Book Review: The Brilliant Abyss: Exploring the Majestic Hidden Life of the Deep Ocean

"... at the heart of deep-sea biology lies the ambition to understand how life is possible, how species survive and ecosystems flourish under extreme conditions.  Naming new and ever-strange life-forms is just the beginning of the story."

A few years ago, I reviewed Poseidon's Steed: The Story of Seahorses, From Myth to Reality by Dr. Helen Scales.  It's one of my favorite popular books on the subject of marine biology, telling the story of some of the ocean's most unbelievably enchanting inhabitants.  And so, when I saw another book by her on surreal sea creatures, I knew I had to give it a read.  The Brilliant Abyss: Exploring the Majestic Hidden Life of the Deep Ocean, and the Looming Threat That Imperils It takes readers to the furthest reaches of the seafloor.  Unlike the instantly recognizable, highly charismatic seahorses, however, in this book Scales' introduces us to a host of creatures that few of us have ever even heard of, let alone seen.

The book could roughly be divided into two parts, as shown by the subtitle.  In the first, Dr. Scales performs an overview of the life of the deep ocean, including the interesting history of how we first began to explore this most remote and inhospitable of ecosystems.  For most of our history, it was largely assumed that the vast stretches of the deep ocean floor were as desolate as the surface of the moon, and about as lifeless.  Now, we know that the ocean floor is home to an amazing diversity of species, whether scavenging whale carcasses and marine snow on the abysmal plains, lurking in canyons and crevices, or huddled upon seamounts.  Most of this is life that we are not able to observe directly - it's too difficult and dangerous for us to go to their depths - so they are studied remotely.  We're given the impression that for every faint glimpse we're given of life in the deep via a camera or a submersible, there are entire vistas that we are missing out on.

The second part of the subtitle refers to the looming threat that imperils the sea.  Spoiler alert - it's us.  Through overfishing (including dredging the seafloor), pollution, and the effects of climate change, we're managing to destroy a world that most of us can't even imagine exists.  It's hard for many people to believe that we can have such a big impact on a landscape that we'll never see and know so little about.  It's even harder for other people to imagine that we should care.  To them, however, Dr. Scales offers a lesson in how much the deep sea impacts the surface world, and how our survival as a species may be influenced by the underwater world.

I'll admit that I had a harder time getting in The Brilliant Abyss than I did Poseidon's Steed.  It was largely due to the subject matter.  Seahorses are just a much easier topic to focus on, a single group of fish verses the enormous diversity of the deep ocean.  They're much more relatable - half the creatures mentioned in Brilliant Abyss don't even have faces - and everyone loves them.  They have a long history of association with us - in art, religion, folklore, literature, and as aquarium specimens (I wish that Dr. Scales had dived a little deeper (pun intended) into the myths and legends of the ocean's depths to help remind her readers about what a hold this realm has had on our imagination).  Their conservation plight is much more readily apparent, with pictures of dried seahorses stretched out for sale in a market.  And we've all seen them.  Seahorses are a staple of public aquariums.  Most of the species of the abyss are out of sight, out of mind, which makes the peril they face that much easier for us to overlook.

But that, Dr. Scales reminds us, is exactly the danger.

The Brilliant Abyss: Exploring the Majestic Hidden Life of the Deep Ocean, and the Looming Threat That Imperils It at Amazon.com