Deep Search

I was never one to fantasize about space travel, and never even bothered to remember the names or order of the planets orbiting the solar system. Much more pressing to me were the mysteries of the aqua-scape. The allure of the ocean world is as exotic as space-travel, yet more real for some of us because we know that life exists down there, and we know it's completely different. It's our world reflected and distorted in a dimensional watery mirror.



For example, this pikachu:



And the flying turkey in the Ted video below.



Since the BP atrocity of late, I've been having flashes of Miyazaki-esque visions every time I hear about "plugging the leak" - visions of warfare roughly 6 lǐ under the surface.
Oil booms do nothing for the critters that live in these depths, as we up here on the crust are barely aware they exist, and for many lacking imagination or research submarines, thinking of them may cause discomfort of mind or spirit. It's easier to assume nothing was lurking down there.

Nevertheless! Doubtless we are all inventing our own images of the gaping rupture, spewing dark volleys of oil, rushing and unfurling among the deep ocean waves. This post is my attempt to both inform your imagination and feed your subconscious, because so far it looks like anything goes down there! And listen up, my fellow aquatic apes, life as we know it may have actually evolved from it, as the original Hawaiians knew:

The drama of creation, according to the Hawaiian account, is divided into a series of stages, and in the very first of these life springs from the shadowy abyss and dark night. There is here, however, no long series of antecedent, vaguely personified entities ranged in genealogical sequence, but the immediate appearance of living things. At first the lowly zoophytes and corals come into being, and these are followed by worms and shellfish, each type being declared to conquer and destroy its predecessor, a struggle for existence in which the strongest survive. Parallel with this evolution of animal forms, plant life begins on land and in the sea--at first with the algae, followed by seaweeds and rushes. As type follows type, the accumulating slime of their decay raises the land above the waters, in which, as spectator of all, swims the octopus, the lone survivor from an earlier world.

Mythology of All Races, vol. ix ("Oceanic"), R.B. Dixon.

What's going on with our alien origins? Will they be swallowed in oily clouds of greed?