in Paradise. Leo is already out
fishing and Walter is concentrating hard over a smoked fish snack. I call Neil Stanton on
the radio and find out he has heard nothing from Port Moresby about the new team or the
new supplies. While Freddy rattles around in the Galley fixing
breakfast I sit in the cockpit and look out at the lagoon. I woke up this morning still
thinking about the coral reef, the whole atoll, as a super organism - a megabeast.
"There is a problem, logically, when I try to present the
concept of the megabeast to the Earthwatch participants," I mumble.
"Yeah, what's that? Scrambled eggs for brains?" Freddy
quips, scrambling eggs.
"No, really. I'm trying to work it out. It's the same logical
hurtle needed to comprehend the planet as a living being."
"How can you work anything out before breakfast?" Freddy
puts a cup of coffee on the cockpit seat next to me.
There are several ways to look at symbiosis and they have a lot to
do with the confusion in my mind about self and community; the individual coral polyp and
the whole colony; the one and the many. I glimpsed something on awakening. I scribble some
notes in the log:
1) Symbiosis is another name for synergy.
2) Larvae have the same genetic memories as huge coral colonies.
3) Damn! I can't quite focus on the third idea. It was something
about direction. To have direction. Something to do with the Gonioporid coral I
photographed yesterday. When I touched one polyp, it withdrew. When I touched it again,
the whole colony systematically pulled in. And the dolphins, when one got worried and
signaled to the whole school and they left together. When I try to think about it, all I
get is the idea of consciousness. The communication of one being with the whole life
system.
I know. The third idea is this: Consciousness, the communication
network, is a synergetic activity too. Yes. There it is. That's it.
Thoughts, words and biological signals are themselves "beings" made up of the interactive behavior of smaller entities with the larger
systems they create - they create with their communications.
The physical manifestation of the signal transmitted along the nerve
net of the coral or whacked into the sea by the tail of the dolphin has two aspects. One:
The physical signal itself. Two: The meaning of the signal to the entities receiving the
signal - a meaning defined by the sum total of the memories of the receivers. (To have
direction).
"OK, so now I've got it," I say.
"Here's breakfast," Freddy hands it up.
"The layers of the system are created by consciousness (knowing
together) - intercommunications between selves sharing the same interval of awareness.
Consciousness on one level creates new, different, behavior systems, new levels of being.
These new, larger, levels of being then control the behavior of the beings which make
them. This gives directionality to the process of becoming - either embryologically or
evolutionarily."
"And here's my breakfast," Freddy hands it up and comes
out into the cockpit to eat with me. "Now, what's all this babbling about?"
"This is not easy to wrap my mind around. I can see it, but not
put it into words. The crucial thought is the link between the layers of the nested
systems. The control system. It's a feedback control system - a reflection - that changes
the direction of the next set of communications. I keep wanting to think of this in
cycles, as in cybernetics. But there are no such things as cycles because the whole system
is changing its position and relationships in a non-linear and non-repeating way. So the
feedback system does not actually feed anything back, but controls the forward systematic
development of the communication web "
"Yeah, well, wrap your mouth around those scrambled eggs," Freddy digs in.
"I can almost say it. It has to do with the ability of the
collective self to perceive, remember, and then, through its sub-layers, respond. But
includes the limits of the abilities of its components. It has to do with the...."
"Don't talk with your mouth full," she sips her coffee.
After breakfast we take one look at the clear blue sky and the
crystal clear water and grab the camera, dive gear, a picnic lunch and head off to
explore.
A sea turtle floats slowly over the shallow sand, sees us and flaps
away at top speed. A tribe of eagle rays majestically glides out of the hazy distance and
wings right past us. I lie on the bottom, holding my breath effortlessly and watch a tiny
neon blue goby nip parasites off a goatfish. The goatfish hangs vertically in the water,
its long whiskers extended straight out, trying not to flinch as the goby bites off the
little isopods clinging to its gill plates. We find a table Acropora almost two
meters in diameter cresting a tangled web of living corals of every description. Fish
fountain up over the coral and Freddy and I hold hands, just watching.
 We eat lunch on the big beach. Leo's boat is nowhere in
sight. There is no sign of humanity anywhere except for our outboard bobbing gently just
off the beach. Little ghost crabs dart back and forth on the sand defending their
territories or chasing nightmares - who knows. After lunch Freddy cuts my hair and we get
into a playful wrestling match, winding up in the water where we abandon bathing suits and
pretend we are mating turtles. We both almost drown laughing.
Back aboard Moira and I work on my list again. It's like a
cross-word puzzle where the whole pattern adds up to something. I pencil in the letters.
1) Symbiosis = Synergy = To Be.
2) Larvae = Coral Species = To Change.
3) Consciousness = Transmission of Behavior = To have Direction.
The wind comes up. I go outside to see what's happening. Freddy is
reading in the cockpit. The sun is setting and the clouds develop a beautiful salmon
color. We sit in the cockpit and watch the sun go down. It approaches the horizon and
comes into contact with some big cloud banks. I force myself to see the planet spinning so
I can feel its majestic, perfect movement as the body of Earth moves up to hide the sun. |
Corals develop a free swimming larvae called a Planula; a cluster
of cells in an oblong shape. The outer cells of the cluster grow
flagella. These beat in wave-like synchrony to move the larva
through Sea. Coral planula apparently get infected with zooxanthellae
after they reach a certain number of cells.
There
is the coral colony, sitting on the sea floor. It is possible
to find other coral colonies of the same species scattered here
and there on the reef. Sometimes there are many colonies of one
kind of coral on a single reef, sometimes only a few, maybe even
only one. If we up anchor and sail down current, to the west,
we would find other coral colonies of the same species here and
there on appropriate substrates, in just the right conditions.
On an ocean wide scale, we call the distribution of all the colonies
of a particular coral species its zoogeographical distribution.