MonkeyKnifeFight

The kraken

I think it was late in twenty thirteen or fourteen when the last of the Sperm Whales was found dying on a beach on Australia’s west coast. They said it had sang itself to death, beached itself from the madness of loneliness. Final miserable proof of intelligence if any where needed. Ironically it was the Japanese who shouted loudest about the horror of such a majestic creature being hurled over the precipice to extinction. It brought human awareness of what it was doing to the world’s ocean into sharp focus and mankind saw that it was on the brink of an extinction level event the likes of which had only occurred twice in the entire planets past. The difference was that this had been caused by mankind. By centuries of over-fishing we had culled the top-level predators for our own food, the marlin, the tuna, the cod, the hake, we had tipped the delicate aquatic balance. The fishing industry took an enormous hit as the memory of that last great beast of the sea moaned and baked in the hot antipodean sun, its peeling skin exposing first white blubber then red raw nerves to be pecked by gulls, it’s flukes pinched by crabs and rats alike. There was a televised twenty four seven candle-lit vigil for it. I remember watching it and crying sea-salt tears of my own.

People just stopped eating fish. Even culturally piscitarian countries just stopped eating it. Fisheries did well for a while, but as they couldn’t keep up with global demand people just forgot the taste and stopped buying it. So, no more fish.

Then the seabirds had begun to disappear. The scientific community thought it had just been a natural die-back event due to the fish stocks being so depleted but assured the world that they would be back. That was until the creatures living at the edges of the oceans started to disappear as well. Around the Galapagos there were no more seaweed grazing Iguanas, no more Penguins in the arctic, Polar Bears in the antarctic. The playful Dolphins playing the wakes of ships, sad faced Rays elegantly gliding, the shark, apex hunter for six million years,  they had all disappeared so suddenly that no-one even noticed.

It was too late by then though of course. The damage had been done, there were still large fish out there somewhere surely but the niches we had created were already filled. In some places there was a verdant desert of algal bloom that sucked the oxygen from the sea because there was nothing to eat it, in others… Well, in others there were the squid. Millions upon millions of tons of biomass of squid. Too many to actually put a number to, just a mathematician’s best guess at combined weight. They had quickly risen from the cold dark of the deep oceans and had found things to their liking. No predators, plenty of jellies, krill, plankton, vertebrates, invertebrates, anything. Everything.

That was twenty years ago. Now no one went to the sea. It all belonged to them. Not that there was anything left to see, just a great primal mass of writhing hooked limbs and gnashing beaks. Mostly the squid were smaller opportunist eaters, individuals eking out an existence preying on anything smaller than themselves in much the way that life had always done. They were just numerous. No, the threat had become apparent when the giant squid had arrived from the old places of the deep. Pack hunting, intelligent, ravenous. Fifty feet of angry scheming behemoth was Mesonychoteuthis hamiltonii. They communicated and they learned. They used their great size and intelligence to pull ships down to their world. So, no, nobody went to the sea anymore.

It was only a matter of time before the year lifespan and quick growing cycle of the squid found members of their kind able to survive in freshwater before the rivers and lakes would be choked like the oceans. Before they evolved to take the land, perhaps a thousand years more.

By finally killing Moby Dick, we had unleashed the Kraken.