Invasive Species by Shezad Dawood

As part of my recent and ongoing research into marine climate change and its affects, I have found myself repeatedly stranded on the beach of Binary. This syntactical desert island, much like the UK, is repeatedly hammered by the winds of syntactical dialectics. Some of these conflicting spaces: such as native and invasive, local and global, or even indigenous and migrant, bring up different associations depending on which species they are applied to and again which geographies and in which trajectories they are applied. Practices of appropriation, expropriation and censorship can all then be applied too.

In an unexpectedly ironic twist based on what would follow, or many years, The Mysterious Island’s central protagonist Captain Nemo’s (or literally ‘no one’ from the Latin) identity as the Indian anti-colonial warrior Prince Dakkar, whose wrath was incurred at the killing of his wife and son after he joined the Indian mutiny of 1857, was largely suppressed by both publishers and illustrators. One of Nemo’s key transgressions was to roam freely across the oceans, without let or hindrance by borders and nations, and to attack and plunder commercial and military shipping lanes (with a specific focus on British Imperial vessels). His own submersible vessel the Nautilus, was both technologically and imaginatively ahead of its time and allowed him to travel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (often misunderstood as depth rather than distance travelled). Verne it seems, in spite of his publishers, believed in emancipatory and anti-imperialist struggle.

Interestingly the first Nautili appeared over 500 million years ago, before both the appearance of the dinosaurs and the final formation of the continents. Originally extending up to 3 meters in length, the average Nautilus today only grows to a maximum of 25 centimetres. As an inspiration for the expansive steampunk interior of Nemo’s vessel, Verne could have done worse: as the Nautilus grows it creates new chambers in its shell, with an adult specimen possessing up to 30 chambers. Mainly found in the western Pacific and coastal Indian oceans, they congregate in the deep slopes of coral reefs by day (to avoid predators), migrating to shallower waters by night to feed and lay eggs. In fact, if we go further in this idea of vertical migration, the nightly cycle of migration between Benthic zones is very much part of the larger movement of biomass, of which we too form a part.

Ultimately, however, despite a lot of reluctance in the populist sphere, a deep interweaving, intersectionality and even interconnectedness, to slip into a more derided spiritual lexicon is not factually untrue. What connects warming waters to the movement of both people and algae (as co-equivalent species, although it must be said that algal fossils unearthed in Central India have recently been traced back 1.6 billion years), is relatively well established, by both science and fiction.

In Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, the central protagonist Antoinette, in a fever dream sets out to undo her imprisonment, as a Creole woman taken from her wealthy origins in Jamaica by her abusive husband to Thornfield Hall in England– his inheritance after the death of his father and brother – and imprisoned in the attic. Her descent into paranoia and delusion stemming from his unfaithfulness and shame at her ‘impure blood’ and conflicted past, amidst her own family’s plantation-owning past. Her mother’s estate was burnt to the ground by emancipated slaves, killing her mentally less-abled brother in the process, leading to dreams of fire, and the closing of the novel as she escapes, candle in hand from her attic confinement is both a bold decolonial and feminist overturning of the frame of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Setting fire all over again to the ‘Great House’ of Thornfield Hall.

This idea of cycles of return and revenge plays out literally in the proliferation of Sargassum, the metaphor at the heart of Rhys’ novel, and a potential ecological allegory that is often under-recognised. Sargassum or S. Horneri to give it, its scientific name is one of the most invasive algae in the seas, spreading out from its origins in the western Atlantic Ocean to the shores of Florida, California, the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean Islands, Asia and West Africa and extend to more recent possible sightings in UK coastal waters. Sargassum has the twin abilities to provide a habitat and food source that promotes biodiversity, and yet also due to sheer volume to choke off the life of other marine species such as sea turtles. Its key counterweights being competition and herbivory – either in the form of other kelp species or natural ‘predators’ such as fish, sea turtles again, and other marine invertebrates. Sargassum in its ability to float freely on the surface of the ocean, can also allow the introduction of other non-native species as stowaways. So as ever, in thinking of ecosystems and human contradictions, complexity is both the answer and the unanswered question.

Another parallel alga: Caulerpa Taxifolia, ‘was first found in 1984 growing in waters adjacent to the Oceanographic Museum in Monte Carlo, Monaco. There was a about a metre square patch of it when Alexandre Meinesz realised it wasn't part of the native flora. He tried to get people to harvest it or remove it before it spread and warned biologists and oceanographers of the potential species invasion. There was a programme and book made called ‘Killer Algae’, which sounds very dramatic, but people didn't take him up on the seriousness of it. And now there are hectares of it all along the Mediterranean coast because it's so well adapted, and in turn, it has excluded native species which has then affected inshore fishing because it has altered the native ecosystem. Caulerpa Taxifolia doesn't get eaten by any fish because it produces toxins to deter grazers making it an extremely successful species.’¹

What is the price of success? And perhaps I’m straying here into a more complex question of the role of capital in determining success both in the human and non-human. There are various efforts afoot to look at ways of engaging capital in the clean-up of Sargassum, as biomass and for the food, fertiliser and pharmaceutical industries. One of the more interesting start-ups is Seaweed Generation, which is looking to sequester Sargassum on the sea floor of the deep ocean as a form of carbon capture, using technology inspired by manta rays.

Where technology and species also begin to commingle – perhaps in a deeper understanding of the connective tissue in and between Eukaryotes – is this not also a form of creolisation? What if we are seeing a Creolisation or invasion of the space of matter or the manifest? Where technology adds an added feedback loop? An almost spiritual endgame, where we are not so much centre-stage but a late-comer to the party? Certain syntactical currents continue such as manifest and manifold and manifesto. Not that I wish to suggest a manifesto, more that one is unfurling, where the anthropocentric is merely one of the drivers of a new pluralism of forms. Where ripple effects – often assumed to be human in origin – are moving with their own hermetic purpose, towards an end that we know not yet, but that was written 1.6 billion years ago. A certain logic of deep time, rather than the Anthropos.

The current focus of my research is the changing biodiversity of the Scarbrough coast in Yorkshire, both in terms of algae and other species, but also thinking of it as a site of fading imperial grandeur – the ebb and flow of time and morphology. Yorkshire-based author Daisy Hildyard in her recent novel Emergency, which takes on themes of the global existing within the local, and the ripples of deep time, intuits something of this unstable ground beneath our feet: ‘…though in reality there was no origin and no endpoint. A place exports and circulates over distances, just as memory moves the past through the present and changes it. The matter that was in my presence then would continue to break down, build up, and move through places and bodies for a million billion trillion years, as far as I knew.’² Her unnamed narrator – that looks with a cool and critical eye at the slippages between us and the world around us continues:

‘For as long as I’ve been isolating, I haven’t felt that the disease in the world out there is real,’³ which although written during the pandemic, could also express the perennial dislocation between us (as insecure subject) and the world (as externalised object). Which seems a fittingly unresolved and contra-indicative end to a set of notes and questions on our overlapping and interconnected relationships with history, territory, memory, planetary time and algae.