Book Review: A Sea without Fish
David L. Meyer and Richard Arnold Davis
It has been my experience that most folks are not particularly interested in, let alone fascinated by, rocks. On the one hand, it’s kind of disappointing to watch my interlocutor’s eyes dart furiously about for any avenue of escape when I begin to ramble about my latest field trip, but on the other hand, I don’t have to worry about them picking any of my prime sites clean. If my prime sites were chock full of T. rex claws and Triceratops horns, I might find myself embroiled in a modern-day bone war. But I don’t live among the ruins of the Cretaceous or the Jurassic; instead, my primary hunting ground is the Ordovician, long before mammals or dinosaurs or flowering plants or even (mostly) fish. Here on the Nashville Dome, I collect mostly brachiopods, corals, bryozoans, gastropods and cephalopods—none of which will ever take center stage as the rampaging terror of Ordovician Park. While I would buy a ticket, 99.5% of the cinema-going public would stay away in droves.
Happily for me, David L. Meyer and Richard Arnold Davis fall into the .5% who would fork over some cash to sit in a darkened theater and watch trilobites scuttle along the seafloor while nautiloids whoosh through the waters overhead. Indeed, the epilogue of their book A Sea without Fish: Life in the Ordovician Sea of the Cincinnati Region is essentially a treatment for said film, taking us on a scuba adventure into the sub-tropical waters of Cincinnati 450 million years ago where we encounter the creatures and ecosystems they detail in the previous 16 chapters. While the perils of time travel and the desire to get back to today would always loom large (though in light of the perils of today, I might dial the date back to the mid-1990s when things were a little more hopeful), I would happily slip on some flippers and follow them into the late Ordovician ocean.
My primary impetus for reading Meyer and Davis was to learn more about the critters I find in my own backyard. The Nashville Dome is part of the Cincinnati Arch, and while Meyer and Davis focus primarily on the fauna of what is today northern Kentucky, western Indiana and southwest-southcentral Ohio, much of that same fauna was contemporaneously living its best life in the NashVegas area. Many of the fossils I have collected in the last year come from the Arnheim Formation, the base layer of the Richmondian stage (the youngest—i.e., most recent—stage in the Cincinnatian), and numerous other strata from which I have collected in the Middle Tennessee area correspond with the various other formations of the Cincinnatian considered in this work.
As guides to the life of this era, the authors did not disappoint. Chapters are devoted to nine common phyla (Chapters 6-12), algae (Chapter 5), and graptolites and conodonts (Chapter 13), and each of these chapters includes a description of the basic anatomy of the animals under consideration as well as a discussion of their likely role(s) in their ecosystem. The accuracy of these portraits is, of course, limited by the evidence to hand, and the exact mechanisms of feeding, reproduction, movement, etc., are likely lost to time, but analogues to other better known species both within the fossil record and extant today provide a relatively solid footing for basic conjecture.
Of greatest significance for me, however, are the fossil photos. Most every time I’m in the field, I bring home a backpack full of specimens. And then what? I have a crazy goal of putting together a diorama of every known (and, dare to dream, some heretofore unknown) Ordovician species from the Cincinnatian. In order to do that, I have to identify all of those specimens, and that’s hard—especially because I am much more focused on doing my thing in the field than on the “lab work” of cleaning and speciating. (I rationalize this by telling myself I have a limited window of age and health in which to collect, so gather ye fossils why ye may, but the bottom line is that field work is fun but cleaning, whether its fossils or floors, is just ugh.) That said, some of the great unwashed mass of dead critters strewn about the house in cardboard flats are actually pretty darned clean just as they are, certainly clean enough for lazy me to take a good look at them and figure out what/who they are. The photos Meyer and Davis provide here are of excellent quality and feature many very old friends I recognize from my own collection, allowing me to put a name to a face. The most exciting ID I’ve made thus far came when I was looking through some specimens from northern Kentucky. I had just finished Chapter 12 on echinoderms and recognized the critter in my hand as Isorophus cincinnatiensis, an edrioasteroid shown in Figures 12.12 and 12.13.A-B on pp. 180-181. Wow-zer-oo-ne-roo!
Based on a sample of two geeks (my brother and me), I feel safe in saying that the target audience for A Sea without Fish is almost certainly not the general reader (sadly, I don’t think Meyer and Davis will be able to retire from the proceeds of a best seller, at least not if this is the work on which they’re staking their golden-age solvency), but it is accessible to anyone interested in the topic. The prose is clear, and a glossary of technical terms is provided, along with an extensive list of resources cited. And, as discussed earlier, they end by pulling together all that has gone before to venture out across time and down into a vast fishless sea—the very same sea that floods my mind’s eye every time I pull a horn coral or complete brachiopod from what was once the ocean floor. Wonderful life, wonderful mind to know that life and hold it dear.
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