Absorbing Seadevils

I keep meaning to set up a document to jot notes about the Wonder course. Right now, I’m in the middle of a NY Review of Books article by Tim Flannery about two books: The Deep (Claire Nouvian) and The Silent Deep (Tony Koslow). Here are the paragraphs that made me stop and make notes:

To understand the full extent of the constraints that the abyss places on life, consider the black seadevil. it’s a somber, grapefruit-sized globe of a fish–seemingly all fangs and gape–with a “fishing rod” affixed between its eyes whose luminescent bait jerks above the trap-like mouth. Clearly, food is a priority for this creature, for it can swallow a victim nearly as large as itself. But that is only half the story, for this description pertains solely to the female: the male is a minnow-like being content to feed on specks in the sea–until, that is, he encounters his sexual partner.

The first time that a black seadevil meets his much larger mate, he bites her and never lets go. Over time, his veins and arteries grow together with hers, until he becomes a fetus-like dependent who receives from his mate’s blood all the food, oxygen, and hormones he requires to exist. The cost of this utter dependence is a loss of function in all of his organs but his testicles, but even those, it seems, are stimulated to action solely at the pleasure of the engulfing female. When she has had her way with him, the male seadevil simply vanishes, having been completely absorbed and dissipated into the flesh of his paramour, leaving her free to seek another mate. Not even Dante imagined such a fate.

I don’t know what we’d do with a description like that, which tops anything from the Museum of Jurrasic Technology. But it makes me think that we need to talk to some folks in Gilmer about wonder in science.

Can we do something with Elizabeth King’s work and the automatons of the Renaissance, which I think showed up in their cabinets of curiosities? (These also remind me of the short stories of ETA Hoffman, in which young men repeatedly fall in love with women who turn out to be automatons.)
11/30/2007