Indicator Species

The return of the otters was front-page news. We celebrated, left our offices and apartments and schools and walked down to the harbor with our phones in front of us to watch them sun their bellies on the seawall and fish for blue crab with their little claws, littering the shoreline with shell. Scientists came from the university to test the water and spoke excitedly on the news about oxygen levels and indicator species and other things that we didn’t understand but knew to be good, and we were happy.

The dolphins came next. More aloof, they breached and played further offshore. Kayakers started venturing out further into the waters and were rewarded with clicks and trills, happy toothy cephalopod giggles. Charter fishermen who once left the harbor behind in a green wake on their way to cleaner waters started lingering too, tossing the dolphins plum prizes from their catch. Peddlers on the pier started hawking dolphin keychains, dolphin postcards, dolphin balloon animals.

By the time the selkies came we had grown accustomed to the life in the harbor, to the docks covered in sunning terrapins, the mallard mothers warming their eggs in their nests, the shimmering schools of silverfish the size of perch. We had fixed the water, we clever people, and without knowing what it was exactly that we’d done we took credit, enjoyed the fruits of our vague labor. Some of us biked to work, after all; some of us re-used our grocery bags. Rent in the big shiny buildings that looked out over the water increased. New tour companies sprang up overnight, “intimate” wildlife encounters guaranteed or your money back. The mayor brought an octopus up onstage with her to accept a conservation award, one tentacle twined around her wrist like a tennis bracelet, a manacle. Some of us took our children to splash in the shallows, deaf to the warnings of the old-timers. Those waters never were for swimming, they told us as minnows nibbled at our toes, and we laughed.

Neither did we care that the water was rising, that the shallows weren’t as shallow as they used to be, that some of the docks at the far end of the marina were sinking under the weight of the mussels clinging to their pilings. It was the moon, we reasoned, those few of us who spared a thought. The natural turning of the tides. In fact, the seabed was rising and the water along with it, the dormant bivalves beginning to wake and multiply. Nervous men from the Department of Natural Resources appeared on the television at night, encouraging the consumption of seafood; its abundance, its fecundity, was becoming a concern. The seagulls listened, and the ospreys, and the eagles too, until the power lines began to buckle and the piers grew slick and dangerous with bird shit. Dock cats grew fat and sleek. Mermaids out on the lighthouse point fished discarded Christmas tinsel out of the garbage patch to weave in their hair. They waved at the tugboat captains as they made their way out of the harbor, guiding ships through channels that no longer matched the nautical charts.

In the end the whales navigated the waters easily, song guiding them over the oyster beds and through the seaweed patches to the shore. Most of us had retreated to higher land by then, though a few furious holdouts in hip-waders watched them approach from their second stories, from behind saturated sandbags. We watched as the piers and the marinas and the white marble steps of the pretty waterfront houses were pushed firmly and gently under the green waves, waves that roiled and teemed with squawking flapping swimming singing life.

Courtney Pasko is a writer and library worker. Originally from rural Pennsylvania, she currently resides in Baltimore with her husband and their cat, Poe. Her work has previously appeared online in HAD and hex.

Published April 15 2025