When I was a kid, I had a serious obsession with whales. Some kids like horses, others like dogs, but I was into whales – huge, intelligent, graceful creatures that sing weird, haunting songs. What’s not to like?

I saw a humpback whale once in the wild. It’s kind of hard to appreciate how mind-bogglingly enormous they are until you see one, and even then I kept wondering whether I’d only seen a cresting wave or whether all that gray and white had really been an animal.

Dipping your toes in tide pools and picking up shells on the beach is all well and good, but there’s some seriously big stuff under all that water.

MARICOLOUS

(Adjective: from Latin mari for “sea/ocean” and colous for “to inhabit” )

living in the sea

There is so much mystery beneath the waves.

Creatures that have never seen sunlight are swallowed up by others that glow in the dark. Giant squid live their entire lives without being seen by human eyes, despite their enormous size. Animals that defy imagination slither, swim, and slip across the ocean floor, unseen and unstudied.

And maybe that’s good for us. We pin things to cards and catalog our knowledge, while below us, a thousand meters deep, live things we’ve only just heard of. We think of the vastness of space and tremble but the ocean is deep and wide and has uncountable staring eyes.