Turtle Reef

by Jennifer Scoullar

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘We won’t know until we do some tests, but I suspect appendicitis.’

  An orderly arrived, went into the cubicle and emerged wheeling the trolley. How did she do it? Bridget still managed to look gorgeous in spite of the ordeal she was going through. Zoe could have sworn she’d brushed her hair.

  ‘Ring Quinn for me . . . and Dad,’ said Bridget.

  ‘Of course,’ said Zoe. ‘Do you want me to stay or bring you anything?’

  ‘Go home. I’ll be fine.’ Bridget managed a smile. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘No worries. You just get well.’ Zoe reached over and squeezed her boss’s hand. It was almost a relief knowing Bridget was ill. It explained why she’d needed Josh to work with Echo. But, a nagging voice reminded her, it didn’t explain the look on Bridget’s face when she recognised Zoe in the crowd at the dolphin pool. The look of panic, not of pain.

  Zoe rang Leo and left a message on his voicemail, and then Quinn. ‘I’ll be right there,’ he said. ‘Did they say what was wrong?’

  ‘The doctor thought maybe appendicitis.’

  ‘That’s impossible,’ he said. ‘Bridget had her appendix out when she was fifteen.’

  CHAPTER 15

  She ushered the crowd in and turned on the red light, bathing the previously darkened room in a rosy glow. Zoe hadn’t expected quite so many people for her first demonstration. She’d practised plenty of times, but there was truth in the old show business adage, never work with children or animals. And it didn’t help that Karen was lurking in the background. She and Bridget had been sceptical about the idea from the start. ‘You’d better perform, Einstein,’ whispered Zoe, ‘or I’m going to die of embarrassment.’ The big hooded eyes of the octopus were fixed on her as she turned to face the gathering.

  ‘Welcome everybody, to our new Octo Show.’

  ‘Why is the light all red?’ asked a skinny boy.

  ‘Most octopuses are nocturnal,’ said Zoe. ‘Their eyes don’t pick up light in the red range very well. It tricks them into thinking it’s dark.’

  ‘Tricks me too,’ said the boy’s father. ‘I can’t see a damn thing.’

  ‘It might take a few moments for your eyes to adjust.’ Zoe tried to sound encouraging. She moved closer to the tank and stepped awkwardly over the makeshift guard rope. ‘Meet the star of the show, our hammer octopus . . . Einstein.’ A titter ran through the crowd at the mention of Einstein’s name. Zoe stepped aside and gestured towards the aquarium with a flourish. ‘Octopus are cephalopods, meaning head-foot, and are in the same family as squids and cuttlefish.’ The audience members shuffled closer and peered into the glass. Zoe looked around. Einstein was gone. No wait, she was there, lying flat on the bottom. Her skin had turned to the colour and texture of fine sand. People kept staring, but her flawless camouflage meant they couldn’t see what was right in front of them.

  ‘There’s nothing there,’ called the skinny boy. In a flash, he ducked beneath the rope and rapped on the glass. Einstein showed herself, flashing red with anger to the appreciative gasps of the crowd. It could be fatal if she became upset enough to discharge her ink screen. The ink itself wasn’t toxic, but in a confined space it could clog her gills and choke her. Zoe was ready to rescue Einstein from the tank if needed, but instead the octopus jetted off behind her rock. Zoe groaned to herself. Great. Now what was she supposed to do? She hadn’t fed Einstein last night, in the hope she would be hungry enough to perform, but after a fright like that? She might not emerge for hours.

  The crowd were looking at Zoe expectantly, so she put on her best smile. ‘You’ve just seen for yourselves why the octopus is called the master of disguise. It changes colour faster than a chameleon. It’s also an escape artist extraordinaire that can flatten its boneless body to squeeze through the tiniest of cracks, and create its own smokescreen. An octopus is jet-powered. It has eight arms with thousands of suckers that can taste as well as feel. It’s a shape-shifter, with a beak like a parrot, venom like a snake and teeth on its tongue. But the most intriguing thing of all is its curiosity and intelligence.’ Zoe ran her hand over her head. Einstein was still nowhere to be seen.

  ‘You’re telling me that overgrown chunk of calamari has a brain?’ said a man wearing an ‘I ♥ Queensland’ T-shirt . . .

  There was a ripple of laughter. She’d been afraid this would happen. How could she convince them that the humble, misunderstood octopus deserved their respect?

  ‘My dog can do tricks,’ a girl said. ‘Is that octopus as clever as my dog?’

  ‘It’s hard to judge,’ said Zoe. ‘But some people think so. A common octopus has five hundred million neurons in its brain. That’s not very different to a dog, which has around six hundred million.’ There was a murmur of surprise.

  ‘Do octopus have hearts?’ asked the girl.

  ‘They sure do,’ said Zoe. ‘Three of them, pumping blood that’s blue instead of red.’

  Fascinating as these fun facts might be, they weren’t much use without Einstein. The audience still wore hopeful expressions on their faces. Zoe looked around helplessly.

  She did have a second hammer octopus she could show them, a smaller male, compliments again of Archie. He lived in the next tank and had been christened Houdini, due to his skill at escaping. But he was much shyer than Einstein and had already eaten a crab that morning. Odds on, he’d be hiding too. And anyway, he wasn’t trained.

  Zoe thought hard. ‘Do you have a cat at home, as well as a dog?’ The girl nodded. ‘Does it like climbing into boxes?’ The girl giggled and nodded again. ‘Well, in the same way that cats love boxes, octopuses love small, tight places too. Excuse me for a moment.’ She left the room, ran to the equipment cupboard and returned with an old-fashioned glass fish bowl – Einstein’s favourite toy.

  Zoe took the lid off the tank, slipped the bowl inside and waited. This proved too much of a temptation for Einstein. She flowed out from behind the rock and poured herself into the fish bowl, moulding her body to its shape until only her eye horns peeped over the rim, pulsing purple with excitement. She looked very cute, and the laughter that followed was appreciative instead of derisive. So far, so good.

  Zoe took a glass jar from her bag, showed it to the crowd, and placed a piece of herring inside. She screwed on the lid and gave it to several members of the audience to check that it was tight. Then she put it into the tank. ‘Let’s test the problem-solving abilities of an octopus,’ said Zoe. Einstein had decided to play. She enveloped the jar in her mantle, grasped it with all eight arms and repeatedly twisted her body. A minute later the lid came off and fell to the aquarium floor. Einstein ate the herring. A burst of applause greeted her effort. Even Mr Calamari clapped, and Karen nodded approval.

  Zoe brimmed with relief and pride. ‘An octopus’s sensitive suction cups and prehensile arms can hold and manipulate objects as effectively as any human hand,’ she said. ‘Let’s make the task a little harder.’ This time she put a piece of herring inside a child-proof pill bottle. Einstein pressed her mantle down on the cap. Twisting her body at the same time, she removed the lid with ease and ate the fish. Then she blew a jet of water at the little empty jar. It shot into the stream of bubbles from the aerator and was propelled straight back to her. She did it again and again.

  ‘Einstein’s playing bouncy ball,’ said the skinny boy.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Zoe. ‘Octopuses are very playful. Play is defined as an activity for enjoyment or recreation without any practical purpose. Only intelligent animals play.’ Einstein directed a powerful stream of water at the pill bottle, shooting it right out the top of the tank. This last antic won over the crowd. They jostled for the best view as Einstein dismantled a Mr Potato Head stuffed with sardines and then played tug of war with her feeding stick.

  Her last and most impressive trick involved an octo-puzzle box. Zoe had kept it as a souvenir from her time as a researcher at Sydney Aquarium. It consisted of a series of three Plexigla
s cubes, each with a different clasp. The smallest cube had a sliding latch that twisted to lock down, like the bolt on a horse stall. Zoe baited it with crab meat, locked it and placed it inside the second cube. This next box had a latch that slid counter-clockwise to catch on a bracket. Zoe placed this cube inside the largest box of all. It had two different locks – a bolt and a lever arm that sealed the lid like the top of a glass canning jar. Zoe set her stopwatch and dropped the puzzle box into the tank.

  The octopus surged onto it and a hushed expectancy came over the audience. Time ticked by. Einstein focused on the task with almost human concentration. A minute in, and she’d undone the two latches of the big outer box. Using one arm to extract the smaller cubes, she began working on the second box. Forty seconds later the inner cube came free. It took just ten seconds for Einstein to slide open the last bolt and receive her reward of crab. ‘Under two minutes,’ said Zoe. ‘Her best time yet.’

  People cheered as the octopus flowed to the top of the tank and extended an arm out of the water. Zoe reached over and gently shook it. ‘Good job.’ She fed Einstein a last piece of crab.

  The octopus grabbed her reward and retired to an empty coconut shell on the sandy bottom to eat it. To the delight of the crowd she grabbed a second coconut shell and pulled it down on top of her like a lid, waving her arms before disappearing from view.

  The charming move with the coconut shells hadn’t been taught. It was just what Einstein did when she’d had enough attention, but it was a terrific finale to the show. Zoe grinned. Maybe she could work out some way to reinforce that behaviour, ensure it became a regular part of the act. She turned to the audience. ‘Thank you all for coming, and I hope that meeting Einstein today has given you a new respect for our cephalopod friends in the ocean.’

  There were murmurs of assent. ‘That’s a sweet octopus,’ said the girl as they trooped from the room. ‘Mum, can we have one as a pet?’

  ‘Our puppy might get jealous,’ laughed her mother. ‘But you’re right about Einstein being sweet, and clever too. I had no idea. We won’t be eating squid or octopus again, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Your plan to convert the world into cephalophiles seems to be working,’ Karen said, when the last of the crowd had left.

  ‘It does, doesn’t?’ said Zoe, grinning. ‘Wasn’t Einstein wonderful?’

  Karen gave a one-shouldered shrug. ‘I have to admit, the octopus did okay. If she can consistently repeat that performance, I think you’re onto a winner. How’d you teach her the trick with the coconut shells?’

  Zoe tapped the side of her nose and put on what she hoped was a mysterious smile. ‘A professional secret, Karen. Now, have you seen Josh? I promised he could come with me this afternoon to sample seagrass.’

  ‘Josh? He’ll be bored stupid. But at least you won’t get lost with him along. That boy knows Turtle Reef like the back of his hand.’ Karen looked up at the gathering clouds. ‘If you’re going, don’t leave it too long. I don’t know what’s going on with the weather. It shouldn’t be this hot and stormy in October.’

  A pod of dolphins joined them for the trip out. They kept pace with the boat as it headed up the coast towards Cape Nelson under a gloomy sky. Always a thrill to see them, but also an unsettling reminder of what the centre’s dolphins were missing out on.

  Zoe took off her jacket despite a few spots of rain. They skirted the mudflats and subtidal shallows surrounding the Kiawa River mouth until they reached a likely-looking sampling site. Zoe took an echo-sounding. It seemed like as good a spot as any. Not too deep, with fair visibility and what looked like an even coverage of seagrass. She marked their position with a yellow buoy, tagged the coordinates on her GPS and dropped anchor. ‘Right, Josh, let’s get to it.’

  Sitting at opposite ends of the little runabout, they could barely see each other over the mountain of equipment in the middle: stakes, snorkels, flippers, quadrats, buoys, binoculars, cable ties, measuring tapes, plastic bags, clipboards, weighted ropes, maps, seagrass identification sheets – and her scuba gear, which unfortunately seemed to be right at the bottom of the pile. Great. ‘Help me move this stuff, Josh.’

  Half an hour later she was ready. ‘Can you give me that ruler, and a quadrat?’ Josh looked blank. ‘One of those square things.’

  He handed it over. ‘What’s it for?’

  ‘It’s a standard habitat sampling tool.’ Zoe carefully labelled it. ‘You set it down on the seabed, and take a photograph to record and identify the species inside it. Then’ – she picked up a thin PVC pipe from the equipment pile – ‘you use this to take a seed core sample, put a few plants into plastic bags for analysis, and do it all over again at the next site.’ His eyes had glazed over. Maybe it had been a mistake to bring him along.

  ‘Can I help?’

  ‘Sorry, Josh,’ she said. ‘I need you here on the boat to spot me and, anyway, you don’t have any dive gear.’

  ‘How deep is it here?’

  ‘Fifteen metres.’

  He snorted. ‘Fifteen metres? Who needs dive gear for fifteen metres?’

  Zoe tightened her straps. ‘I do. Now keep an eye on me, will you? I shouldn’t be long.’

  Over she went. Visibility wasn’t nearly as good here as it was further down the coast. Unseasonable heavy rain in the catchments had caused the Kiawa River to run high, discharging its silt-laden run off into the estuary and intertidal zone. Clouds of fine particles suspended in the water meant that fish materialised from the gloom without warning. A reef shark loomed nearby, and a fantail ray. A cuttlefish shimmied into view, the rippling fin of its mantle flashing blue and silver. The creature seemed as curious about her as she was about it. ‘Shoo gorgeous,’ she mouthed softly. ‘I’ve got work to do.’

  Zoe set down her quadrat on the seabed in an area of ribbon grass and paddle weed. She took out her camera. This was a steep learning curve. It was harder than she thought to avoid shadows, or patches of reflection in the photographs. Zoe measured stem lengths and leaves, and took samples. After examining three quadrats in a five-metre radius, she went topside.

  ‘Can we go now?’ Josh looked bored.

  ‘Not yet.’ Zoe checked her observations against the identification sheets and standard cover estimates. She stored her samples and transferred the information to a data recorder. ‘Okay, now we can go.’ They fired up the motor and headed north for a few hundred metres. Then she repeated the whole process.

  Josh wasn’t much of a dive buddy. As Karen had predicted, he quickly lost interest in the whole seagrass mapping thing. Sometimes when Zoe returned to the boat he was off swimming. Once he startled her by free-diving down and sneaking up behind her. He thought it was hilarious. Another time, he was taking a nap. Zoe didn’t mind that Josh wasn’t taking the job seriously. They were in calm, shallow water and she was getting the hang of things. She’d be perfectly happy to head out by herself next time.

  As the afternoon wore on Zoe made some disturbing findings. This area was a far cry from the idyllic underwater meadows that Bridget had shown her on that first dive. The aerial pictures had been deceptive. The mix of seagrass here wasn’t as lush as it looked in the photographs, and it contained fewer species than she’d expected. Many places were degraded and suffering from some form of dieback. Dugong grazing trails were few and far between. And the sediment layer was three or four times deeper than it should have been. This wasn’t a major problem for vigorous species with long strappy leaves and large rhizomes, like ribbon and eel grass. But shallow-rooted, small-leafed varieties? The ferny spinulosa and delicate paddle weeds? They were being choked by silt.

  By four o’clock, when Zoe stopped for a drink and afternoon snack, her mood matched the dreary grey skies. ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Josh as he downed the last of their Tim Tams.

  ‘The seagrass here isn’t as healthy as I’d hoped.’

  Josh pulled at her arm and pointed shoreward. ‘Look.’

  A dark shape lay in the shallow water between
their boat and the gnarled tangle of mangrove roots. A living, moving thing. She found it with the binoculars. Hmm, maybe not. That odd rolling motion might be due to the rhythm of the incoming tide. A dugong. She grabbed snorkel and fins. ‘Let’s go.’

  There was no pungent smell of death, just the stink of rotting seaweed and mangrove mud. The animal half-floated and half-lay on her side. A newborn calf rested beside the body, drifting gently back and forth between its mother’s flippers as if even in death she tried to comfort and protect her infant.

  Zoe had never seen such a large, dead animal before, not like this. Not in its natural environment, raw and unsanitised. Not away from a dissection table or outside of a butcher shop. She was overwhelmed. The dugong mother showed no signs of obvious injury. Zoe took a closer look. She was pretty sure she knew what had killed her. Starvation. At a rough guess the dugong weighed about half of what she should have. Death must have been recent, for she wasn’t yet bloated. On the contrary, she was oddly deflated. Skin that should have been thick and smooth, hung off her skinny frame in great folds. The vital blubber layer, designed to insulate her from hunger during lean times, had collapsed like a flat balloon and her tail was limp. Sightless eyes were sunk deep into the dugong’s wizened, wrinkled face. Even her short trunk seemed to have shrivelled and shrunk.

  The baby was about a metre long, and heart-tuggingly beautiful. Dead? Zoe couldn’t tell. She prayed to see the rise and fall of that perfect pale-cream chest. But then young dugongs were notoriously difficult to raise. They almost never survived – and this one was so young. Bile rose in Zoe’s throat. What should she hope for? Josh paddled in closer to the animals, reaching out uncertainly to touch the calf. It moved a little under his hand, but not of its own accord. The calf was dead too.

  She should put her scientific hat on. She should be dispassionate, take measurements and tissue samples and photographs from every angle. But what she saw in front of her wasn’t a research opportunity. It was a real-life tragedy that seemed somehow personal. Dugongs had similar life spans to humans. They reached sexual maturity at a similar age, and their pregnancies lasted more than a year. They were slow breeders, just one calf every five or six years, each live birth representing an enormous investment on behalf of the mother. Heartbreaking, to think this one had successfully delivered her baby, only to die when it needed her most. Had she known? What did dugongs know? They were closely related to elephants, and elephants were highly intelligent and famed for mourning their dead. Did this mother dugong despair as she used the last of her strength to bring her doomed baby into the world?