A Sea of Glass: Searching for the Blaschkas' Fragile Legacy in an Ocean at Risk

A SEA OF GLASS

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the General Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

A SEA of GLASS

Searching for the Blaschkas’ Fragile Legacy in an Ocean at Risk

DREW HARVELL

FOREWORD BY HARRY W. GREENE

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

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University of California Press

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© 2016 by The Regents of the University of California

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PREPRESSEmbassy Graphics

PRINTER AND BINDERQuaLibre

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Harvell, C. Drew, 1954– author.

    A sea of glass : searching for the Blaschkas’ fragile legacy in an ocean at risk / Drew Harvell.

        pages    cm. — (Organisms and Environments ; 13)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-28568-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-96111-1 (ebook)

    1. Marine biodiversity conservation.    2. Marine invertebrates.    3. Marine invertebrates—Models.    4. Glass animals.    5. Blaschka, Leopold, 1822–1895.    6. Blaschka, Rudolf, 1857–1939.    I. Title.    II. Series: Organisms and environments ; 13.

QH91.8.B6H37    2016

    333.95’616—dc232015029740

Printed in China

24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 2002) (Permanence of Paper).

ORGANISMS AND ENVIRONMENTS

Harry W. Greene, Consulting Editor

In memory of my brother,

RICHARD K. HARVELL,

who first inspired my interest in oceans, wild places, and art, and continues to remind me to follow my heart

CONTENTS

Foreword by Harry W. Greene

1. INTRODUCTION

The Quest for the Living Blaschka Animals

2. ANEMONES AND CORALS

Rooted Lives of At-Risk Animals

3. JELLYFISH

The Rise of the Medusa

4. WORMS

Ecosystem Engineers Undercover

5. SEA SLUGS

Fire Stealers of the Deep

6. OCTOPUS AND SQUID

Shape-Shifters under Pressure

7. SEA STARS

Keystone Species in Glass

8. THE VOYAGE OF OUR BLASCHKA BIODIVERSITY

Acknowledgments

Appendix: A Primer on the Blaschka Tree of Life

References

List of Illustrations

Index

FOREWORD

A SEA OF GLASS: Searching for the Blaschkas’ Fragile Legacy in an Ocean at Risk is the thirteenth volume in the University of California Press’s series Organisms and Environments, whose unifying themes are the diversity of plants and animals, the ways they interact with each other and their surroundings, and the implications of those relationships for science and society. We seek books that promote unusual, even unexpected connections among seemingly disparate topics and that are distinguished by the unique talents and perspectives of their authors. Previous volumes have spanned topics as diverse as Baja California reptiles and grassland ecology, but none of them have directly addressed the marine realm.

Drew Harvell’s A Sea of Glass is a love story about oceans—those watery kingdoms that cover almost three-quarters of the Earth’s surface (deserts amount to only about a tenth)—and about soft, squishy critters—jellies, anemones, tubeworms, and others even less familiar to most of us; sea slugs and their better known molluscan cousins, the squid, octopuses, and cuttlefish; and sea stars, our own closest relatives among invertebrates. A Sea of Glass is also the tale of three superbly talented naturalists, the author herself and a couple of nineteenth-century Bohemian glassblowers. Through vibrant prose we accompany Drew into the marine realm, among the tentacled anemones and shape-shifting octopi in their cold, sometimes murky environs. Through her global travels and dives, we follow two distinctive yet obviously connected threads, the biology of those salt-water invertebrates that also fascinated the Blaschkas, and the fate of marine life on a planet increasingly threatened by the effects of human dominance. A third thread, the blurring of boundaries between science and art, runs through it all.

A Sea of Glass spins together the pieces of this distinguished biologist’s career as researcher, conservation activist, and teacher. Her scientific work focuses on the ecology and evolution of coral resistance to disease—corals, as you will soon learn, are actually animals, related to anemones—and most pressingly, the impacts of a warming climate on coral reef ecosystems. To better understand these problems, she uses field observations and experiments, the latest techniques of molecular biology and chemistry, and mathematical modeling; her questions and procedures have taken her from Florida’s keys to the Yucatán Peninsula, from Hawaii to Indonesia. She’s worked with the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis and promoted coral reef research and restoration at the World Bank. And here in this volume, sailing and diving with Drew the veteran teacher, readers get a mini-course in the biology of invertebrates, a celebratory tour of those animals traditionally defined by what they don’t have and thereby taxonomically distanced from those with backbones. Invertebrates, we learn, span much of the animal tree of life, and thus shed light on our deepest ancestry.

Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, the father-son team of naturalist glassblowers, have provided what amounts to the study specimens for our class. Working from Germany, basing their efforts on illustrations in books and live animals they kept in aquaria, their spineless menagerie captivatingly portrays a wide range of marine invertebrates. Indeed, the Blaschkas’ exquisite pieces were originally commissioned for Harvard, Cornell, and other then-young universities because they were three-dimensional, unlike paintings, and because they retained colors, unlike the stinky, spirit-preserved corpses traditionally used as teaching material. And in fact, the structural complexity of these glass animals is so minutely portrayed that even here, on the page, they beckon as if alive.

Right from the start A Sea of Glass draws us in to appreciate other life forms in their own light, with an eight-armed animal that is surely among the smartest if not the most provocative of invertebrates. The ride never lets up, and by the end we realize what’s at stake here. Underlying it all is the diversity of life itself, the astonishingly myriad ways in which creatures make their livings, under circumstances utterly foreign to us. Then there’s the health of the oceans, housing everything from sulfur-eating microbes and edible sea cucumbers to the largest mammals that have ever lived—and our ever-growing effects on water chemistry and temperature, the impact of which we cannot entirely predict but which someday might be catastrophic. Finally there are the roles of science and art in human affairs, the one providing us with facts and answers, the other affecting our values and thereby our relationships with the rest of the living world. A Sea of Glass invites us into the watery depths, to scrutinize curves and bumps of marine invertebrates, to ponder surprising combinations of color and design, and in so doing to look beyond the sharks, fishes, and whales. It invites us to learn more and thereby to care.

Harry W. Greene

1.

INTRODUCTION

The Quest for the Living Blaschka Animals

Common octopus (Octopus vulgaris) in glass from the Cornell collection, restored in 2014. Photo by Gary Hodges.

WHEN I FIRST MET the level gaze of two periscoped eyes and felt suckered tentacles on my arm, I did not imagine that I would soon be holding an ink-spewing Houdini. It was otherworldly to be communing underwater with an eight-armed alien with roughly the intelligence of a cat—maybe more. For what cat can figure out how to open a child-proof bottle of Tylenol? This even eludes some people. Not surprisingly, octopus intelligence is complemented by emotions and distinct personalities. Each animal is an individual being—smart, aware, and curious. But here’s where these alchemists trump us humans: not only are they masters of shape and color, changing their appearance at will, but they have unusual powers and can taste with their tentacles and see with their light-sensitive skin. I am entranced, pulled further into this curious being’s world during one of my first dives on a quest to find the living counterparts of the glass animals created by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka more than 150 years ago.

The octopus we found in Hawaii is similar to my favorite glass piece (opposite) in the historic collection of glass sea animals housed at Cornell University, where I teach. I first saw it twenty-seven years ago, broken and dusty, its knowing eye cocked up at me, suckered tentacle stretched across the bottom of its box. I was discouraged to see the octopus so damaged, with shattered tentacles and a gaping hole above the eye; it looked to be beyond repair. That broken glass masterpiece is a metaphor for how some of these animals are faring in the oceans of today: like their glass counterparts, some of the living representatives are in decline. This inspired my quest to use our glass collection as a time capsule and to see how many of the living representatives we could find in today’s oceans, a quest chronicled here in A Sea of Glass. It is a continuing global journey that has taken videographer David Brown and me from the shores of Maine and Washington to far-flung locales like Indonesia, in the most diverse waters of the Coral Triangle, and the Ligurian coast of the Mediterranean. It is also a quest to bring the glass to life and show the brilliance and unusual biology of the inhabitants of the Blaschkas’ tree of life.

In the 1980s, I heard from Paul Feeny, then chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell, that the university had a stunning collection of glass invertebrates packed away in offsite storage. The collection had been made by the famed glass flower artists Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. It was Paul’s idea that we should go look at the collection and think about bringing it back to campus. Paul asked Carol Yoon, then a PhD student and aspiring journalist, to come along and write up a piece about the collection for the Cornell paper. Together we made the forty-minute drive to a storage warehouse outside of Corning, New York. As we walked in the door of the huge old warehouse, I wondered why I was even there, since all we could see were boxes and boxes stacked on metal shelves that stretched endlessly across a concrete floor. As a young assistant professor trying to establish a research career studying living marine ecosystems, I really had other things to do. But once I opened the boxes, there was no turning back. I was astounded at the perfection with which so many of the invertebrate species I knew and loved had been rendered in glass. There before me were glass models of many species I knew well and, equally enthralling, countless ones I had never seen before: anemones, jellyfish, boxes and boxes of sea slugs—and the octopus. They were all in cardboard cartons, many wired onto their original shipping cards, with Blaschka numbers and their former taxonomic names. Some were as perfect as the day they had been made, shiny and bright; others were shattered beyond repair. I couldn’t stop looking; each box held some new wonder. In many cases it was like greeting old friends that I had once seen on some shore, long-forgotten Latin names filtering up out of the past. It was almost too much to take in at one time. Paul and Carol shared in the moment of unearthing this essentially lost treasure.

Beginning with that single octopus, so perfectly made and so easily broken, I searched through all the boxes and found 569 glass animal models, acquired in 1885 by Cornell University, with the help of its first president, Andrew Dixon White, as a teaching collection (Reiling 1998). Each is an exact replica of an animal that once lived in our oceans and might still. I was enchanted that anyone could have produced such exquisite masterpieces, nearly indistinguishable from their living counterparts. That one glass octopus inspired me to begin restoration of this rare and valuable collection. When I saw its living double on a reef in Hawaii twenty-five years later, it would propel me on a worldwide quest to find more living Blaschka biodiversity.

Our 150-year-old Blaschka collection is a time capsule, pulling us back to explore the biodiversity of a bygone era. This was not only a time of plentiful seas, before the Industrial Revolution, but also the age of natural history. The Blaschkas were profoundly influenced by, and initially copied, many of the spectacular anemone, jellyfish, and squid watercolors of the great naturalists Ernst Haeckel and Philip Gosse, eventually producing over 800 perfect glass sea creatures inhabiting many branches of the tree of life. These are the most ancient of animals on earth, animals without backbones, and they represent the fundamental body plans on our planet. Not dogs, cats, dolphins, turtles, or even fish, but rather anemones, corals, sea stars, octopuses, sea slugs, and sea squirts, animals less well known than the more common back-boned creatures and yet with big roles to play in the economy of our oceans. Some are alive and thriving to this day; others have not fared well. Some are classified as endangered in today’s oceans, and still others have been impossible to find and may even be extinct.

Interestingly, the Blaschkas are not best known for their sea creatures. Historically, they are famous for their glass flowers, a major collection of which is currently housed at Harvard University. It includes over 3,000 sculptures, encompassing all major orders within the kingdom of plants. Most people don’t know that the Blaschkas created the glass menagerie of rare and mysterious sea animals first. Cornell’s collection of sea animals, acquired in 1885, may have been one of the last invertebrate collections made before they shifted to making the flowers in 1886 (Reiling 2007). The circle of Blaschka influence is vastly wider than the Harvard flower collection and the Cornell sea animal collection; Blaschka glass sea animals are shown by over fifty museums and universities across the globe and include large exhibitions in Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, Austria, the United States (at Cornell, Harvard, Tufts, and the Boston Museum of Science), Belgium, Canada, France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, and Sweden (Callaghan et al. 2013). More than 3,500 models of 800 different animals are estimated to exist. Like Cornell’s, some collections are dusty and in need of repair (Reiling 1998). Part of my work as a professor at Cornell and curator of its collection has been to sleuth out current scientific names and to restore the damaged models for exhibition. (An online gallery of most of Cornell’s glass invertebrates can be found at www.library.cornell.edu/blaschka-gallery. Many of the Blaschka watercolors housed in the Rakow Library at the Corning Museum of Glass are available at www.cmog.org/research/library-search/%22Blaschka%20design%20drawings%20Marine%20invertebrates%22.)

Over the past few years, in between dives inspired by the Blaschka sea animals, I have made numerous trips to the Rakow Library at the Corning Museum of Glass to explore the eight boxes of original Blaschka correspondence and watercolors in its collection. As with the glass collection, I was in turn humbled, inspired, and excited by the discovery of such a rich history; my hands shook the first time I opened those boxes. I am not by training a historian, but I felt a historian’s reverence at being able to touch the past, and excitement at the volume of material. When I leaf through the Blaschkas’ journals, letters, and watercolors, I slip back in time and feel their presence, each time learning some new detail of how and why they created something so inspiring to me.

Leopold Blaschka’s background, recounted in Henri Reiling’s article (1998), offers some clues to his passion for excellence in glass. Born in 1822, he was one of three sons in a family of glass-and metalworkers in the village of Böhmisch Aicha, in what is now the Czech Republic. Glassworking had been a family tradition for 300 years. Leopold’s father, Joseph, taught him the arts of glassmaking and enameling. As a boy, Leopold enjoyed natural history and displayed a talent for drawing. He was the only one of the three brothers gifted enough to be a glassworker. In 1846 Leopold married his love, Carolina Zimmermann; sadly, she died in 1850 during a cholera epidemic. This was a crushing loss, soon to be followed by another. Leopold’s beloved father died in 1852, sending him into despondence. The following year, seeking solace and escape, he traveled aboard the brig Pauline to North America. The boat was becalmed on the Atlantic, during which time Leopold observed several species of jellyfish, including the stunning and dangerous Portuguese man-of-war. His diary entry from this voyage, described in chapter 3, reveals that he was entranced by the forms