pH: A Novel. Nancy Lord

and tally counters.

      Ray had now entered his realm, the world of living zooplankton. Though he was dedicated to the study of marine organisms overall, there was nothing that excited him more than the tiny, footed, flagellated, ciliated, bristled, tentacled, transparent creatures, in all their life-cycle stages, all the way up to pulsing jellyfish as large as the reflected moon. It had become a primary goal in his life to encourage as many people as possible to look at his microfauna, to know that they existed. If ordinary people could admire their great beauty, maybe they would want to learn more about them, and maybe they would begin to understand why it was important for such creatures to have a home in the ocean. With his photographs, shot through the lens of a microscope, he was able to capture and enlarge the tiny larval forms of fish, the amphipods, the copepods, the microzooplankton radiolarians with their incredibly intricate mineral skeletons, and the shelled pteropods known as sea butterflies.

      Ray liked to tell students, “My goal is to make people want to hug plankton.”

      “How’s it going?” he asked now. He picked up a clipboard, to have something to do with his hands.

      “Is very good,” Nastiya said.

      It wasn’t just her Russian accent; it was the off-the-beat syntax that got him every time, and something about the harshness of her consonants. Good. My God, how could “good” be such an attractive, even sexy, word? When he talked with Nastiya he always wanted to adopt her own speech. The couple of times he had inadvertently done this, she had looked at him, wounded, and thought he was making fun of her.

      Nastiya’s great attribute was her ability to sort zooplankton. She had a tremendous eye for the subtleties between species, and she could sit at a microscope for hours.

      His inner voice repeated “Is very good,” but his outer one said, “I want to set up the carboys on the foredeck after lunch, and we’ll try some incubation.”

      “Okey-dokey,” Nastiya said, finally looking up from the scope and straightening her back.

       Okey-dokey?

      “So,” said Marybeth, “the lack of wind equals lack of mixing equals lower productivity? Not so many nutrients up in the water column where the phytoplankton can reach them? And then the zooplankton have less phytoplankton to eat?”

      “Precisely.” Ray moved around the table to stand closer to her. The room was tight between the lab tables, the big freezer, and the boxes of supplies. “That’s the theory. That’s the value of all these data sets, the time series, year after year, to match ocean conditions to primary production and to be able to apply what we learn to understanding and managing the species people care about, like salmon. Other people, I mean. People like us care about zooplankton.” He was trying to be funny again. People like us, crazy people like us, wacky scientists. He wasn’t yet sure that Marybeth was one of them, but she seemed an eager student—and had sworn, when he’d interviewed her for the cruise, that she’d been sailing all her life and had never gotten seasick.

      “Let me have a look,” he said to Marybeth, taking her warm spot on the metal stool. The sample teemed with several species of the bug-like copepods, with their long rowing antennae and plumose setae extending like the horizontal fins on airplane wings. How could anyone not be in constant awe that a critter only three or four millimeters long could be so finely, elaborately designed? He used the eyedropper to pick out a few, one at a time, and squirt them into the adjacent dish. He counted aloud and she clicked the tally counter.

      “A few Calanus pacificus,” he said. This was significant, but not unexpected. He explained to Marybeth: “One of the southern species that’s becoming more common here. A warm water copepod, ‘warm’ in quotes, moving northward. Smaller than our resident species. If it becomes more dominant, the foraging efficiency of visual predators might be affected. And, to the degree that it displaces our larger, fatter, more nutritious northern species, those predators will have less to eat.

      He refocused the lens. “What I’m not seeing is Limacina helicina. Nastiya?”

      “What?” She said this more aggressively than seemed warranted.

      “Are you finding any Limacina in your sample?”

      “No, I have not.”

      “And, Marybeth, why are we interested in Limacina?”

      “Because it’s a pteropod, and pteropods are a keystone species. Lots of other things eat them.”

      “That’s right. And pteropods have shells, so they’re vulnerable to ocean acidification. That makes them an indicator species as well. There’s two species we should be finding in these waters—the more common Limacina helicina and the less common Clione limacina.”

      “The naked one,” Nastiya added.

      “Right. The naked pteropod, because it only has a shell in its embryonic form and loses it a few days after hatching. It becomes a predator itself, and eats the shelled pteropods.”

      Nastiya again: “Clione suck those suckers right out of their shells.” She laughed wickedly.

      “Yes, it’s specialized that way. It uses its buccal cones to grab and turn the little snails and its hooked proboscis to extract the bodies. OK, I’ll leave you two to your work.”

      Was he concerned about the lack of pteropods in their first tow? Not really. One tow wasn’t significant. One season wasn’t even significant. That’s why they needed tow after tow, year after year, along with all the temperature and other data—the time series that showed trends and long-term change.

      The chemistry. The ocean’s chemistry—its pH—was going to be significant.

      Coffee cup in hand, he went looking for his daughter. He had hope for her inquiring mind, which seemed more promising than her brother’s. At sixteen, Sam loved driving fast machines but seemed to have no interest in how they worked or what to do when they stopped working, and he avoided the natural world except as a playground for said machines. Of course, science recognized that the adolescent brain, especially the male one, was incompletely formed. Hadn’t he himself been an idiot, in multiple ways, during his teenage years? Aurora, on the other hand, was watchful and attentive to detail, and she loved animals.

      But where was she? Not in the galley. He headed for her cabin, a vision of a disapproving Nelda hurrying his steps; you didn’t just leave your eleven-year-old to fend for herself in a strange place! What if she’d gotten disoriented and fallen down a ladder into the engine room? What if the ship’s crew, whom he knew from previous cruises to be incredibly nice guys, really weren’t? What if she was barfing her guts out? If she was seasick now it was going to be a long week’s cruise.

      But there she was on her back on her top bunk, still wearing purple pajamas. She was plugged into her iPod, jiggling one leg, and staring into another electronic screen that he’d never seen before.

      “There you are,” he said, pretending that he hadn’t just panicked. “Would you like to get dressed and come see what the others are doing?”

      “No.”

      He waited a couple of beats while the electronic device beeped. “Hey,” he said, “I’m going to get my binoculars. Let’s go up on the flying bridge and see what birds are around. And porpoises. There were porpoises a little while ago. I should have come and got you then.”

      “OK.”

      They passed onto the deck where the carboys—those glass incubation jugs they’d hauled from Fairbanks—would be set up, and up the stairs to the pilothouse where Captain Billy refilled Ray’s coffee cup with an earth-friendly blend. It was already afternoon in New York, and a Mets game was playing on the radio. Billy showed Aurora the GPS and the depth finder and then the paper charts that marked their course straight out from the mainland to the edge of the continental shelf. She feigned interest, politely. He let her sit in the captain’s chair. Ray could tell that Billy really wanted to listen to the Mets game. He thought