Nearby Rock Face

A whale carcass brings a large amount of organic matter to the seafloor. On nearby rocks, sea anemones one to two millimeters across form a dense layer. The outline of the whale bones is large and occupies the frame first; when the camera shifts slightly away, a single anemone is nearly a small dot, and as many small dots touch one another, the rock surface takes on a fine, continuous texture. The bones can be recognized at a glance by their edges, while that layer of covering only emerges from among the grains and undulations of the stone surface once many tiny bodies have joined into a sheet. They are very close to the whale bones, close enough that a single photograph can contain the edge of the skeleton, a short stretch of seafloor, and that layer of covering. The material brought by the whale carcass and the place where the anemones attach are visible at the same time, but they fall on two different kinds of surface.

At first, this stretch of “nearby” seems like a horizontal distance. Less than twenty centimeters down into the seafloor, beneath a thin layer of sediment, basalt is already present, giving it a very shallow vertical depth as well. What the whale carcass entered was not a materially uniform base plate; over a very short distance, sediment and rock lie adjacent to each other. Moving a few steps along the seafloor is near, and going downward less than the length of a ruler is also near; the same directional word folds two directions together. The basalt belongs to the underlying geology of the surrounding area, while the record of the anemones falls on rock faces around the carcass. The former gives this nearby area a shallow-layered structure, but it does not predetermine the lithology of every rock face to which the anemones attach. The two observations sit next to each other, and cannot be compressed into the smoother phrase “anemones on basalt.”

An explanation therefore also comes naturally closer: the whale carcass changes nearby conditions, and the rock face allows attachment to occur. This division of labor is as neat as two puzzle pieces that happen to interlock. The field survey did indeed record dense aggregations on rocks around the carcass; on distant rocks observed by the research institute, the same distribution was not seen. But the survey did not separate out how the whale-fall influence and the rock material each participated in this aggregation. Distance provides a clear difference, and surface provides a clear place of landing; the two are combined in the same frame, yet they still do not make a completed causal route. The difference between nearby and distant places is real, and the large material input from the whale carcass is real as well; to connect these two facts into a mechanism in which each part plays its assigned role is to take one step further. That step seems very short, but it crosses exactly beyond where this observation can find footing.

This does not make the relation before our eyes blank. The mass of the whale bones cannot turn neighboring surfaces into an extension of itself, and the dense covering on the rock face does not thereby acquire another ready-made cause. The two patches of seafloor are separated by only a short distance, yet the change in material gives that distance thickness. The camera moves from the whale bones toward the nearby rock face, where anemones one to two millimeters across form a densely packed layer; the whale carcass and the rock face remain in the frame together.