Dave Freedman - Natural Selection

Jason shook his head. He had no idea what the rays fed on down there. “But now we know why that one settled in the oil slick near Clarita.”

Darryl pivoted. “We do?”

“If Craig’s right, it must have been sick, even dying. I could never figure it: Why would a healthy ray lie down in a patch of oil? It wouldn’t. But a sick one, one that didn’t know where it was or what it was doing… Dollars to doughnuts, it was infected with GDV-4. You realize you could be talking about an apocalypse down there, Craig? I mean, if what you’re saying is actually happening, this virus could be the deep sea’s version of an ice age. These rays could be on the verge of extinction.”

Monique stepped forward. “Or adaptation. ”

Jason turned. “You think so?”

“Think about how long these things have been down there.”

“How long?”

“Rays are cousins of sharks, right? So they could have been there since Pangaea.”

Pangaea was an ancient supercontinent, an enormous landmass that preceded the earth’s current five-continent formation. Pangaea’s breakup 290 million years ago had profound effects on all the earth’s species, on land and at sea, placing them in wildly new environments that either killed them off or forced them to adapt. The evolutionary adaptations attributed to Pangaea are nothing short of astonishing: kangaroo rats in the deserts evolving organs to make their own water internally, polar bears in the Arctic evolving skin to endure temperatures below minus-eighty degrees, duck hawks developing wings to fly 175 miles per hour.

“So you’re suggesting Pangaea could have split an ancient population of rays?” Jason turned to Monique fully. “While mantas evolved on the surface, this other species evolved in the depths?”

Monique nodded. “Sort of like a… deep-sea cousin.”

“ Deep-sea cousin.” Craig smiled. “I like that.”

Jason eyed Monique curiously. “So how would this… deep-sea cousin have evolved? I guess it’s hard to say, isn’t it? Since we know so little about life down there.”

Monique raised an eyebrow. “We might know how it didn’t evolve, though.”

“How so?”

“Every species of manta we know lives in warm, tranquil seas, and they’ve all evolved identically. So doesn’t it stand to reason that if another group of rays lived in an entirely different environment, they’d have evolved into entirely different animals?”

“You think? How different could they really be, Monique? No matter where they evolved, you’re still talking about very large, slow-moving creatures. Wouldn’t their size alone limit their abilities to evolve into anything significantly different from the mantas we already know? It’s a rougher environment down there, granted, and I suppose they might have adapted—I don’t know—some stinging or electrical capabilities to compensate, but I can’t imagine anything much more than that.”

Monique wasn’t so sure. She recalled reading what Darwin had once said on a similar subject. When asked to explain how two genetically related species, the harmless domestic house cat and the vicious African lion, had evolved so differently, the father of evolution had attributed the results to vastly different environments, stating that more rigorous environments will force surviving species to become more rigorous as well.

“Life’s a lot tougher down there, Jason. Maybe these animals somehow evolved to deal with that.”

Tougher, Jason thought. In the case of the deep-sea cousin to the manta ray, what did tougher mean? But they’d gotten ahead of themselves. They were speculating, perhaps blindly. “We still don’t really know anything here, do we? I mean despite everything Craig just said, we don’t know these animals are from the depths; we don’t know they’re a new species. There’s really no proof.”

Monique looked at him. “Don’t forget the teeth Darryl found.”

Jason hesitated. The teeth. Was there any way the fat, stumpy S-shapes had actually come from the rays? Jason had previously written that off as unrealistic but now… “When’s Lisa’s meeting with that tooth expert?”

Monique checked her watch. “I think it’s starting right now.”

THE LOBBY of UC Berkeley’s new biosciences and bioengineering facility was jam-packed. With a three-day conference just getting under way, more than six hundred well-dressed men and women in their thirties to sixties were smiling, shaking hands, making small talk, and sipping water from Styrofoam cups.

How am I going to find Mike Cohen in this mess? Lisa Barton thought, standing on her tippy toes to see over the morass of people. She glanced down at her own tailored suit, an elegant charcoal-gray number over a sheer white blouse, and smiled. Lisa hadn’t dressed up for anything in more than a year and appreciated the opportunity to wear something nice. She pushed into the crowd. Catching the occasional elbow and throwing a few herself, she methodically walked the entire room until she saw him, engaged in a low-key conversation. Mike Cohen was forty-five with a full head of curly brown hair, a laser-sharp intellect, and an ensemble that would make any fashion designer vomit: a navy suit made of 100 percent Dacron with a cheap red tie loose at the neck. When his conversation ended, he spotted Lisa and smiled wide.

“Lisa, how are you?”

“Hi, Mike. Nice to see you.” They hugged.

“How you been?”

She shrugged. “Honestly, things were slow for some time, but we might be onto something now.”

Cohen smiled anew. “You were always a straight shooter, Lisa. If I asked anybody else here that question, they’d say everything’s been gangbusters since birth.” He glanced at his watch. “I’m sorry, but I have a presentation in fifteen minutes, so maybe we should get to the reason you’re here.”

“Is there a place we can talk?”

Seconds later, they entered Cohen’s office, nondescript and white-walled. He sat behind a metal desk with a faux-wood top. “So what do you got?”

Lisa placed a few of the fat S-shapes on the desk. “These.”

Cohen didn’t move. He just stared at the teeth, his brown eyes narrowing. Then, without actually touching the teeth, he ducked down to study them from another angle. Then he stood and moved his head all around, assessing them from more angles still, ignoring his dangling tie.

“Where did you get these?”

“The Pacific.”

“Where exactly?”

“About twenty miles off Monterey.”

“What depth?”

“A little more than a hundred feet.”

“Do you know the coordinates?”

“Longitude and latitude? Two of my colleagues might.”

“You said on the phone your team’s tracking some kind of new species?”

“We think so.”

Cohen picked up the phone. “Janet? I have to cancel my presentation. Please apologize and check timetables so we can reschedule.”

Lisa was staring at him now. He raised one of the teeth carefully and tapped it with a fingernail. “These didn’t come from a shark.”

He studied the tooth further, again from multiple angles. “They didn’t come from a barracuda, angler, gar, wallfish, parrot fish, or pike. They didn’t come from anything I’m familiar with.” He stared at them anew. “I’ve never seen teeth like this in my life.”

Lisa was stunned. Had they come from the rays?

“Would you like me to do an analysis on them?”

Lisa could barely contain herself. “Very much so.”

Cohen stood, eyeing the glass door that led to his lab. “Back soon. I’ll let you know what I find.”