The Ocean World of Jacques Cousteau [antikvár]

Introduction: It's a Hard Life"Nature red in tooth and claw"?Civilization has the fundamental ambition of introducing a degree of order into the primeval struggle for existence. But to this day man has only succeeded in drawing a curtain between life's harsher manifestations and certain of our human sensibilities. Most of us have never visited a slaughterhouse or a fish cannery or a 24-hour-a-day illuminated chicken-and-egg farm. When we fall in love, we rarely have to dispose of our rivals by means of a billyclub. When a neighbor turns nasty and tosses beer cans into our backyard, we call the police. When the police collude with the neighbor, we call the state or federal authorities. When we play rough games, we institute rules and time periods and an umpire.But the classic, bloodstained struggle simmers right along in easy view if we care to look for it. We need protein just as urgently as the shark needs his mouthful of red snapper even though we are fed by the farms and stockyards and trawlers of this world. The newspaper reminds us daily that lust and territorial dispute and injured vanity and greed turn into acts of savagery and murder in the best-regulated communities. At a more general level, nations hurl themselves into vast conflagrations which consume millions of men and irreplaceable treasure for causes whichin the past several hundred years at leastbear no sensible proportion to costs. Man has lots of shark in himself still, as almost all of us find out at least once or twice in our lifetime.The creatures of the sea do not write poetry or paint pictures. Their lives are more obviously determined than ours by the basic quests of life: for survival, for food, for a mate, for a territoryfor play. And in pursuit of these quests they have developed over the evolutionary eons offensive and defensive weapons in nearly every conceivable direction. Man can find a precursor of almost all his primitive or refined armament in the sea. There are animals that use the analogues of swords, spears, bows and arrows, nets, electric cattleprods, camouflage, armor-plate, speed, poisonoften two or more weapons in dazzling combination. Moreover, advanced animals utilize tactics and strategies. (A lioness will stampede a heard of zebra toward her invisibly crouching mate; the stratagem is roughly that employed by Napoleon at Jena.) Barracuda "herd" schools of smaller fish. Dolphins hunt in packs. A male killer whale will lure a ship away from his vulnerable family. In a properly conducted seal rookery (one not too overcrowded ) there is a strictly enforced order in the access of males to females. No matter how exigent his passion, the young male must bide his time or get badly chewed up. It is all the struggle for life, for survival. With the notable exception of the explosives man concocts in his laboratories (culminating in the biggest bang of them allthe atom bomb),man can learn everything he wishes to know about the principles of attack and defense from some creature in the sea.Still, in the sea, as elsewhere in nature where it has not been contaminated by civilized man's ecological irresponsibility, there are balances struck between attack and defense. For example, predators survive only if prey also survive. If too many sea otters devour too many urchins and abalone, the otter population soon suffers from the effects of starvation. (Then, of course, the urchin-abalone population recovers, in turn triggering a resurgence in otters. The mathematics8