saltygeographies

Touching

Touching squishy bodies (click for video).

Over 5,000 new lifeforms have been discovered while prospecting for deep sea minerals. While the seabed has largely been represented as a resource awaiting exploitation, still little is known about the ecosystems and lifeworlds of the benthic realm. Sample collection techniques are challenged by the soft bodies of newly encountered somatic forms, like the delicate gelatinous corporeality of deep sea sponges, siphonophores, and worms.

Touch, as Dixon and Jones’s (2014) work explores it, is a topology that is beyond surface-skin encounters. Touch moves beyond surface effects into a corporeal realm of texture that engages a volumetric of bodily materiality. Tompkins reflects through touch between bodies as “texture of flesh in all of its soft rheological gelatinousness: its squishy, jiggly substantiveness, which both holds shape and is flexible, its ability to return to its original form no matter the pressure it is subjected to” (2024:203) .

Touching slimy bodies.

Collecting

Capture, classification, preservation, storage, and display all contribute to the systematic conceptual bounding and spatial ordering of an anarchic nature. The structuring apparatuses of such an archive entangles broad scientific traditions from taxonomic identification to taxidermic preservation, but also Western ideals of universality and objectivity. Within this capture and classify process, the unknown are unprotectable, deemed killable in their refusal to be known in this way, “unsnared by the net of scientific nomenclature” (Deweerdt, 2023, np). Despite a proliferation of technologies for measuring and monitoring the ocean and marine ecosystems, there are so many unknowns amidst environmental change, that “some species may be becoming extinct before they are even found” (Ocean Census Alliance 2024:np).

“[D]escribing a new species has traditionally required a physical specimen, a holotype, to be preserved in a museum and referenced in perpetuity. . .[since]  without a scientific name, it’s difficult to add the animals to a list of endangered species or activate other legal mechanisms to protect them” (Deweerdt, 2023, np).

Robotic touch

In the deep sea, robotic arms used for sample collection tend to crush soft bodies, or they disintegrate when brought to surface pressure. Amid debates over whether high-definition video and photographic evidence may suffice for establishing a holotype, roboticists are developing new forms of soft robots that can provide a “nondestructive grasping of gelatinous marine organisms in the marine environment” (Sinatra et al., 2019, 2), using biomimetically inspired Dragon SkinTM providing silicone softness for gentle collection.

Soft and squishy sea life.

Given the cost and difficulty of ocean exploration, the most well studied parts are those targeted for extraction. Biomimetic soft robots are being developed for many tasks that necessitate “delicate manipulation and non-destructive exploration” (Li 2023; 2) on land and in the sea. At University of Twente new Robotics Centre, students were building worm-like soft-bots (among other things) for soil sampling that would maintain the stratified layers of earth and provide low cost soil sata for agriculture and construction industries.