GOD JUL // MERRY CHRISTMAS

PLAYFUL SEALS: MIGWAT

Seals—those sleek, playful creatures that glide through our oceans and lounge on rocky shores—are part of a remarkable evolutionary story stretching back millions of years. 

Though we often see them today basking on beaches or popping their heads above the waves, their journey through the fossil record reveals a dramatic tale of land-to-sea adaptation and ancient global wanderings.

Seals belong to a group of marine mammals called pinnipeds, which also includes sea lions and walruses. 

All pinnipeds share a common ancestry with terrestrial carnivores, and their closest living relatives today are bears and mustelids (like otters and weasels). 

While it may seem unlikely, their ancestors walked on land before evolving to thrive in marine environments. It takes many adaptations for life at sea and these lovelies have adapted well. 

The fossil record suggests that pinnipeds first emerged during the Oligocene, around 33 to 23 million years ago. 

These early proto-seals likely lived along coastal environments, where they gradually adapted to life in the water. Over time, their limbs transformed into flippers, their bodies streamlined, and their reliance on the sea for food and movement became complete.

In Kwak'wala, the language of the Kwakwaka'wakw First Nations of the Pacific Northwest, seals are known as migwat, and fur seals are referred to as xa'wa.

JELLYFISH: DANCERS OF THE DEEP

This lovely ocean dancer with her long delicate tentacles or lappets and thicker rouched oral arms is a jellyfish. 

Her brethren are playing in the waters of the deep all over the world, from surface waters to our deepest seas — and they are old. They are some of the oldest animals in the fossil record.

Jellyfish and sea jellies are the informal common names given to the medusa-phase or adult phase of certain gelatinous members of the subphylum Medusozoa, a major part of the phylum Cnidaria — more closely related to anemones and corals.

Jellyfish are not fish at all. They evolved millions of years before true fish. The oldest conulariid scyphozoans appeared between 635 and 577 million years ago in the Neoproterozoic of the Lantian Formation, a 150-meter-thick sequence of rocks deposited in southern China. 

Others are found in the youngest Ediacaran rocks of the Tamengo Formation of Brazil, c. 505 mya, through to the Triassic. Cubozoans and hydrozoans appeared in the Cambrian of the Marjum Formation in Utah, USA, c. 540 million years ago.

I have seen all sorts of their brethren growing up on the west coast of Canada. I have seen them in tide pools, washed up on the beach and swam amongst thousands of Moon Jellyfish while scuba diving in the Salish Sea. Their movement in the water is marvellous.  

In the Kwak̓wala language of the Kwakiutl or Kwakwaka'wakw, speakers of Kwak'wala, of the Pacific Northwest, jellyfish are known as ǥaǥisama.

The watercolour ǥaǥisama you see here in dreamy pink and white is but one colour variation. They come in blue, purple, orange, yellow and clear — and are often luminescent. They produce light by the oxidation of a substrate molecule, luciferin, in a reaction catalyzed by a protein, luciferase.

BEAUTIFUL SOUL: GRIFFEN