The Drifter Returns Home
Jack Faullin | May 2018
I know what it's like to be a drifter, an itinerant, a vagabond. If you’ve ever lived or vacationed in a particularly large city, so do you. If you’ve taken the subway or the bus before, you know the feeling I am about to describe. Even if you’ve been on Sanford Mall during a class change, you may have felt this feeling.
There’s a moment in situations I have aforementioned that I can only describe as sublime. It is when each and every person you can see is moving in a different direction with their own path and destination. It is a sort-of organized chaos, where everyone tries not to get in anyone else’s way and minds their own business. It is different from a mob or a concert or other situations with lots of people because the activity that connects people is exactly what separates them simultaneously: movement. When I see this congregation of strangers, whether in Times Square or a subway station during rush hour, I cannot help but think what each of their stories is like. What led them to walking hurriedly towards the quickly departing southbound train or sauntering towards Walker Hall with math homework in hand and headphones in ear? Sometimes we play a little people-watching game where we try to channel our inner Sherlock Holmes and deduce their destination based on appearances and actions. “Oh I bet that guy is going to the music building because he is carrying a violin case.” Each person that crosses your path has their own; and the fact that I will never know the overwhelming majority of their stories takes my breath away. Everyone is just drifting, in between one place and another, temporarily neither here nor there.
It is phenomenon that concurrently inspires and terrifies me. It’s terrifying because I do not want to experience it for very long. I would very much like to keep moving like everyone else and eventually arrive at my destination. No one wants to be in perpetual motion, always moving but never arriving. My species knows this emotion well. Humor me for a moment and imagine that you are on a bus riding home. It is the end of a long day, you have leftover spaghetti in the fridge and your favorite comfy reclining chair waiting for your arrival. When you disembark the bus, however, your home is missing. It was there the last time you were, but since then, it has disappeared from existence. What would you do? Call 911? Call your roommate? Investigate the place where your home used to be? Or would you just get back on the bus and keep drifting? What else is there to do with no place to call home?
I know for a fact that the Leatherback Sea Turtle experiences this often. They are the best drifters on Earth. Leatherbacks have the widest global distribution of all reptile species. They can be found in the tropic and temperate waters of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, as well as the Mediterranean Sea. Adult leatherbacks also traverse as far north as Canada and Norway and as far south as New Zealand and Argentina. They are the largest, heaviest, deepest-diving, farthest-travelling reptile on the planet. They often grow more than two meters in length and weigh upwards of 900 kilos. They can dive up to 1000 meters and can hold their breath whilst underwater for around seven hours. It has been documented that they sometimes travel over 10,ooo kilometers in a single year.
The Leatherback Sea Turtle has been forced by anthropogenic sources to drift, to remain in motion, for longer than it would like. Their tropical home beaches are disappearing between visits to lay eggs. The Leatherback Sea Turtle is being forced to stay at sea, never able to return home and thus subsequently never given the chance to rear any young, leading to a slow burn of extinction has goes relatively unnoticed in comparison to other more directly threatened species. Furthermore, the rising global temperature is affecting the gender ratio of eggs that do get laid. The ratio is around 1.87:1 female to male, and scientists are worried that the rising temperatures will bump the ratio up to 2:1, further perpetuating the slow extinction of the Leatherback.
But like I said earlier, the Leatherback is made for this drifting, and they will not go easily. Their namesake shell, or carapace, is both flexible and tough, as it is made up of thousands of tiny bone plates that are interconnected. The carapace is separated by seven ridges that run the length of the turtle and help streamline it while swimming. Finally, the leatherback, despite being a cold-blooded reptile, the Leatherback has evolved extraordinary methods of maintaining its body temperature in the cold waters of our oceans. They are a thermoregulating ectotherm, which is a bit of an oxymoron. How can a cold-blooded animal regulate its body temperature internally? Because they are so large, leatherback sea turtles have a low surface area to volume ratio, thus the core temperature of the turtle changes at a much slower rate. This phenomenon is called “gigantothermy.” The turtle is also wrapped up in a layer brown adipose tissue, a strong insulating layer of fat most commonly found in mammals. This system has the ability to retain more than 90% of heat at the core of the animal, decreasing the heat loss through the exposed extremities. When in high temperature waters, just the opposite occurs. Flipper stroke frequency decreases dramatically, and blood moves freely to the extremities and expels heat through the areas not covered in the insulating tissue. Leatherback sea turtles are so successful at regulating their body temperature that they have the ability to maintain constant body temperature 18 degrees above or below the ambient temperature in the water they’re drifting through.
So all of this makes me wonder if the Leatherback ever experiences the same emotion I described at the beginning of this narrative. Do they ever drift by the Caribbean Coral Reefs and feel profound sadness that they do not have a final destination of home to drift towards anymore? Do they see the little clownfish nestle within an anemone and feel jealousy? Or do they just wonder about the lives of fish and other sea creatures that they will never know? No matter what they think, one thing remains true; the Leatherback Sea Turtle will get back on the bus and keep drifting, for its the only thing it can do without a home to return to.
Jack Faullin | May 2018
I know what it's like to be a drifter, an itinerant, a vagabond. If you’ve ever lived or vacationed in a particularly large city, so do you. If you’ve taken the subway or the bus before, you know the feeling I am about to describe. Even if you’ve been on Sanford Mall during a class change, you may have felt this feeling.
There’s a moment in situations I have aforementioned that I can only describe as sublime. It is when each and every person you can see is moving in a different direction with their own path and destination. It is a sort-of organized chaos, where everyone tries not to get in anyone else’s way and minds their own business. It is different from a mob or a concert or other situations with lots of people because the activity that connects people is exactly what separates them simultaneously: movement. When I see this congregation of strangers, whether in Times Square or a subway station during rush hour, I cannot help but think what each of their stories is like. What led them to walking hurriedly towards the quickly departing southbound train or sauntering towards Walker Hall with math homework in hand and headphones in ear? Sometimes we play a little people-watching game where we try to channel our inner Sherlock Holmes and deduce their destination based on appearances and actions. “Oh I bet that guy is going to the music building because he is carrying a violin case.” Each person that crosses your path has their own; and the fact that I will never know the overwhelming majority of their stories takes my breath away. Everyone is just drifting, in between one place and another, temporarily neither here nor there.
It is phenomenon that concurrently inspires and terrifies me. It’s terrifying because I do not want to experience it for very long. I would very much like to keep moving like everyone else and eventually arrive at my destination. No one wants to be in perpetual motion, always moving but never arriving. My species knows this emotion well. Humor me for a moment and imagine that you are on a bus riding home. It is the end of a long day, you have leftover spaghetti in the fridge and your favorite comfy reclining chair waiting for your arrival. When you disembark the bus, however, your home is missing. It was there the last time you were, but since then, it has disappeared from existence. What would you do? Call 911? Call your roommate? Investigate the place where your home used to be? Or would you just get back on the bus and keep drifting? What else is there to do with no place to call home?
I know for a fact that the Leatherback Sea Turtle experiences this often. They are the best drifters on Earth. Leatherbacks have the widest global distribution of all reptile species. They can be found in the tropic and temperate waters of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, as well as the Mediterranean Sea. Adult leatherbacks also traverse as far north as Canada and Norway and as far south as New Zealand and Argentina. They are the largest, heaviest, deepest-diving, farthest-travelling reptile on the planet. They often grow more than two meters in length and weigh upwards of 900 kilos. They can dive up to 1000 meters and can hold their breath whilst underwater for around seven hours. It has been documented that they sometimes travel over 10,ooo kilometers in a single year.
The Leatherback Sea Turtle has been forced by anthropogenic sources to drift, to remain in motion, for longer than it would like. Their tropical home beaches are disappearing between visits to lay eggs. The Leatherback Sea Turtle is being forced to stay at sea, never able to return home and thus subsequently never given the chance to rear any young, leading to a slow burn of extinction has goes relatively unnoticed in comparison to other more directly threatened species. Furthermore, the rising global temperature is affecting the gender ratio of eggs that do get laid. The ratio is around 1.87:1 female to male, and scientists are worried that the rising temperatures will bump the ratio up to 2:1, further perpetuating the slow extinction of the Leatherback.
But like I said earlier, the Leatherback is made for this drifting, and they will not go easily. Their namesake shell, or carapace, is both flexible and tough, as it is made up of thousands of tiny bone plates that are interconnected. The carapace is separated by seven ridges that run the length of the turtle and help streamline it while swimming. Finally, the leatherback, despite being a cold-blooded reptile, the Leatherback has evolved extraordinary methods of maintaining its body temperature in the cold waters of our oceans. They are a thermoregulating ectotherm, which is a bit of an oxymoron. How can a cold-blooded animal regulate its body temperature internally? Because they are so large, leatherback sea turtles have a low surface area to volume ratio, thus the core temperature of the turtle changes at a much slower rate. This phenomenon is called “gigantothermy.” The turtle is also wrapped up in a layer brown adipose tissue, a strong insulating layer of fat most commonly found in mammals. This system has the ability to retain more than 90% of heat at the core of the animal, decreasing the heat loss through the exposed extremities. When in high temperature waters, just the opposite occurs. Flipper stroke frequency decreases dramatically, and blood moves freely to the extremities and expels heat through the areas not covered in the insulating tissue. Leatherback sea turtles are so successful at regulating their body temperature that they have the ability to maintain constant body temperature 18 degrees above or below the ambient temperature in the water they’re drifting through.
So all of this makes me wonder if the Leatherback ever experiences the same emotion I described at the beginning of this narrative. Do they ever drift by the Caribbean Coral Reefs and feel profound sadness that they do not have a final destination of home to drift towards anymore? Do they see the little clownfish nestle within an anemone and feel jealousy? Or do they just wonder about the lives of fish and other sea creatures that they will never know? No matter what they think, one thing remains true; the Leatherback Sea Turtle will get back on the bus and keep drifting, for its the only thing it can do without a home to return to.