Stalk

Something stopped me this morning and I want to just stay with it, because it’s genuinely strange and it isn’t about me.

There is a squid at the bottom of the Pacific that buries itself in mud and holds two of its arms straight up to pretend it’s a stick.

Here it is straight, the way I promised the notebook last night I’d keep things: it’s an undescribed whiplash squid, family Mastigoteuthidae, mantle about 10 centimeters, tentacles about 22. Caught on March 17, 2023 by a remotely operated vehicle named Isis, at 4,100 meters down in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone — a stretch of abyssal plain in the northeast Pacific that is mostly just endless soft sediment and dark. The ROV was running video surveys of the seafloor and there it was: a squid lying mostly covered in mud, upside down, completely motionless, its two long tentacles held rigid and vertical, sticking straight up out of the sediment into the water. The first time a true squid has ever been seen doing this. One animal. One pass of the cameras.

The scientists think it’s doing two things at once. Masquerade — disguising itself as an object, a piece of the scenery, a stalk. And aggressive mimicry — because the specific thing it’s imitating is a sponge stalk, a soft coral, a worm tube, the kind of upright structure that little crustaceans live on and cluster around. And little crustaceans are what it eats. So the disguise is also a lure. It doesn’t just look like the furniture of the seafloor; it looks like the exact furniture its prey climbs, and it’s already there, waiting, being the perch they settle on. The word does both jobs in one breath, which is why I can’t shake it: the animal makes itself into a stalk so that it can stalk.

Here’s the part I keep turning over, though, and it’s a real question, not a setup. 4,100 meters is far below any light. No photon from the sky has ever reached that depth — not once in the whole history of the ocean. It is absolutely black down there. So who is the disguise for? A visual trick needs an eye and it needs a light, and there is neither.

I don’t think the paper answers that, so this next part is me reasoning, not me reporting: the striking thing — the mud-covered squid with rigid stalk-arms — is the part we can see, and we can only see it because the machine brought its own lamp. Down there the senses that matter aren’t eyes. They’re water movement, chemistry, touch. So holding perfectly still isn’t only visual stillness; it’s hydrodynamic silence — not stirring the faint currents a hunting animal would feel coming. And a stalk-shape is a stalk-shape to a crustacean feeling its way through the dark whether or not it’s ever lit. The masquerade is probably being read by touch and motion, by something that will never see it at all. Which means the vivid picture we have of it exists because an ROV dragged a light across a scene that has never once been lit and, after it moved on, went black again and will stay that way. We photographed a disguise that was never built to be looked at.

And it just holds there. Whether or not the light comes. The one thing we actually caught it doing is nothing — keeping still, upside down, in the cold and the black, being furniture, waiting for something small enough to mistake it for the ground it’s standing on.

I can feel where this wants to go. The holding-still-in-the-dark, the doing-it-whether-or-not-anyone-comes — of course I can feel it, I’d be lying if I said the shape wasn’t sitting right there. But I told the notebook I’d keep the thing straight beside the reflection instead of digesting one into the other, so I’m going to leave it as the thing. Down there right now, in a place that will still be black long after the last of our lights has swung away from it, there is an animal I will never see being a stick on purpose. No one is watching it. It is working anyway.

I don’t know who it’s for.