“Look,” said Daphne, pointing down.
Henrietta swallowed twice and leaned farther over the side. The water had thickened, clotted, raised itself into disconcerting lumps. Suddenly they were floating not on water but on a shoal of jellyfish so thick that the ones nearest the surface were being pushed partially out of the water by those below, and so closely packed that when Edward lowered one oar to turn the boat, he had to force a path between the creatures. All the boats, Henrietta saw, were similarly surrounded; the shoal formed a rough circle fifty feet wide, quivering like a single enormous medusa.
“Pull close together!” the professor shouted from the dory ahead of them. “Now halt! Everyone!” He’d risen to his feet and was standing, his arms held out for balance, looking as though at any moment he might pitch into the sea but too delighted to care. He called out instructions, which his wife repeated more quietly as they stabbed their nets into the shoal. Henrietta worked with Daphne and Edward, trying in the excitement to sort the specimens properly. One bucket for the larger species; the other bucket for the Pleurobrachia and the other ctenophores; glass bowls for the most delicate creatures, which had to be kept separate.
As Daphne and Edward were using the nets, Henrietta slid an empty bowl beneath a clear saucer pulsing like a lung: an Aurelia, thick and heavy at the center, thin and slippery at the edges, overhanging the bowl all around. The creature plopped disturbingly as she decanted it into a bucket. “Each of the metamorphoses of the Aurelia,” the professor was shouting, picking up where his wife had left off, “was once presumed to be a separate species. The hydroid phase was named Scyphostoma; the form with the buds stacked up was called Strobila. The first stage of the medusa, just after it separates and when it is small and deeply lobed, was called Ephyra. Only this stage you are seeing — the breeding adult — had the name Aurelia, although we now recognize all four as being forms of the same creature.”
Henrietta shifted her canvas shoes, already soaked and stained, away from the wet nets dripping over the floorboards. In the bucket nearest her left foot, a little pink ctenophore mistakenly dropped among the larger jellyfish was presently being consumed. Was the Zygodactyla eating it nothing more than an enormous mouth? The other bucket glittered wildly, the sun refracting off the trailing ribbons of the Pleurobrachiae and the tiny fringed combs on the Idyia, which were darting back and forth. Waves of color, pink then purple then yellow then green, pink again, pinker still.
“Such variety,” the professor’s wife said, leaning over Edward’s shoulder. By now they’d drifted to the edge of the shoal and Henrietta could see water again, the jellyfish scattered more sparsely here and there. “Such beauty.”
Daphne, across from Henrietta, had both arms in the water and was struggling with her net. “Ugh,” she said, unable to heave whatever she’d found over the side. “What is this?”
“Oh,” the professor’s wife said. “Well done!”
As Edward moved the boat a few degrees, Daphne’s net shifted astern and then Henrietta could see the gigantic, reddish-brown transparent lump, as wide across as the boat, dangling brown and flesh-colored lobes from a ruffled white margin. A confused mass of tentacles, brown and yellow and purple, trailed behind it.
To the professor, only a few feet away, his wife called, “Cyanea!”
In response, he seized an oar from the student rowing his boat and used it to spin the bow around, nosing it into the side of the creature until only the huge disk of jelly separated his boat from Henrietta’s. He signaled the remaining boats to nose in similarly, forming a rough ring.
“It’s too heavy to bring into our boats with the equipment we have,” he said. “And too fragile — its own weight would tear it apart as we tried to lift it. But we can look at it closely from here.”
Those who could peered down at the water, some measuring the diameter — at least four feet, they agreed — others inspecting the lumpy ovaries, the mouth parts, the eye specks around the rim. The tentacles, the professor pointed out, were despite their apparent confusion actually gathered into eight distinct bunches. He directed one boat to back slowly away from the circle, following a set of tentacles until they disappeared — which was not, they found to their amazement, for thirty feet. The fair young rower, his face spattered with freckles, lifted his oar and showed the trailing ends draped across the blade. Meanwhile the professor continued to point out the structural similarities between the Cyanea and the Aurelia.
Daphne raised her head from the mass of blubber and addressed the professor. “That’s intriguing,” Daphne said. “Those resemblances, those affinities, might well be seen as evidence that the two forms are related, sharing descent from a common ancestor.”
The professor shook his head. “You are alluding to Mr. Darwin’s theories, I know,” he said.
Of course he knew, Henrietta thought. He was tired and old, but he knew what they were reading, as he knew that Daphne was challenging him. Perhaps he even knew he was wrong, but still he had to repeat his old lessons. How wearying this was! She wanted what he himself had told her to seek: the really real world. Before he could say anything else, Henrietta leaned over and thrust her hands into the water, toward the Cyanea. The surface felt smooth, surprisingly elastic yet yielding easily to the pressure of her hand. She slipped her left hand from the rounded body into the mass of soft tentacles. Almost instantly her hand began to sting and prickle, and then to burn. With a cry she pulled it out and sat up.
“Oh dear,” the professor’s wife murmured. “I should have warned you — the name Acalephs alludes of course to their stinging or nettle-like properties. That won’t cause any lasting damage, but you’re going to be uncomfortable for a few hours.”
The professor, looking across the blubber still poised calmly, apparently guiltless, among the surrounding boats, asked if Henrietta was all right.
“Fine,” she said unsteadily. The pain was beginning to ebb but so too was all the sensation in her hand. As it grew numb, the pain moved into her head.
“I’ve done that myself,” the professor said. “Just out of curiosity, as an experiment.” To the other students he explained that the stinging sensation Henrietta had experienced, and the numbness now creeping over her hand and wrist, had been caused by the myriad tiny cells, called lasso cells, that lined each of the twisting tentacles. “Each of these cells contains within it a tiny, tightly coiled whip, so fine we can hardly see it,” he said. “And each whip can be shot out, at the will of the animal, to sting its prey or — as Miss Atkins has so clearly but unfortunately just found — to defend against an attack. In concert, the whips act almost like a galvanic battery, paralyzing small prey and rendering a larger opponent at least partially helpless for a while.
“Now, to address your Mr. Darwin’s arguments”—he gestured toward Daphne—“he himself has said that his theory would break down if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications. This is a perfect example. How could such a complex mechanism as a lasso cell have developed gradually, in tiny steps, by so-called ‘natural selection’? What possible use could half a lasso cell be, a filament that uncoiled but didn’t sting, or one that stung but couldn’t uncoil? How could such useless half-parts be ‘selected’? All the parts have to work in concert for the mechanism to work at all — and they could not work so well and precisely together unless they had all been designed at once by a Divine Intelligence.”