The ocean is full of strange and wonderful creatures.
Leah Thorpe, Director of Operations at the Shaw Centre for the Salish Sea in Victoria.
As an oceanography doctorate and author of a fantastical ocean-based novel series, I adore the intersection of fact and fancy.
I had the pleasure of interviewing marine educator Leah Thorpe, currently Director of Operations at the Shaw Centre for the Salish Sea in Victoria. She’s a biologist by training and previously worked for several whale conservation groups.
I asked Leah about her favourite ocean animal, and she considered it a very challenging question due to the incredible diversity of weird and wonderful life in the ocean. “I tend to be drawn to things that are very bizarre,” she said. “The ocean sunfish… is the heaviest of all the bony fishes and has a flattened body that is as tall as it is long.” Although the sunfish, also known as the Mola mola, is indisputably an odd creature, Leah considered the grunt sculpin to be the weirdest fish. Leah notes, “When you watch this fish, you just can’t help but ask, ‘How the heck do you exist?’ The grunt sculpin might seem awkward and clumsy, but when placed inside a giant barnacle, with appendages that mimic the feeding apparatus of barnacles, “It all starts to make a little more sense.”
Ocean sunfish, Mola mola.
Being an author of fantasy, I asked Leah what legendary sea creature she wished were real. Leah chose a mermaid, partly because most other legendary sea creatures are terrifying, and partly because she’d like to be one. “I love the idea of something like a mermaid existing,” Leah said. “I’m not saying I believe in mermaids, but I do know that the ocean is a huge, largely unexplored realm and there is a lot about it we have yet to understand.”
In a world where we are still discovering new species of whales, and the seas are populated by grunt sculpins and sunfish, it’s hard not to wonder what else is out there. Although it’s unlikely that mermaids exist, there are plenty of fascinating creatures that roam the depths of our blue planet and prove that real-life creatures are sometimes more fantastical than legends.
Interested in learning more about the real-life origin stories of legendary sea creatures? Check out author Dr. Emma Shelford’s Way Cool Talk on July 7th at 1pm.
Grunt sculpin, Rhamphocottus richardsonii
Emma Shelford
Emma Shelford, B.Sc., Ph.D. Emma’s doctorate at UBC focused on the influence of marine viruses on global nitrogen cycling. Today, she is an author of contemporary fantasy novels. Her latest book features a local marine biologist who discovers that legendary sea creatures are real.