Radiolab - Beware the Sand Striker

Episode Date: June 16, 2023

Shipworms. Hairy Chested Yeti Crabs. Parasitic Barnacles in the cloaca of Greenland Sharks. These are the types of creatures Sabrina Imbler, a columnist at Defector, likes to write about. The stranger, the better. In this episode, Imbler discusses how they balance maintaining scientific rigor while also drawing inspiration and metaphor from the animal world. Then they read a stirring essay from their new book, How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures . It’s about the sand striker, one of the ocean’s most gruesome predators, and the various prey that surround it. In learning about the relationships between predator and prey lurking in the murky bottom, Imbler ends up unearthing new insights about predation in human society. The essay deals with sexual assault so listen with care. EPISODE CREDITS Reported by - Lulu Miller Produced by - Sindhu Gnanasambandan Original music and sound design contributed by - Alex Overington with mixing help from - Jeremy Bloom and Arianne Wack Fact-checking by - Natalie Middleton and Edited by  - Alex Neason and Pat Walters EPISODE CITATIONS Articles:“Creaturefector” (https://zpr.io/3myWi4grgkGB) by Sabrina Imbler Books: How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures (https://zpr.io/agkRj7xyPG9T) by Sabrina Imbler Dyke (geology) (https://zpr.io/7kAtAKjdBqPa) by Sabrina Imbler Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Wait, you're listening to radio lab from WNYC. Give me a rundown of some of the creatures you've written about, shipworms, the hairy chested Yeti crab. Today I I talked to a researcher who studies Greenland sharks, but I was more interested in the parasitic barnacle inside the cloaca of a female part. Yes, yes, it's multi-purpose hole. What makes you think, wham, of all the creatures in the world? Like the one I'll talk about this, like what makes you go to the barnacle in the cloaca to even focus on?

I, I think I'm just fascinated by the things that are strange just from my own experience. This is Radialab, I'm Lulu Miller, and I'm here with writer Sabrina Impler. I'm a staff writer for Defector, which is a worker-owned sports and culture site, but I write about creatures on Defector. I have my own little column. So I'm a huge fan of Sabrina's. I read their book a few months back. It's called How Far the Light Reaches, A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, and they do this thing that I love to do, but sometimes worry about doing,

which is that they look to nature, they look to animals to both see the animals, but also to kind of draw some human lessons. And, you know, I know that in certain ways, like that is a cardinal sin of science reporting, like thou shalt not project. But they do it in this way that somehow stays scientifically rigorous and clear. And I just wanted to share their magic, their work with more people. So I called them in to read an essay that absolutely floored me. That taught me a lot about the marine world and taught me a lot about

the human world. And just a content warning that essay is about a creature, but it also deals with sexual assault. So decide if that's something you want to listen to today. And yeah, that's where we are headed into the work and the mind of Sabrina Imblor. So before I have you go in and read the essay, I do wonder like, is there ever, Is there ever, is there a downside or is there a danger to seeking, you know, these little kinds of human lessons, or maybe even guidance, or inspiration, or connection, or resonance? Like, do you see a danger in that, or is that something that ever gives you pause, or that you've ever thought about? I give me pause every day. Oh really? I mean, I often will find myself like impulsively wanting to you know advocate for some kind of animal or not and then sort of realizing like it's

that's like not the most responsible way to write about that animal. Which I guess sounds kind of abstract, but I was thinking about it a lot this week, and I was curious if you had seen the stories of the boat syncing orcas. No, what's going on with the orcas? You know, orcas, they sometimes have fads. A while back, there was this fad of wearing salmon as a hat.

Whoa. Like, it would be a death salmon, and they would just put it on their head and sort of swim around for a while back there was this fad of wearing salmon as a hat. Like it would be a death salmon, and they would just put it on their head and sort of swim around for a while. And did anyone have any guesses why? I don't think anything beyond play, which is like... Wow. Okay. Yeah. Okay. It's so weird.

And so now the fat is destroying boats? Yeah, so there are some orcas sinking boats off the coast of Spain. Oh my God. And researchers believe it is ostensibly for revenge after a female orca had this traumatic moment with a boat and then began teaching this aggressive behavior.

What kind of boat are we talking about? Like sailboats and yachts. Okay. Wow. I think I mean, I think it arrives at a boat and people are like sink the yachts, right? Like we don't want the billionaires and I've seen all these tweets being like, tell the orcas about like Jeff Bezos' new yacht.

Yeah, yeah. Wow. And I was thinking about this because I was like, oh, like at first, I was like, I love the vote-sinking orcas, like let them sink all the votes. And then I was like, I think it's funny for like a tweet or a meme or something,

but I'm not gonna write a story that's like, you know, the vote-sinking orcas are agents of socialism because like, they're not. Instead, just two days after this conversation, Sabrina published a piece that, in a way, punctured the anarchist fantasy of the vengeful orcas. They examine the patterns of scratches and scars on the skin, and it turns out that we don't actually know the cause of the wound.

And we don't know enough about orcas to know if revenge is even where this behavior is coming from. As far as science can say, their wants and thinking are unknowable to us and discovering a creature that's more mysterious. I think it feels much more exciting to me to look in sort of the realm of metaphor and to find sort of like, can this animal be a model of another way of living?

Or how can learning about the life of this creature like really expand my own and make me consider possibilities for myself that I had never imagined. Hmm, yeah. Okay. Well, so that is the perfect segue into the essay I want you to read for us, beware the sand striker. So I guess just help us set it up. The sand striker is a marine worm that is a vicious predator and it's so stealth very few of the researchers who spend their life studying it have ever seen it, right? Yes, and these worms basically burrow deep into the sand so that most of their long worm like body is hidden and they just have a pair of like pincers sort of

mandibles, extruding from the sand and some antenna. And so if a fish happens to swim over the sand strikers jaws, they'll snap shut and then they'll drag the fish down deep into the sand. And as Sabrina was learning about the worm, they happened to be thinking about predators and predation in human society. I started writing it. I think, you know, there were a lot of conversations around to me too. And I was just coming to understand some experience that I had had that I now understand were not consensual sexual or romantic experiences.

And it felt like, well, you know, this worm opens this portal to this larger conversation. So maybe I can tell the story of what happened to me alongside this worm. Well, all right. Take us, take us in. Okay. Sabrina picks up about halfway through the essay. I never told these men about my blackouts because it seemed a mortifying thing to admit that I was a child to inexperience to handle a liquor,

to out of control to be an advocate for my own body. I would go out of my way to share these stories with friends to get ahead of the narrative. I let them fill me in on the events of the night nodding at things I could not recall until I had reassembled the night in my mind as refracted through them. If they were happy for me, then I could be happy for me. The more I bragged about those nights, the more inconsequential they became. When I first came out to my mother, she asked me if I thought I was a lesbian because so many men had been cruel to me. I knew that when she said cruel, she meant boyfriends who had broken up with me.

But instead, I thought of these other men. And for a moment, I wondered if she had a point. Sand strikers or worms like them have been around for hundreds of millions of years. Unlike dinosaur bones or ammonite shells, the squishier worms did not fossilize easily. Scientists only know of ancient sand strikers from the very few geological traces they left behind. Hard jaw parts, tracks in the mud, paper mache like molds of spaces their bodies inhabited before dissolving. The oldest we know of lived 400 million years ago in the Devonian Age and grew to around three feet long, smaller than today's largest sandstrikers but still abnormally giant for

its day. Scientists describe the species of extinct worm solely based on its jaws, as no vestige of its soft body remains. Another prehistoric sandstriker from just 20 million years ago left a series of L-shaped burrows found in sandstone in northeast Taiwan. The edges of the burrows were rich in iron, indicating that they may have been lined with a mucus layer to maintain their shape, and when scientists look closer, they found feather-like impressions in the rock, suggesting

the repeated disturbance of sediment from a lunging creature, striking and retreating, striking and retreating. These ancient worms may have been different, shorter and softer perhaps than modern sand strikers, but they hunted in the same way. Ancient fish too watched for dimples in the seafloor and antennae swiveling in the grit. Joanne is an owl, perhaps the world's leading expert on sandstrikers, told the BBC she

had never seen one alive in the wild, only in museums. She traveled to East Timor on a research grant to study the worms and could not find a single one. Zanol knew the worms were there, lurking in the sand, maddeningly close to her and actively affecting the ecosystem, even if she could not take a photo or see them with her own eyes. She knew, but she couldn't prove it.

A few days after I graduated college, freshly moved into an anchovy-sized bedroom in Brooklyn, I opened Twitter to see everyone sharing the same Buzzfeed story. The art was everywhere. Spiderman Black words laced across a bright red background, staining my feed. It was the victim impact statement read by Chanel Miller, a young woman who was sexually assaulted behind a dumpster at Stanford. I'd been following the case vaguely, noting how it had happened near my hometown, how the media had fixated on Brock Turner swim times, but there were so many cases like this, meaning stories of girls touched at parties in dorms, touched outside their clothes or underneath,

stories that usually did not result in police reports. Miller was still anonymous when the statement was published, and I would only later learn our similarities. How we were both half Asian, how we grew up in the Bay Area, and once took art classes at the Red Island School of Design that made us feel among other things inadequate. You don't know me, but you've been inside me, and that's why we're here today.

Reading that first sentence, my breath caught. Part of the statement is an italicized list of questions the defense attorney had asked Miller, did you drink in college? You said you were a party animal. How many times did you black out? I stared at these questions so familiar from my own self interrogations. The first few times I revised this essay, more encounters flickered back into memory, a tagged picture on social media,

an old story recounted at a party, a name that sounded too familiar on LinkedIn. It's absurd how many men I've slept with have later requested me on LinkedIn. I wonder if this is because LinkedIn is the easiest portal with which to find me. I wonder if it's because my name appears occasionally on the internet, slotted under stories I've written.

I always wonder what they want from me, forgiveness, my body, or to connect them with an editor of some magazine. After reading Miller's impact statement, I opened a browser on my phone, switched to incognito mode, and Googled, can you consent while blacked out but awake? I scrolled through articles, reddit threads, and PDFs. Everything seemed to say no, you cannot consent while incapacitated, so I Googled more. I refraised my queries until they morphed from search terms to incoherent personal questions. I knew the internet could not answer. How drunk to consent? He phrased my queries until they morphed from search terms to incoherent personal questions I knew the internet could not answer.

How drunk to consent? What if you say yes when drunk but cannot remember? Said yes but don't remember, is it sexual assault? How do you know what you wanted, well blacked out? Why do I black out so often? I wasn't even hoping for a particular answer. I simply wanted someone to plot my experience on a grid to tell me if it was valid to feel this way

or if I just needed to get over it. I read about the clinical psychology professor Kim From who testified in Miller's case and dozens of others. From has made a living by testifying in criminal cases that a person can theoretically consent to sex while blacked out. Her argument sometimes convinced me that I was at fault. I found a slideshow about alcohol and consent made by two white men who worked at a risk management consulting group. The difficult case the presentation reads is someone who has a high tolerance for alcohol, but doesn't display the traditional symptoms due to their tolerance level. That was me, the difficult case.

All nature documentaries share a familiar kind of dramatic irony. The ocean is clean with water. When the narrator, whether he is David Attenborough or disounds like him, introduces you to something small, soft and witless, you know it will be devoured. This is inevitable. When you see the writhing, sequined mass of a bait ball, meaning a school of fish that swims tightly in a globe. You know they will be picked off by whatever larger thing has caused them to swim so close together. In Blue Planet 2, Attenborough introduces the sand striker as the sun disappears, giving

way to the electric indigo of night under sea. We do not see the worm for over a minute, instead following the looping path of an ill-fated reef fish. It is hard to watch something and know it will die, but there is nothing I can change. The sand's triker lunges into an attack, mandibles slicing through the brine to clamp down on the fish and drag it beneath the sand. Even if the fish manage to escape, there may be other worms lurking nearby. There are only so many places to go on the seafloor.

Why is prey in nature videos always unsuspecting? Stealthy crocodile captures unsuspecting prey, world's biggest spider gobbles down in unsuspecting lizard. Cuttlefish hypnotizes unsuspecting crab. When we watch these videos, we are supposed to marvel at the attack, whether achieved by speed or cunning or brute force. The prey is rarely the true subject of the segment. We see a hair bounding through the snow not to understand how it forages, but so that we can see how the Arctic Fox ambushes prey. We see sea lions jetting under ice to see how Orcas hunt in packs. We see bee-eater

birds zipping through the sky to witness the dive bombing techniques of a bald eagle. There are exceptions, of course, and this isn't to say that we are told nothing about the inner lives of the prey. We learn about the hairs thick winter coat and shortened ears. We see the seals jump in and out of the water to avoid the gnashing jaws of an orca. We see the intricate community dynamics of turquoise bee eaters jostling over nesting sites embedded in a cliff. But more often than not, the documentary shifts our attention back toward the predator, and ends the segment with predation as climax, hair in fox jaw, seal blood in water, jewel-colored bird in the yellow talons of an eagle.

Though prey can be caught off guard, can be surprised, can even be ambushed. Prey is never truly unsuspecting. It has evolved the blueprint of its body in response to or in anticipation of trauma. The Arctic hare is blue gray in the summer and white in the winter, so it will not be seen. Certain creatures have even adapted to give up a part of their body until it can regenerate, cease-lug shedding papalais, crab sacrificing a claw,

geckos shedding a still twitching tail as a decoy while they escape. Snakes play dead, butterflies disguise themselves as leaves, octopuses squirt ink. These adaptations are remarkable and make these creatures exceptional in our eyes, and yet would not be necessary without the constant threat of the predator. I acknowledge this metaphor of predation is cheap. I don't fault the sand striker for hunger or for hunting. It works much harder than I do, someone who buys meat already dead and plucked. Part of the reason I find its body gruesome may be a hardwired instinct in the animal in me, an animal that fears snakes and creatures

that move like them. When the sand striker snatches a fish and begins to feast, it is not thinking of what the fish is feeling. It has no complex brain and no sense of morality, which means its intentions are never cruel. A worm cannot shirk a duty it does not know, but we can. Radio Lab will continue in a moment. This is Radio Lab, I'm Lulu, back to Sabrina Imblers' essay, Beware the Sam Stryker. I am not writing this to blame the men who have touched me when I was not aware enough to consent. Instead, I hope to place them like pushpins on a board of encounters that society has framed as acceptable. I do not know what I was like in these states, what I said, how I slurred.

For much of my life, the idea of conflict scared me so much that I would do almost anything to avoid causing a scene. My priority was my pride, not my body. I do not know what I would rather believe. If these men thought I wanted it, if they knew I wasn't there to consent, if they suspected at all and buried those concerns, if they didn't care.

I do not know if these men knew I was gone. The clinical term is incapacitated, but the only way I can understand it is gone, burrowed out of my body for the night. I know legally, logically, that if I was incapacitated, gone, then I could not have consented. I know that to believe this requires

overturning a part of my past that I told myself was fine, pushed to the shaded areas of my mind, and allowing myself to feel. This feels like an awful amount of space to take up. In truth, I am fine most of the time. If I stretch out my memory of my life like a ribbon and held it up to the light,

whole years would be threadbare. Worn patches, rips, holes. In a way this makes me feel relieved. Whatever happened in those hours of my life is lost to me forever, or if it still exists, molded into something like instinct. These are the missing hours of my life. Time I have lived unconsciously, existing as a physical body in a space without the power to understand what I was doing or what was happening to me.

Several years ago, a boy I knew in college wrote to me on Facebook to apologize for what he did that one night. I stared at the message, racking my brain for what it could have been. I came up with nothing. I almost texted a friend to ask, but afraid my ignorance of that night would give away my blackout. I did not. I wanted to ignore the message, to block him, but I knew he lived in a city I sometimes

visited, knew that some of my friends were his friends. I worried what would happen if he confronted me, if he told someone we knew about my blocking him, so I messaged back within the hour to ensure nothing would seem weird, so that I could seem impeccably unfazed. No worries at all. Seconds later, unsure if my first message implied that something did in fact happen, I messaged again.

I'm sure it was nothing. If I were a more ruthless detective of my own life, more sure that I could love myself knowing all the things I've done and the things done to me while I was not there, perhaps I would have had the courage to ask him what he was talking about, but I am not, so I did not. No, I am not writing to blame these men, but I also am not excusing them by casting their behavior as something instilled in them by systems beyond their control. Almost every system we exist in is cruel, and it is our job to hold ourselves accountable

to a moral center separate from the arbitrary ganglion of laws that so often get things wrong. This is the work we inherit as creatures with a complex brain, which comes with inexplicable joys like love and sex and making out in cars, but also the duty of empathy, of understanding what it means when someone is stumbling. My experiences are not exceptional, and either their recurrence or their severity, but I want to imagine a world in which the men around me when I was younger could have acted as a safety net, could have seen a drunk girl stumbling on a sidewalk as a person, not an opportunity.

I wish they could have seen me and alerted my friends, walked me home without touching me, or even just left me alone. Yes, I was fine, not in danger of choking on my vomit or passing out or hitting my head. I was fine until they found me, and then I wasn't. In certain waters, sand strikers prey on small fish called monocle breams. The breams are the color of armor, silvery bodies with one dark stripe, unabashedly plain among the flamboyant menagerie of tropical fish. They are the kind of fish it would seem who would only make an appearance in a nature documentary if they were about to be eaten. Brings feed on tiny-shelled things that also lurk in the sand, copepods, shrimp,

and micro-crestations. They cluster in social groups, aware of the power that comes in numbers, and multiple pairs of eyes watching the horizon for threats. Though the brims may see the expanse of black sand below them as empty, the worms lurk underneath in their mucus-slined burrows, antennae feeling for flesh the worms can grab.

The deck, it seems, is stacked against the breams. The food they seek lies buried in sediment that could easily cloak the worms that seek to devour them. While observing young monocle breams and waters off Indonesia, scientists noticed the fish exhibit rather unusual behavior. It always starts with one dream, who eyes pointing downward notices a suspicious dimple in the sand. Maybe there's a crater or a stray antenna peeking above the grit.

The fish inches closer in slow spurt, pausing often to assess any new movement. The others, noticing this fish's strange behavior, follow suit, hovering behind eyes fixed on the sand. Then the first fish starts to blow, spitting jets of water toward the crater, whirling up sand and revealing the worm that lies hidden underneath. Breames are incapable of harming the sand striker, as delicate fins and even the most forceful water jet can't pierce an excess skeleton. But what they can do is expose and warn. Their spurting alerts others nearby to the worm's stealthy presence in a kind of effervescent

whisper network. Once exposed, the worm might retract just one antenna, other times it slinks back entirely into its burrow, buried too deep to hunt. Sometimes the breeze only knew to spit after one of their own was taken, snatched and dragged deep into the sand. In one case, other species of small, invulnerable fish, rasses and blennies joined the crowd, eyes pointed toward the burrow, memorizing the threat. The scientists marveled at the Bremes collective action, approaching and mobbing a predator such as a sand striker invites real danger, losing a fin, a patch of scales, even dying. But the scientists never saw the worm fighting back against these mobs.

They never saw a fish placed in danger by alerting others to a threat. The breams swim around the reef to forage but never veer far from their home range, refusing to be forced out. They will do what they can to make this dangerous place safe for one another. When the scientists published the paper on the monoclebreins, they called their behavior novel. And it was, in the sense that humans had never observed it before. But had we even thought to look?

Sabrina Impler. Their most recent book is called How Far The Light Reaches. A life-intensity creatures it is so brilliant, so moving. Go get it! This episode was produced by Sindo Yana Sanvandan and edited by Alex Nisan and Pat Walters, music and sound design this episode by Alex Overington. Thanks so much for listening. See you soon. Hi, I'm Maureen and I'm calling from Charlottesville, Virginia. Radio Lab was created by Chad Abumrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lula Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-host. Dylan Keef is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Brassler, Rachel Qsick, Aketty Foster Keys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nayan Sanbanan, Matt Kielte, Annie McEwan,

Alex Niesen, Saur Kari, Anna Rasquit Paz, Sarah Sandbach, Aryan Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. Hi, this is Ellie from Cleveland, Ohio. Leadership support for Radio Lab Science Programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, Assignments Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational Support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Foundation.