A juvenile green sea turtle on the reef at Heron Island. Death is a part of the cycle of life. Without it the world as we know it could not exist. From the early life forms that developed deep in primordial seas to the complex incredible ecosystems that we know and love, death has been an essential part of the story, an inextricable piece of the puzzle that is life. As a biologist, I work in the liminal space between life and death. Without death, we could only study organisms in-situ, and could only glean so much from their behavior, physical attributes, and whatever they leave behind, in the form of feathers, fecal matter, or scales perhaps. Without living organisms to bring wonder to every environment I’ve ever visited, I don’t know where I would be. My love of marine life drove me from when I was as young as I can remember to chase this crazy dream of becoming a marine biologist. Death is a part of my work. For better or for worse, much of my time as a biologist has centered around death. From the fish I dissect to better understand their life history parameters and contribute to their management in the US, to the excavation of sea turtle nests and seeing which hatchlings didn’t make it. It’s an ugly facet of my professional life, and one that has to be handled delicately. When faced with explaining what I do, I’m forced to use wishy washy language, and pull the punch of explaining that I am responsible for the death of organisms because it’s hard to say but harder to hear. And yet I find myself struggling to wrap my mind around death. I got some bad news about a family friend while I was working with sea turtles on Heron Island. On an island where I walked by the bodies of small terns who didn’t make it to fledging, past the shearwaters that fly through the night and hit buildings of the research station with too much force. The skeletons of corals long since dead lie white and in pieces all along one of the most beautiful stretches of beach on this earth. And somehow I couldn’t make the death of someone in my circles make sense. Somehow death feels personal when it cuts too close to the people I love. I am surrounded by it day and night and all the spaces in between by career choice and by the time that I have been born into. Living in this day and age introduced me from a very young age to the concept of extinction, where we are losing species at an alarming rate. Extinction was a concept that was easy for me to grab and hold onto. Extinction is the end. Whole generas and species and organisms that I never had the pleasure to see gone without acknowledgement. Extinction kept me up when I was young, wondering what I could do to stop it. And it feels like my own personal extinction event whenever a loved one is gone. My own personal loss of something unique and special and contributing to the world in its own special way. And yet, life inexorably marches onward. Years ago, a friend told me that the answer to life was to live. And though I didn’t see the parallels at the time, that advice is echoed throughout the animal kingdom. Corals today live on the skeletons of their ancestors, thousands of years down the line, and we have a coral structure that is visible from space. Sea turtles face abysmal survival rates, and yet, year after year, decade after decade, sea turtle mothers emerge from the sea to lay clutches of eggs, where perhaps one in 100 will survive to adulthood. It's not as though life is ever wasted in the biosphere either. Though few sea turtle hatchlings will survive to adulthood, they serve as an important food source for hundreds of animal species – from the birds, crabs, coyotes, armadillos, raccoons, and fish that feed on this annual supply of nutrients into the terrestrial and marine ecosystem. The corals of today will serve as the backbones for the corals of tomorrow. And so life marches forward, with death in the shadows cleaning up behind. Though my grief doesn’t care for metaphors or comparisons, it is comforting to know that every living thing on earth is following the same path, no more or less significant for brushes with that which comes for us all.
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AuthorBree Gibbs, here. I'm a recent Master's Grad just trying to share what it's like to be a trash scientist (for those who aren't in the know, I'm a marine biologist). Categories
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March 2021
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