Jason went to the stern, his mind racing. “Are you saying that terramouth died of GDV-4?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. York personally flew to the National Oceanographic Institute at Waikiki seven weeks ago to check old tissue samples.”
“Then that means… that virus has been down there for thirty years?”
“At least.”
“How could that be? If it’s been down there that long, how could we not have known? How could the fishing industry not have been affected?”
“Because the fishing industry doesn’t fish the depths, Jason. Do you understand how deep we’re talking here? Three, five, even six miles down.”
“So we’re supposed to believe this virus has just stayed down there all this time without climbing to the mid and upper waters?”
“You know how big the damn oceans are, big guy. It would take decades even for a fast-moving virus to cover that much ground.”
Jason hesitated. The world’s oceans were indeed enormous, triple the surface area of dry land and that didn’t account for depth. The seas were two miles deep on average with many trenches more than six miles down. Craig was right. Even a fast-moving virus could take decades to form a meaningful presence in the higher waters. Until then, it might show itself only in dribs and drabs, which, of course, was exactly what had happened. It explained why GDV-4 had been so challenging to locate up to this point.
Monique turned. “Did York say anything about it going airborne?”
“What?” Darryl eyed his wife. “They’re worried about GDV-4 going airborne?”
Craig cleared his throat. “They were. The Audubon Society’s been crowing about some missing seagulls, but those rumors were gibberish. GDV-4 had nothing to do with it. But it has everything to do with these rays of yours, Jason. It’s driving them out of the depths, and they’re migrating to escape it.”
Jason turned to Monique. “Does a migration from the depths make sense here?”
“It makes perfect sense. If there really is serious devastation down there, these rays would have to go into higher waters to find food.” She shrugged. “Lack of food is the single biggest reason for off-season migrations.”
“A new food source.” Jason loved the simplicity of it. “So what was their old food source? I mean plankton doesn’t exist down there, right?”
“I couldn’t say what exists down there, Jason.”
No one could. The depths are an enigma, not just to them but also to human society; the only place on earth that truly is. There is no light at all in the depths, literally none, an entire world bathed in constant darkness. There is also the pressure. Pressure in the depths is so powerful it can literally crush a dump truck. The most sophisticated subs ever made can get nowhere near the depths, barely capable of diving more than nine hundred feet when the world’s oceans average more than ten thousand. And that’s just the average. While unmanned probes can be sent down, the devices are usually ineffective. The reality is that as advanced as human society is, the depths are still a mystery. Like deep space, they totally defy exploration. Man can attempt to visit but only for the briefest of moments, and even then, with very limited access.
Jason shook his head. He had no idea what the rays fed on down there. “But now we know why that one settled in the oil slick near Clarita.”
Darryl pivoted. “We do?”
“If Craig’s right, it must have been sick, even dying. I could never figure it: Why would a healthy ray lie down in a patch of oil? It wouldn’t. But a sick one, one that didn’t know where it was or what it was doing… Dollars to doughnuts, it was infected with GDV-4. You realize you could be talking about an apocalypse down there, Craig? I mean, if what you’re saying is actually happening, this virus could be the deep sea’s version of an ice age. These rays could be on the verge of extinction.”
Monique stepped forward. “Or adaptation.”
Jason turned. “You think so?”
“Think about how long these things have been down there.”
“How long?”
“Rays are cousins of sharks, right? So they could have been there since Pangaea.”
Pangaea was an ancient supercontinent, an enormous landmass that preceded the earth’s current five-continent formation. Pangaea’s breakup 290 million years ago had profound effects on all the earth’s species, on land and at sea, placing them in wildly new environments that either killed them off or forced them to adapt. The evolutionary adaptations attributed to Pangaea are nothing short of astonishing: kangaroo rats in the deserts evolving organs to make their own water internally, polar bears in the Arctic evolving skin to endure temperatures below minus-eighty degrees, duck hawks developing wings to fly 175 miles per hour.
“So you’re suggesting Pangaea could have split an ancient population of rays?” Jason turned to Monique fully. “While mantas evolved on the surface, this other species evolved in the depths?”
Monique nodded. “Sort of like a… deep-sea cousin.”
“Deep-sea cousin.” Craig smiled. “I like that.”
Jason eyed Monique curiously. “So how would this… deep-sea cousin have evolved? I guess it’s hard to say, isn’t it? Since we know so little about life down there.”
Monique raised an eyebrow. “We might know how it didn’t evolve, though.”
“How so?”
“Every species of manta we know lives in warm, tranquil seas, and they’ve all evolved identically. So doesn’t it stand to reason that if another group of rays lived in an entirely different environment, they’d have evolved into entirely different animals?”
“You think? How different could they really be, Monique? No matter where they evolved, you’re still talking about very large, slow-moving creatures. Wouldn’t their size alone limit their abilities to evolve into anything significantly different from the mantas we already know? It’s a rougher environment down there, granted, and I suppose they might have adapted—I don’t know—some stinging or electrical capabilities to compensate, but I can’t imagine anything much more than that.”
Monique wasn’t so sure. She recalled reading what Darwin had once said on a similar subject. When asked to explain how two genetically related species, the harmless domestic house cat and the vicious African lion, had evolved so differently, the father of evolution had attributed the results to vastly different environments, stating that more rigorous environments will force surviving species to become more rigorous as well.
“Life’s a lot tougher down there, Jason. Maybe these animals somehow evolved to deal with that.”
Tougher, Jason thought. In the case of the deep-sea cousin to the manta ray, what did tougher mean? But they’d gotten ahead of themselves. They were speculating, perhaps blindly. “We still don’t really know anything here, do we? I mean despite everything Craig just said, we don’t know these animals are from the depths; we don’t know they’re a new species. There’s really no proof.”