2. Softness

Just prior to the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 I had the opportunity to visit Fiji, which is known in the scuba diving community as the soft coral capital of the world. One notable drift dive was at “Purple Haze,” a site that was best visited during the changing of the daily tides. Purple Haze—referencing a Jimi Hendrix song—alluded to a particularly dense wall of violet soft corals that the incoming tide would cause to “bloom,” the floral verb used to describe the inflation of their hydroskeletons. While there are many types of soft corals, this particular kind relied on the flux of the current to activate their bodies, so that they changed from an appearance of crushed tissue paper into softly ballooned branches, tufted with lavender polyps ready to grasp passing food particles. As I drifted along past this wall, I was aware that the currents enabling the corals to bloom also prevented me from pausing in place to examine the corals more closely. I could only observe them in motion, even as a few people in the group swam countercurrent to try to obtain photographs. Of course, divers present their own disturbances. Reflecting on another Fijian dive site, “Mellow Yellow,” one person recalled how “dozens of divers circumnavigate popular pinnacles every day, their exhaust bubbles percolate upward and scrub the soft corals above. We may aspire to take only pictures and leave only bubbles, but on sites with vertical walls, overhangs or pinnacles, the bubbles may cause damage.”1

Compared with stony corals, soft corals have received less scientific (and practically no humanistic) attention.2 In the acknowledgments of Soft Corals and Sea Fans (2001), the editors write, “Until now, no comprehensive and user-friendly reference material to soft corals and sea fans of the warm shallow waters of the broader Indo-Pacific region existed.”3 Indeed, the section on soft corals in The Biology of Reefs and Reef Organisms (2013)—which one would expect to be a totalizing survey of many types of corals—is a mere two paragraphs long. Across textbooks and popular media forms, Corals largely imply reef-building stony corals, obscuring the variety of other types of corals and their near-kin relations.

Soft corals, together with sea fans, blue corals, and sea pens, are part of the animal group Octocorallia. The polyps of these organisms have eight tentacles, rather than six (as with stony corals, which are part of Hexacorallia).4 Soft corals have no solid skeleton, although some have small internal structures called sclerites—like icicles made of calcium carbonate—unique to particular species. In lieu of a skeleton, some soft corals pump water through the mouths of their polyps into internal canals, forming a hydroskeleton that can be quickly inflated or deflated as needed.5 Soft corals are found in the Indo-Pacific Ocean but not the Atlantic, and colonies can be hundreds of years old.

If a dominant coralation has been to see Corals as builders—as architectural agents, as makers of worlds—what happens when we shift our consideration to soft corals? How do soft corals differ from the stony iconicity of Corals, exemplified in Shakespeare’s oft-cited passage from The Tempest, “Full fathom five thy father lies / Of his bones are corals made / Those are pearls that were his eyes”?6 Whereas bleached corals have become iconic and gothic images of precarity in the face of ocean warming—bone-like in their depigmentation—what kind of narrative might we tell about soft corals in face of climate precarity? Are stony corals, in their evocation of bones, more mournable subjects?

To think with soft corals is to undo the normative coralation of Coral with building and the accretion of records. We encounter one such scene in the documentary film Chasing Coral (2017), directed by Jeff Orlowski, which dramatizes the effects of extreme ocean warming on coral reefs. Chasing Coral was planned as a sequel to Chasing Ice (2012), Orlowski’s earlier documentary that followed a team that set up remote cameras to capture evidence of glacier recession over several months. Anticipating that a new ocean-warming event would lead to severe coral bleaching, Orlowski applied the same formula: set up underwater cameras to document the change from healthy corals to dead ones. However, Chasing Coral significantly varies from Chasing Ice through the failure of remote observation and recording. Despite best efforts to engineer automatic recording—underwater cameras inside glass globes, with a self-scraping mechanism for cleaning off algae—the cameras either died or produced blurry footage. With time running out, Orlowski and his team gave up on remote observation and instead opted for the labor-intensive option of scuba diving to make repeat observations of sites at Lizard Island, Australia. This was no vacation: diving involved the daily work of washing/drying heavy gear, pounds of weights, multiple tanks, and camera equipment. It was physically exhausting. Although Orlowski’s team had planned for (and wanted) remote observation, they found themselves committed to embodied observation, documenting the dying corals, both soft and stony, through daily submergences. These dives exemplify what it means to “dwell in the dissolve,” Stacy Alaimo’s term for the ecological grief of recognizing transcorporeal vulnerability.7

One scene at end of the documentary features an affective moment of soft coral contact. Coral enthusiast Zach Rapo gently disturbs the water around a necrosing coral with his hand, sending fleshy strands of mucus opaquely into the water. His extradiegetic narration adds, “It’s flesh. It’s living tissue . . . that’s rotting away.” He swims away to bring something back to show the camera for a close-up: a yellow piece of soft coral, nested in his two hands, disintegrating to produce a mucus-white halo. Unlike stony corals, whose bone-white skeletons remain after the polyps die, soft corals simply melt into the ocean, leaving no record of their existence. The scene then cuts to Rapo pulling out an underwater notebook and pencil, where he scrawls the sentence, “This is the hardest dive I’ve ever had to do,” and holds it up to show the camera. Chasing Coral juxtaposes this familiar mode of inscription—writing on a tablet—with something that appears to be its antithesis: dissolution.

The fact that Chasing Coral centers on moments of dissolution lends it political urgency, but also draws coralations to the media form of the book. Consider the following metaphor used by Richard Vevers, who worked in advertising before turning his attention to ocean activism as the CEO of XL Catlin Seaview Survey: “Losing the Barrier Reef has got to mean something. You can’t just let it die, and it becomes an old textbook. It’s got to cause the change it deserves.” This comparison to “an old textbook” initially struck me as odd, since it is still a type of record that endures. Yet it makes a certain sense if what the textbook lacks is a readership. Vevers wants coral death to “cause the change it deserves,” to transform coral corpses from the realm of the abject back into the realm of signification—into inscriptions—that will catalyze action. This desire to catalyze change manifests in the structure of the documentary itself: Chasing Coral is the type of documentary that sets up the viewer to fulfill the very lack that it assumes from the beginning. If, by the end of the film, you find yourself feeling pathos for the corals, then you help the documentary achieve its goal—the invitation to care—which carefully avoids systemic critiques of capitalism, or energy-intensive video streaming of its Netflix distribution, aimed at a global North audience.8

But to return to Vevers’s description of the reef as an old textbook: perhaps soft corals challenge another coralation, the imagination of Coral (stony corals, again) as a kind of inscriptive record of the past climate. During one moment in Chasing Coral, Dr. Neal Cantin opens a drawer full of thin, bone-white slabs. These slabs are samples of coral, that the documentary reminds us that “you can look at growth rings in corals in the same way you can look at growth rings in trees.” I find it difficult to ignore the visual similarity between these coral samples and stony tablets, surfaces for (what are here read as) inscriptions of an oceanic climate record. Stony corals lend themselves so easily to media analogies with records, perhaps because of the temporal linearity of how each residue of calcium carbonate accretes and hardens on top of another—like tree rings, or geologic strata. Cantin points out a normal growth pattern in one sample of 1.5 cm per year, until 1998, when bleaching due to an ocean warming event interrupts its formation—one of several interruptions caused by global climate change from anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. This kind of climate record is not possible to trace in the bodies of soft corals, which—in a non–book type of way—simply melt away into the ocean during extreme moments of heat stress.

Heat can be a difficult phenomenon to film because it is not primarily visual.9 During the massive ocean heatwave in 2016 that Chasing Coral documents, a full third of all corals in the Great Barrier Reef were affected by bleaching. Bleaching is the stress response of the corals to extra-warm water, whereby they eject their symbiotic algae (zooxanthellae).10 Losing these algae causes corals to lose pigment, resulting in the bleach-white color of bone in the stony corals. The bone-white skeletons left behind (such as those that adorn the cover of Irus Braverman’s book, Coral Whisperers: Scientists on the Brink [2018]) make ocean warming visible as spectacular indexes, drawing a visual coralation between coral death and colorlessness. If coral skeletons attest to the accretion of time, then such a temporal record is endangered by the effects of coral bleaching and ocean acidification. Consider a striking metaphor from Allan Sekula in Fish Story, “the gum disease of the future eats away at the teeth of the past.”11 Stony corals, like teeth, might also be said to suffer from the “gum disease” of anthropogenic climate change. More literally, anthropologist Amy Moran-Thomas moves past the figure of the mouth to notice a more digestive material metaphor in the case of corals, which are “showing signs of metabolic disorders” because of increasing heat stress, which causes starvation and bleaching.12

Here my thought drifts back to soft corals, which, instead of bleaching into a white skeleton during ocean warming events, simply dissolve under thermal stress. What media analogies do soft corals lend themselves to, if their fleshy materiality is so different from that of their stony cousins? What are the media of softness? These are questions that challenge the way that many scholars imagine the Anthropocene through print media. Theorizations of the Anthropocene commonly draw on a spatio-temporal logic of layering likened to chapters of Earth’s history, a bookish comparison.13 Consider how the Anthropocene has drifted toward analogies of writing, where humanity inscribes the next epoch of geologic history in Earth’s strata—measurable by radioactive isotopes or by synthetic plastics packed into our ever-increasing trash heaps—or erases newly extinct species in the future fossil record. As Tobias Boes and Kate Marshall write, “The Anthropocene makes Lascaux painters out of all of us, for we all collectively inscribe messages upon our planet that our distant descendants (provided they exist) will one day approach with wonderment and incomprehension.”14 Even though we can read records of the climate in the stony bodies of some corals, this tactic does not work in the case of immediately felt effects like ocean heat. Geological strata are but one body, or one medium, for the Anthropocene to register.

What is the Anthropocene for soft corals? Perhaps a matter of saturation. As Rafico Ruiz and I wrote in our introduction to Saturation: An Elemental Politics (2021), saturation evokes both a watery and chemical poetics. While the Oxford English Dictionary defines saturation as the feeling of being “full” or “glutted,” we also might think of a saturated solution in a chemistry lab.15 Saturation offers a trans-elemental imaginary that “positions scholars to compare materials and social forces that might not otherwise find themselves in the same conversation,” modeling an important alternative to (not a total replacement of) the popular concept of entanglement—which is more suggestive of threads, yarns, or vines, and implies the possibility of disentanglement.16 The Anthropocene oceans are saturated by political decisions and petrocultural dependency that drive global climate change and extreme ocean-warming events. But saturation also comes to matter in the liveliness of soft coral bodies; recall that seawater is the milieu that sustains soft corals as their tentacles slowly grasp and unfold in the current, the water forming their hydroskeleton—in this state, they are (following the OED) full and glutted with water. When we think about all the ways that seawater is both inside and outside the soft corals, buoying them, assisting in coral reproduction, carrying nutrients, and how corals are sensitive to changes in current, it is harder to hold onto an ontological division between organism and environment, coral and ocean. Soft corals necessitate attention to the prepositional mode of being “of” the ocean, not as builders erecting lasting edifices, but as fluid sculptures of flowing water.

If soft corals had been the dominant reef organism that Darwin and other British explorers encountered, I wonder if it would have been as tempting to coralate them with metaphors of empire and empire building. Where stony corals blur the ontological categories of animal, vegetable, and mineral, soft corals offer more distance from the mineral (although some varieties, as I mentioned, build sclerites). Descriptions of soft corals drift more toward plants rather than architectures (soft corals “blooming” or forming “gardens”), comparisons that channel gendered correlations between softness and femininity, or gardening as a woman’s activity—an exception being Bronislaw Malinowski’s Coral Gardens and their Magic (1935), which references stony reefs in the Trobriand Islands. In Chasing Coral, soft corals do not suggest permanent records but rather forms of ephemerality, fleshy bodies that decompose as easily as tree leaves into the heat of a compost pile.

Notes

1. 1. Diver’s Alert Network, “Fiji: Soft Coral Capital of the World,” https://dan.org/alert-diver/article/fiji-soft-coral-capital-of-the-world/.

2. 2. In one exception, Peter Godfrey-Smith dedicates a chapter in Metazoa to soft corals, locating the evolutionary beginnings of animal action in soft corals, “action that involves coordination across vast scales from a cell’s point of view.” Peter Godfrey-Smith, Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2020), 54.

3. 3. Katharina Fabricius and Philip Alderslade, Soft Corals and Sea Fans (Durban, South Africa: Durban Natural Science Museum, 2001), v.

4. 4. Fabricius and Alderslade, 1.

5. 5. Fabricius and Alderslade, 14.

6. 6. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, I.2.

7. 7. Stacy Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

8. 8. See Mark Sweney, “Streaming’s Dirty Secret: How Viewing Netflix Top 10 Creates Vast Quantity of CO2,” The Guardian, October 29, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/oct/29/streamings-dirty-secret-how-viewing-netflix-top-10-creates-vast-quantity-of-co2. See also Laura U. Marks et al., “Streaming Media’s Environmental Impact,” Media+Environment 2, no. 1 (2020), https://mediaenviron.org/article/17242-streaming-media-s-environmental-impact.

9. 9. More specifically, heat is detectable in the infrared, just outside the spectrum of visible light, and shimmering heatwaves are a visual phenomenon specific to air.

10. 10. Quirin Schiermeier, “Great Barrier Reef Saw Huge Losses from 2016 Heatwave,” https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04660-w.

11. 11. Allan Sekula, Fish Story (London: Mack Books, 2018), 150. My thanks to Caio Santos for this reference.

12. 12. Amy Moran-Thomas, “Sweetness across Thresholds at the Edge of the Sea,” in Eating Beside Ourselves, ed. Heather Paxson (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2023), 37.

13. 13. “In the same way, everywhere on Earth, traces of earlier epochs persist in the contours of landforms and the rocks beneath, even as new chapters are being written. The discipline of geology is akin to an optical device for seeing the Earth text in all its dimensions.” Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018), 22.

14. 14. Tobias Boes and Kate Marshall, “Writing the Anthropocene: An Introduction,” Minnesota Review, no. 83, special issue, “Writing the Anthropocene,” ed. Tobias Boes and Kate Marshall (2014): 63.

15. 15. Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz, eds., Saturation: An Elemental Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2021), 1.

16. 16. Jue and Ruiz, 4.