Reymond Lise

01 Parazoanthus presegmenus

Yellow Cluster Butt Anemone

“Come all you planulas and polyps, buds and ephyra, and mighty Medusae, let me tell you the story of the surface folk and how they changed the world. Thousands of lifetimes ago, the surface folk unearthed a material so rich in life that they built their whole world around it. This black ooze was made of the decaying remains of billions of our ancestors, distilled through the natural movements of the earth. This ooze allowed the surface folk to do incredible things; they travelled farther in their sky-skimmers, ate and drank more, and even practiced advanced healing that allowed their numbers to bloom. But as their numbers grew, so did their consumption and the scraps they left behind. Many life forms were hunted to near extinction or became tangled and choked on the sea-sifters and heaven lines that now filled the oceans. We had to adapt quickly to the changing ocean or perish and become more oil for their machine. Hope lay with us, the ‘simple’ invertebrates; sponges, jellyfish, and some resilient corals began weaving scraps of the surface folks’ rubbish into their own bodies, giving them resilient structure and increasing our toxicity over the generations. This is how we came to thrive. Our predators began choking on our flesh, and we grew so numerous that the sky skimmers struggled to part our seas. Little is known of what became of the surface folk; we still see their scraps in our waters and giant metal shells on our floors, but the sky-skimmers no longer voyage across the vastness, nor do they hunt with their sea-sifters, sand-scrapers, and heaven lines. No matter what happened to them, their legacy of waste remains. It is now up to us to live within and learn to thrive in the plastic world they left behind. ”