Day 59. Aniramble.

We were supposed to turn facts about an animal into a story or an impression.... and of course, i'm an aquarium nerd. i'm not sure about this one. it feels random and disconnected. Blah.

Sea hares are basically big, weird sea slugs. Not a lot of people have heard of them, and sea hares definitely haven't heard of us. They smell things, mostly. They slumber and clamber over things, and maybe, if they're in a life-or-death situation, they ink, this dark purple cloud. They have these tiny beady eyes at the base of their "ears," but I get the feeling they're for show by the way sea hares move without regards to anything in their way.
They are the whales of the slug world: up to a foot of squishy, slimeless, sea slug, a purple Flubber. Once a year, they lay eggs like spaghetti, long trailing strands left over everything, like confetti the day after a party. They lay so many because eggs get eaten in a snap in the ocean. Sometimes, if you are patient and put your finger next to kelp they are eating, they will nibble you with their rough tongue.
At the aquarium where I volunteer, there are touch tanks, and the sea hare is my favorite thing to show people. They have no idea what to expect from the giant, purple thing that feels sort of like baby skin. Once, a girl touched it and stayed by the tank for a good fifteen minutes, saying "It likes me petting it. It likes it." People want the sea hare to like them. Once, a small boy stroked its back and said to me, "It feels like free will."
The sea hare is anything you want it to be. It is not quite slug, not quite squid, and a quite a long way from hare. It is a hermaphrodite. It would never question that, it just is. In its amorphous, lazy ways, I have seen it both stretched over its world and curled into a dark ball, where it loses all features. I imagine it is hiding from us, the traits we assign it. It could be. Their brains' nerve cells have very large axons, meandering axons, and I wonder what their thoughts would be if we could understand. They are used for human neurology research, and sometimes I hope that from that they will discover that humans and sea hares are not so different; that their internal shell that guards their organs hides more than guts. But for now, they are oblivious and kind and soft in a stuffed-animal-from-when-you-were-young way.
Ten years ago, there was an unexplained explosion in the sea hare population. They crowded the waters and everywhere you looked, they were there. Until one day, they weren't. They died off in the same way all populations that suddenly explode do.
That year I found a dead sea hare, on a beach in central California. I saw one washed up after the highest tide in months. It was soft and something was wrong; part of its flesh had turned green and spongy. I knew it was dead, but I scooped it up in my hands when my parents weren't looking and carried it into the sea. I like to think that in a tsunami, if all humans washed into the ocean, sea hares would go to our floating bodies and carry us ashore.