Ova Kingdom - Dark Mountain

The ocean wraps the planet like a caul.
–James Hamilton-Paterson

Everything has a beginning, and ours was water.

In the primordial darkness where all first formed, there was infinite murk – the black watery chaos.

And then there wasn’t.

In the myth of the cosmic egg, a common creation story in the ancient world, the primaeval seas bring forth an egg which holds a divine being – the creator of the universe – and so we can conclude, righteously or not, everything that happened then, and everything that is happening now, is owed to them.

So often, eggs are thought to be only an essential part of the terrestrial realm, conjuring up images of backyard hen houses and factory farms, maybe a robin’s nest, but it is comforting to know the opposite is true. That there are craggy unpopulated islands, translucent veils, coral hideaways, wind-swept shores, and freezing sholes full of ovoidal prelife and the sheer numbers are breathtaking. A true accounting (and reckoning for what is lost to human exploits) will never be possible, it changes every second, and that too is comforting.

The tale of a mermaid’s purse goes like this: if found by a sea witch, it should be used like a chicken egg – to divine prophecy, to include in magic rituals, and to carry around as a protective object of fertility and rebirth.

Chondrichthyes, jawed and cartilaginous fish, like catsharks, skates, and chimaeras, develop an egg sac and make a detachable uterus, a protein and collagen pouch generally containing one embryo, to be laid in seagrass meadows or rocky crevices.

Sea witch, if you find a purse on the shore, it most likely did its sea job, and is ready for its second life, but caution, you must give something back when you take from the shores.

You must give something back when you take from the shores.

In another watery world a male benthic giant Antarctic sea spider is collecting his surrounding gelatinous cloud of thousands of tiny eggs, then gently and carefully gluing each one to the seabed floor. Over the next few months, a blanket of algae will cover them until hatching.

For semelparous oysters, it’s puffs over blobs. Females clap their valves together to release microscopic egg puffs from the front of their shells. Claps occur every 30 seconds, for some fecund mollusks up to an hour, and anywhere between two and 70 million eggs are released per spawning event.

Nudibranchs prefer egg ribbons coiled and spun, in a rainbow of colors, appearing like coral or some random frippery on the seafloor. The kaleidoscope of possibilities the order represents is to ensure survival in all manner of ocean.

The gyre of the Sargasso Sea enriches its waters, belting its namesake Sargassum macroalgae across its surface: a great place to protect eggs. Catadromous eels choose this sea for their spawning, egg release, and death.

A clutch of 150 eggs slowly heats and cools in the sand, determining the sex of each baby Hawksbill sea turtle. After hatching, a gauntlet. In one of the deadliest migrations on earth, contending against shorebirds, crabs, and human hands, they take their first sand crawl and sea breeze breaths in the maddest dash of their lives on nesting beaches in Australia, Cuba, Hawai’i, and Florida.

The violent yet apathetic plundering of the dark seafloor, by fish trawlers and dynamite, by unscrupulous collectors and nets of all kinds, plus a layer of litter so steadfast it creates its own ecology, has yet to be acknowledged as the environmental collapse it is. A degradation of many interdependent ecosystems, akin to clear-cutting rainforests and turning the land into desert.

By 1863 tens of thousands of common murre and western gull eggs were taken from nesting sites in the lead up to the Great Egg War on the Farallon Islands. Thirty miles from the San Francisco Bay and called the Devil’s Teeth by mariners, due to their craggy white rock and treacherous underwater shoals, the islands are home to the largest North American seabird colony outside Hawai’i and Alaska.

Eggers had to be quick, and destroyed all eggs they couldn’t take, to be certain that on the return trip the eggs were freshly laid. For twenty years one company had the sole right to egg on the Southeast Island. A rival company, bent on getting a piece of such a natural bounty, landed on the island but was fired upon. Two people died. An entire generation of birds was lost.

On a clear day, the Farallones can be seen as a fata morgana mirage from San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, a reminder of their dark past.

Darkness makes the ova kingdom possible.

Darkness makes the ova kingdom possible. Fish eggs hatch in the dark. Birds and eels breed while stars are out. But we’re not just talking about nighttime. It’s all that we don’t see. Cannot see, like a black hole, we only ever get a past glimpse, the light surrounding the boundless unknown. Its howl enthralling, its depths indistinguishable from the first form.

A white sheen with brown marbling, the great auk had one of the most beautiful eggs in the world. It was laid on the bare rock of various Northern Atlantic islands, one at a time.

IMAGE:

Anne Campbell
Mermaid’s Purse
Photogram

Eternally in flux, our oceans remain one of the most beautiful and mysterious places on our planet, and of all the elements, water is the one that I am most drawn to, the one that calls to me in my dreams. I use photograms to give a unique perspective on our natural world, revealing beauty in the shapes and forms that are hidden from the naked eye, miniature worlds within worlds.

Anne Campbell is an artist and photographer living and working in north-east Scotland, where she also teaches at Grays School of Art. She is particularly concerned with protecting our natural environment and promoting sustainability, particularly in food production.