Dave Freedman - Natural Selection

Then Jason forgot about her hips. He grabbed a small cutting knife. Then he began to cut.

“ONE LUNG.”

Four separate flaps of white leathery skin were peeled back; in the middle of them, a very large lung, pink and healthy.

“Just like the lungfish,” Monique said in quiet amazement.

Jason turned to Lisa. “Now check the stomach?”

“Definitely.”

He started the next incision.

IT HOVERED just below the surface, a three-hundred-pound juvenile.

Perfectly still, its eyes shifted, watching as a seagull plunged into the water ten feet away.

The bird knifed in, grabbed a minnow, and returned to the surface. It quickly gobbled its food, then just floated there.

THOUSANDS OF other rays also watched the bird. None moved.

This one was the closest. Very, very slowly, it swam toward it.

JASON STUCK a gloved hand into the cut-open underbelly. “ Why would they fly?”

Lisa turned. “ Why?”

“Yeah, why ? What’s the reason?”

THE JUVENILE swam closer, propelling itself ever so gently.

BOBBING, THE seagull glanced up at the gray sky. Then back to the sea. But there were no fish there, just empty, dark waters.

MONIQUE TURNED. “They’d fly for the same reason they left the depths. To find food.”

Jason reached into the belly up to his forearm and rooted around. “What food is in the air?”

Monique didn’t answer. She just watched as a strange look formed on his face. “What do you have there?”

“I don’t know.” But it didn’t feel like a fish.

THE GULL turned back to the water again. All it saw was its own rippling reflection, but still no fish. It looked up, noticing a dozen other gulls gliding nearby. It turned back to the water. Now, just beneath its reflection, were two large black eyes, staring at it coldly.

The gull flew away as fast as it could.

Then there was a frantic splashing behind it… and the sound of wings beating. The bird didn’t look back.

“ It’s a seagull.”

Jason washed it off in the sink and held it up for all to see: a dripping-wet, crushed, feathered body. No one said anything. They just stared at the bird.

As Phil snapped a picture, Jason put it on the counter. Then he reached into the stomach again.

THE CREATURE thundered out of the sea, flapping violently, water shooting everywhere. It rose fast on the diagonal, its eyes locked on the prey ahead.

The gull flew very fast… but not fast enough.

The predator picked up speed, the mouth opening, the fat S-shapes zooming in.

The bird crowed loudly, desperately. Then it went silent.

“ANOTHER ONE.” Jason rinsed off a second gull, then reached back into the stomach. He removed a third one. Then a fourth and fifth.

“Jesus,” Craig said quietly.

Jason began removing crushed birds by the handful. When he finished there were fifty-six in total.

Darryl just stared at them, in five neat rows on the counter. “They’re feeding on them. My God, they’re flying to eat.”

Craig paused. “We don’t know that.”

“We found this animal a hundred and fifty feet from the shoreline, and now its stomach is filled with seagulls. Do the math, Craig.”

Summers stayed calm, analytical. “This ray could have caught every one of those birds when they bobbed on the ocean. We don’t know it flew, Hoss.”

Lisa’s cell phone rang. She checked the ID and picked up. “Lisa Barton… Is that right? Hold on.” She glanced up. “Is there a fax here?”

Monique pointed. “The other room.”

Lisa walked off, and Jason turned back to the cut-open ray. “These animals are certainly trying to fly—right?”

“The juveniles are,” Monique said. “The juveniles alone.”

“But not the adults?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Think about what you saw on your deep dive, Jason.”

“What do you mean?”

“More than a thousand skeletons, and every single one of them was an adult. It’s plain as day. The adults aren’t adapting. GDV-4 wiped out their old food source, they can’t find a new one, and now they’re dying because of it. But the juveniles… they’re swimming into higher waters, hunting new prey, maybe even flying. They are doing absolutely everything they can to eat. They are adapting. Or at least trying to.”

Darryl shook his head. “So… why wouldn’t the adults do the same thing?”

“Maybe they can’t. The adults have spent their entire lives, their entire evolutionary history, in one place, learning one way to feed, one way to live. Suddenly their food disappears and they just have too much… inertia holding them back to do anything different.”

“But the juveniles don’t have that problem?”

“No. At least not to the same degree. They’re brand new to the world. They have much less holding them back.”

“Are all the juveniles are learning to fly, then?”

Monique paused. “I don’t know if it’s supposed to work that way.”

“If what’s supposed to work that way?”

“Adaptation. I don’t think they all adapt at the same rate. When species change environments, they say it’s very gradual. And individual. When ancestral penguins deserted the air for the sea, it didn’t happen en masse. Two hundred thousand penguins didn’t just wake up one day and decide to jump into the water. But one penguin probably did. It went in before all the others. Then, whether it took days, months, or millions of years, at some point, another one followed. Then forty more followed, then a thousand, until eventually, the entire penguin species was swimming. According to the science books, the same phenomenon played out repeatedly over geological time. There was one Archaeopteryx that flew before all the others, one amphibian that crawled, one whale that swam. Maybe there will be one ray that flies. Every species has its pioneers.”

“And its martyrs,” Jason said gravely.

Monique stared down at the cut-open ray, a strange look in her eyes. “So what? If there are martyrs, Jason, so be it. They died for a worthy cause. Everyone’s always said mantas were an evolutionary mistake, that they swim just like birds fly and never should have evolved in the water in the first place. Maybe this creature is nature’s first shot at correcting that. I mean, do you realize what we have here? This animal, this species, is literally evolutionary history in the making.” She touched the dead ray, newly amazed.

“Charles Darwin himself dreamed of seeing something like this. When we talk about all the species that evolved in this planet’s history—the amphibians, birds, mammals, man himself—they were all just tiny pieces of evolution, incremental improvements along the way. But this ray—this ray is evolution. It’s not just a new species, a new genus, even a new family. There has never been anything like this animal ever. It’s a new order. ” She looked at all of them, her eyes blazing. “We just discovered a new order.”

“So how are we going to find them again?” Phil said.

Monique shook her head. “I don’t know.”

The room was silent. Neither did anyone else.

“I know.”

They all turned. It was Lisa. She was staring at a fistful of fax pages.

“ WHAT IS that?”

Holding the papers, Lisa reentered the lab. “A report from the Audubon Society. A report about seagulls going missing up and down the California coast. I called the Audubon people a while ago, when I thought GDV-4 might have gone airborne, but clearly something else is happening to the gulls….” She eyed the papers. “It’s like a plague moving up the coast, and it’s followed the rays’ migration exactly, from Clarita Island right up to here in Point Reyes. They’re feeding on the seagulls en masse.”