The End of Endemism
On Invasive Species, Gut Feelings, and Phoresis in the Venetian Lagoon.
In the frothing, centuries long, political tumult that followed the dissolution of the Roman Empire, numerous states and republics cropped up in the Mediterranean, vying for some specter of reclaimed control of a great power once lost, but not forgotten. Fractured and combative, these states — whose peoples, dialects, cultures, cuisines, and by extension, their externalities and impacts within the ecological landscape — had never truly been homogenously enveloped within any overarching mythological narrative, during, or even after Roman reign; not under the Apollonian sun, nor papal decree. The unification of Italy was a forced agenda that, to this day, has not been realized as intended. While there are still as many dialects in Italy as varieties of cheese or vintages of wine, there is in some sense, a plenary unity promised through the universality of contemporary globalized trade. Because if all the world’s a market, then we all speak at least one common tongue. Currency.
The Republic of Venice, one of the most notable sovereign states to crop up during that stretch of history, persisted for over a thousand years. As a skillful and organized merchant class, the Republic’s strength and continuity could be attributed to a cunning mastery of the seacraft and oceanography, combined with a healthy penchant for curious exploration, and with it, trade. Fast forward 2 or 3 centuries, and the Venetian lagoon still finds itself a bustling port, the eighth busiest in Italy, that sees some 30 million tons of cargo and over a million passengers aboard hundreds of cruise ships travel through its docks each year. But trade on either side of the industrial revolution is as asymmetrical in its reflection of each period as the overlay tracing Italy’s political borders would be over the same timespan. Ironically, the one force that does not respect those borders, pays no tender for transport into dock, nor fills out the necessary waybills, passenger identification forms, or customs clearance, is the force of nature herself. Even the Merchant of Venice could not have hedged this gamble…
Undaria pinnatifida is a part of the endemic fauna of the East China sea and the Northwest Pacific Basin. There, the large brown kelp is a normal member of shallow sea ecologies, growing in healthy and diverse kelp forests that play host to numerous species of aquatic fauna that view the “ワカメ” (wakame) as both habitat, and food source. The Japanese, Chinese, and Korean peoples whose cultures have thrived for millennia on those lands also understand the value of this “weed” as a “crop”. The differentiation between those two terms as applied to any photosynthetic organism is only measured by the level of ignorance or familiarity on has with its potential — be it economic or culinary. In the western world, we have long been woefully unaware of the variety and splendidness of seaweeds, probably best attested to by the fact that just one pejorative word, “sea-weed”, covers, in the minds of most, over three thousand distinct species. Imagine the absurdity of a grocery list that read “leaves” and “animals” full stop. For all these reasons and more, wakame in Japan is not considered a pest, nor a weed, nor a problem, but a delicacy. I’ve sparsely had a serving of miso soup that wasn’t graced with morsels of its toothsome blades. But the forces of nature do not respect the borders of a bowl. Of culinary tradition. Nor the bowels of a ship. The promise of unfettered, neo-liberal globalized trade has delivered on some of the dreams of the West post WWII, but also delivered nightmares.
In a world without horizons, we have borne witness to an end of endemism.
Over the past 30+ years, Undaria pinnatifida has proliferated around the globe. No longer relinquished to a corner of the seven seas, it has moved upon the other six. Travelling not within the streams of equatorial currents or counter currents, but in the bellies of modern mega-cruise ships and supertankers. While the foulage of ship hulls has long been a problem for maritime transport, before the industrial revolution, wooden sailboats had never pumped titanic volumes of water into and out of their ballast tanks. Foulage, the slow growth of ocean life on the underbelly of ships, can and does transport species from place to place, but only those intrepid enough to brave the high seas through their holdfasts. Ballast tanks are a whole other phenomenon. Depending on the amount of cargo they’re carrying on board, large ships will often require adjustments to their draft to ensure they don’t scrape along the seabeds of shallow ports or capsize during navigational maneuvers. The easiest way to facilitate this is through pumping readily available seawater into and out of massive, lowly positioned ballast tanks to adjust the weight of the ship. But seawater is not just seawater. When you peer into the living world long enough, you begin to learn that life is everywhere. There is no environment on earth that is not an environment for life. From fungal spores wafting on zephyrs in the stratosphere, to lithotrophic bacteria buried within fissures kilometers down into earth’s crust. And it is a prudent lesson to learn, that such environments absolutely include life itself.
Seawater is never just seawater. Arthur C. Clarke was right when he noted “how inappropriate it is to call it planet earth, when it is clearly planet ocean.” The oceans are never just some inert, unchanging neutral medium with a recipe that reads 95 parts H2O, 4 parts NaCl, >1 part trace minerals… The oceans were the birthplace of life on earth and have fostered that life for 4+ billion, unbroken, years. When a container ship operated by a Danish multinational, registered in Liberia, helmed by a Greek captain, commanding a Pilipino crew, docks in Yokohama and drinks in hectoliters of its waters, only to eject that water thousands of kilometers away in the next port of call, that ship is not simply modifying its center of gravity, it is becoming an interplanetary spacecraft for passively motile, microbial creatures from all domains of life. Plankton from unicellular algae to echinoderm larvae are sucked aboard via diesel powered pumps, stowaways smaller than any reasonable filter could to filter. They are transported, in a single generation, in a single week even, across continental divides. An important thing to note about macroalgal physiology, is that come spring, when U. pinnatifida is ready to reproduce, it does not bear fruit, nor does it spread vegetatively. Even as whole swathes of massive scythe like fronds begin to die back to wash up to rot along nearby shores, their next generations have already been secured. Microscopic zoospores released into the waves belie their origin; they nearly skirt recognition at all. Ultimately, like all non-vegetatively reproducing organisms, wakame undergoes a recapitulation of phylogenetic evolution, through the historical bottleneck of size, to the first stages its life as diploid sporophytes. Single cells. Eggs. No hen’s egg though, they lean a little on the smaller side of things. A fact of reproductive biology which makes a great many creatures, humans — and our prosthetic technological extensions included — unwitting storks.
To take a short detour away from seaweed for a moment, and edge towards the heart (or rather gut) of this project, we humans can serve as unwitting storks for a great variety of creatures, most of which don’t even require us to clutch a basinet in our beaks. Even as we’ve only just started to learn of the intricacies and near intractable complexity of human microbiomes, drawing analogous conclusions feels inescapable. In the same way oceans are not just oceans, human bodies are not just bodies, nor vessels, nor ships. They are more-than-human worlds. This idea is best encapsulated by the neologism of the holobiont, the whole life, which challenges our conception of just what we mean by “we”. For each of the meager 1 trillion cells of human origin you proudly call “yourself” you carry on and in you, 10 cells of bacteria, yeast, protozoa, mites, virions, and more. You are an environment unto yourself. The vast majority of the microbes that help make you you occupy your large and small intestines. Forget your eyes, your ears, and fingers. Or your head and shoulders, knees and toes. Your gut is the true gateway to the world. Your skin stretched out like a taught canvas would cover two square meters Your G.I tract? A hundred. Roughly the size of a tennis court. These organisms are so intertwined within your body that huge swathes of our DNA are programed with them in mind. Likewise, they are finely adapted to the niche that is us. Human breast milk is filled with long chains of sugars newborns can’t digest — because they aren’t the intended recipients of those nutrients, their microbes are. The microvilli of the cells that line your gut wall constantly excrete mucus, though not to act as a barrier all on its own. It offers safe haven to huge number of bacilli that feed on that mucus at a rate of near perfect replacement. Like a mosh pit at the front row of a concert, their sheer presence is the true buffer… We are mirrors of each “other”. Though, each to the other might seem an odd turn of phrase to organisms a billionth our size that outnumber us by 14 orders of magnitude. Hardly one:one, on even keel. But of course, the numbers might feel as though they don’t add up when the idea of “self” is what’s breaking down.
We are so utterly intertwined, our genomes and worlds having co-evolved for so long, that our very thoughts, health, emotions, and intuitions are wholly shaped in part (partly whole?) by each other. The vagus nerve travels the length of the torso, to connect vital parts of our parasympathetic nervous system to our brain; our heart, lungs, and digestive tract. Our gut microbiota have the ability to affect vagus nerve signaling by directly influencing the concentration or by inducing the release of regulatory hormones from enteroendocrine or gastrointestinal immune cells. Though correlation does not necessarily equal causation, especially not in systems as woefully complex as the everchanging microbial ecology within us, evidence is mounting that the world within our gut can influence the world within our mind in diagnoses as varied as depression through to ASDs. A knot in the stomach when nervous or apprehensive, butterflies of anticipation, stomach aches and pains of love lost, are in so many ways our emotions stretching back through time to commune with the most primordial versions of our histories that we carry within us like time capsules. Stress, and the related response hormones that flood our bodies, can and do lead to disruptions of gut homeostasis. Even the concept of valour and bravery is tied to these echoes between these realms. Diarrhoeal and dysenteric illnesses have played principal roles in the outcomes of military battles throughout history. Freedom from diarrhoea was equated in early military conflicts with bravery and strength where diarrhoea-free soldiers had the “guts” to fight. Attested to by their thousand year reign, no doubt the navies of the Venetian Republic had a rich inner world…
The ever fluctuating microbial communities that thrive inside us are indelibly enmeshed within human homeostasis. Without those allied, aligned, and mirrored forms, other forms of life encroach. It is conceivable that any form of life could eventually reach symbiosis within a new and alien environment, but it is not guaranteed that such ends could be met before one generation, one side of the equation, meets its end. Equilibration times need to function as compatibly matched gears for symbiosis to work. If not, then the only path towards such that end is active evolution. Poetic on paper, but lest we forget, the central mechanism of evolution is extinction. The history of life on earth is more a history of death. It would serve us well to be as selective as selection itself in how we engage such gambles — more like the Merchant of Venice, less like the Merchant of Death.
But it is perhaps another blatant case of human exceptionalism that we speak endlessly of the human microbiome these days, when every organism plays the role of the environment, all the way down to the microbes themselves, who are constantly subjected to invasive predation by bacteriophages, viruses specialized in the infection of bacteria. Some phages manage to be tolerant of, and tolerated by their hosts, others rampantly overtake reproductive machinery to multiply their numbers by the hundreds before bursting forth back into the soup from whence they came. Thanklessly exploding the cell walls of their temporary abodes in the process like awful tourists worthy of a 1 star rating on a Airbnb. Death dealers in their own right, phages keep bacterial populations in check, recycling the recyclers. Viral phages as replicators teeter on the definition of “alive”. But regardless of the semantics, they do reproduce. Boy, do they reproduce. In productive zones, a single teaspoon of seawater can contain 50 million virions. They are the most abundant lifeforms on earth.
The subject recalls 19th century mathematician Augustus De Morgan’s book, The Budget of Paradoxes. In it, we find a poem on the nature of such arrangements:
Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.
Phoresis is impermanent, commensalistic interaction where one organism (the phoront) attaches itself to another (the host) explicitly for the purpose of travel. Phoresis is rooted in the Greek words phoras (bearing) and phor (thief). In nature the strategy is employed for dispersal, migration, and the escape of untenable habitats. It is observed in all manners of organisms, from mites on bees, to moths on sloths. There are ways in which you could argue that biological evolution cannot work fast enough to anticipate the technological whims of mankind. But evolution never anticipates anything. It only ever reacts. Though, in chance circumstances, through hindsight, we observe a phenomenon called pre-adaptation; where an evolved feature becomes awfully useful within a changing environment it was not “designed for” and could not have “predicted”. Today, the environment of the international tourism and shipping industries have shrunk the world, and those organisms preadapted to the combustion powdered vehicles of global dispersal have stolen literal fire from humans, who themselves stole it from the gods. Let’s just say, we’re paying it forward…
All this talk about living ecologies, from the very smallest to the very largest, is intended to remind us about the impact of manufactured ecologies. Ships are biomes. Macrobiomes. There is no place on this earth that does not carry with it the capacity to commute life. There is no arbitrary section of the universe that can be cordoned off and prevented from interacting with any others. Swings of the pendulum within entire ecological clades that, just a thousand years ago, would have taken a thousand years to realize, now happen “just in time”. It’s almost as if our surroundings have gotten so clamorously noisy, that we no longer have the time, nor want, to listen to our gut. To listen to the movements of biological histories, both within and without. But the force of nature has its beguiling ways, and is more than happy to rebound without us. The corporations that move mass against tides and trade winds see themselves as much in the business of logistics as transportation. But where is the logic in penning green circles around profits, eschewing the considerations of ecological externalities, as international trade routes trace great circles round the globe?
In the canals of Venice today, Undaria pinnatifida and other unintended species are stealing habitat away from the endemic species of macroalgae that have long thrived in the lagoon. With the promise of gold in our eyes, we brought their microbial spores there unwittingly, regurgitated from the guts of our massive berthed ships. Ships that have only been growing in size and capacity over the decades. More tourists, more cargo, more stuff, more money, more more. It is a difficult thing to equate, sitting with the notion of ecological decoherence while simultaneously painting the seaweed as invasive. It had no say in the matter. It is we who play the role of the transgressors, who violated nature’s boundaries. But counterintuitively, not spatial boundaries. We have long been everywhere. Temporal ones. Given, say, a few thousand years, there is no reason wakame could not become a balanced and well adapted member of the new biotopes it finds itself transplanted into. Be that the west coast of North America, The English Channel, the southeast coast of Australia, or South America… When you stare at the map of all the places it’s popped up, you quickly realize that these are all ports of call. It goes where we take it. It thrives where it can. It lives because that’s what life must do. It has no say in the matter. We do.
Ecological collapse is unbecoming of us as a species. As Venice suffers more and more “once in a lifetime” aqua alta floods year after year, its mayor yearns for the city to become a model study for the effects of climate change. It is also an ecological model for the not unrelated knock on effects of spatio-temporal contraction at late stages of neo-liberal capitalism. A view that sees all the world as a stolid spreadsheet with cells of value to be abstracted and extracted, moved from one sheet to the other. But that is not, and has never been the world we inhabit. It is a heaving, ever changing, web of causal connectivity. Its cells are not enboxed numerical values, but living cells, incapable of standing still, even if their transmission speed, once limited by autopeotic feedback loops, is something we seem hellbent on skirting around.
We are not the first organisms to initiate a mass extinction. Our world has been through these throes before. 2.5 billion years ago, as cyanobacteria were pumping corrosive free oxygen into an ocean and atmosphere that had always been without it, they burnt nearly all of life that had evolved to thrive in its absence, while simultaneously plunging the climate into the 300 million year long ice age that is a snowball earth. Their impact wiped out more variety of species than the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event that ended the reign of the dinosaurs. But as it was happening, they could not see their future. This is the fundamental difference. We can. The Oxygen Crisis of the Proterozoic was drawn out over a billion years. It’s pendulum swing forced evolution’s hand, giving rise to the vast swathes of life that thrived in a toxic environment. Evolutionary timescales. But our extinction event will not be so protracted. This is another fundamental difference. If our obsession with speed if what got us into the mess, then maybe leaning into that tendency, without ignoring nature’s ways, can help to get us out, or at least to (re)mediate some of the cascading repercussions.
While this text has swung between empires of political power and taxonomy alike, this project’s scope is not intended to bite off more than we can chew. This project is meant to be a synecdoche for slivers of solutions. A hopeful gateway that reaches across the scales and domains of life we are so utterly, hopelessly, entangled within, to provide a hypothesis for “the possibility of life in capitalist ruin” to quote Anna Sing. Like the phages that prey on omnipresent the bacteria that fill our world, keeping their numbers in check, we too should aim our focus, our efforts, and our attention, onto harvesting that which we did not intentionally sow. Undaria thrives in our polluted ports and the once pristine canals of Venice precisely because it thrives in ruins. It excels at outcompeting native flora for light, space, and dissolved nutrients. It has the capacity to absorb toxic pollutants and waste within its fronds, and thrive in spite of that. As an organism, is not the enemy, it is an inspiration.
The “pestatarian” diet has long been with us. From root to flower, the foraging of weeds from dandelion, lamb’s quarters, purslane to ramson stretch into prehistory. Within the recent history they have in times of need been viewed as emergency crops; chicory root being used as a wartime coffee substitute, while ramps were once seen as the food of the poor. Fast forward 200 years, and in times of abundance, indulgences in these forgotten staples now dot 3 Michelin starred establishments. A weed is only a weed if you didn’t plant it in your field. A pest is simply a pet yet to be invited into the domus. Blurring the line between these arbitrary delineations will help us to see a problem as a resource. Wakame is no pest in the waters off Japan. So maybe, like the phages that keep our seas from being overrun with constant blooms of suffocating red tide, we should learn how to eat the ignored. Microbes have undergone a transformation in the public consciousness from demonic germs to necessary allies. It would do us well to listen to our gut, and to relearn for ourselves how to want the unwanted.
The problem of toxicity is still an issue though. No one should propose that we subject human lives to the rachet of evolution and eat the polluted fronds of mature wakame until only the descendants of those left standing are alive to feast on this food source. That is both cruel and a luxury of time we simply cannot afford. But again, our fast thinking, symbolic minds, while being that which got us into this mess, might also be that which can get us out. If we’re to consume an invasive species, taking it as is will not be enough. Some form of further treatment, of transformation is a required step towards a solution. So, we look inward to look outward; to the slow, rhythmic lessons of the microbial world within, to the anaerobes and fermenters that populate our bodies’ guts, and our cities’ gutters. We’ve had all that we need within us from the start. Of this predicament, of our lives… of biological time.
We are perhaps the only products of evolution with a knowledge of evolution. It is befitting to use that knowledge to our advantage. Neuroanthropologist Terrence Deacon calls sentience “the feeling of being evolution”. Lending that sentience to evolution’s fastest and most potent products, bacteria, might very well see us redeemed. If we can force evolution’s hand, it is conceivable we could expedite the re-equilibration time between an invasive phoront, its unwitting (though not guiltless) host, and the microbes that mediate ecological interactions everywhere. The open-ended experiment that constitutes the exhibition sees Undaria harvested from the canals of Venice and fermented in a matrix of micro-environments subject to varying evolutionary pressures. Through the reiteration of successive generations, the “winners” if you will, will see their gene lines grow; it is descent with modification writ both large, and small. Forced mutations will arise as purposefully added exclusionary chemicals, the very toxins we seek to remove, will corral the endemic bacteria into bottlenecks, at first capable of thriving in spite of the pressures, then, hopefully, able to outright dismantle them. The end product, a biologically fomented ferment of both historical and geographic origin. Comestible, conservable, delicious.
Through this process of directed evolution, each glass vessel becomes a microcosm, a miniature future history of the canals of Venice, whose end directed microbiotic life history terminates at a convergence point of a permanently enmeshed ecological braid, across the scales of both time and size; between humans, plants, and bacteria. At that point, a native bacterial culture, evolved out from the canals of Venice itself, will have been evolved. A culture (and culture) capable of safely fermenting, transforming, the fate of not just a photosynthetic phoront too fecund for our own good, but fermenting and transforming our own intuitions about our culpability for the collapse of the ecological ground floor Venice (and the world) stands upon, into accountability for a present we drag with us, perpetually into the future — for the collective “OUR” own good.
The preceding was a piece of writing commissioned for Gut Feeling, the complex and site-specific work, by Lithunaian artist Robertas Narkus, on the occasion of Venice’s 59th International Art Biennale Arte in 2022. Gut Feeling, manoeuvred within the Lithuanian Pavillion between an honest desire to change the world, a persistent belief in the promise of collaboration, egocentric ambitions, and a flirtation with financial structures, technological progress and humour. The term ‘gut feeling’ describes a sense of intuition, or, a hunch, which, according to half-forgotten folklore and recent scientific discoveries, links activities of the gut with the brain.
