This place is a message... and part of a system of messages ...pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor ... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us. The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. The danger is to the body, and it can kill. The form of the danger is an emanation of energy. The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

IDIC

February 2, 2023

My parents are at the beach for the long weekend and my dad has been thoughtfully sending me videos of the various tidal denizens that they've encountered. It's become something of a tradition to visit the tide pools whenever I'm home. Our favorite pasttime (which my mom declines to partake in) is gently poking every sea anemone we can find. The buzz of gentle numbness and the weird bowing-in motion they make never gets old; it's especially satisfying to poke a huge one and watch the beautiful metachronal shivers travel inward.

I don't know when I first noticed that the starfish were missing. Their appearance at the tidepools was always an event, never so frequent as to become ordinary. You could count on seeing one or two on any given visit, the grand dame of the coastal set appearing briefly at the dressing room door to greet her admirers before retiring. When their absence became unmistakable I took it as a localized disappointment, another symptom of my passage into teenagerhood and the myriad disappointments of growing older. Sure, you can go back to the beach any time, but it won't be quite like you remember it. The colors are less vibrant and the path out to the rocks is more painful under your feet.

Anyways, it wasn't local. In 2013, there was a mass die-off of starfish along the West Coast. It's called Sea Star Wasting Syndrome and the cause is unclear. Climate change and the warming of global waters is involved, certainly, but scientists have yet to pinpoint a direct viral or bacterial catalyst. Symptoms include "abnormally twisted arms, white lesions, deflation of arms and body, arm loss, and body disintegration." It's hard to imagine a more thorough destruction.

We are living in the aftermath of the sea stars' quiet apocalypse. The plague continues to this day. It hasn't taken hold in every species, but some of the most beautiful stars have been snuffed out (Pycnopodia helianthoides, a personal favorite, to name one). Children that venture to the tidepools today will likely learn them without the sunbursts of alien, predatory life that once defined the ecosystem. Today I mourn that loss, that particular, personal loss, and the specifity makes it almost manageable. If all the future losses to biodiversity cannot be halted, then I hope that there are plenty of mourners at each and every funeral. I think it's better to feel the loss and sit with it rather than to continue onwards, unaware that the world is a little colder and emptier than it was a moment before.