Usually mysteries are reserved for true crime podcasts and cop shows, but in this week’s episode, both our storytellers delve deep into a scientific puzzle in search of answers.
Part 1: Sabrina Imbler encounters strange blobs in the ocean and becomes obsessed with figuring out what they are.
Sabrina Imbler is a writer based in Brooklyn. They are currently a staff writer at Defector Media on the creature beat. Their work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Catapult, among others. Their chapbook Dyke (geology) came out with Black Lawrence Press, and their first book, an essay collection about sea creatures called How Far the Light Reaches, will be published on December 6, 2022 with Little, Brown.
Part 2: While visiting a new eye doctor, Derek Traub wonders if his Duane Syndrome and uneven vision are somehow connected.
Derek Traub is a writer and storyteller currently living in—and frequently writing about—Los Angeles. For the last decade, he has worked as a writer for the LA Phil, where he recently wrote a book and recorded a podcast series about the Hollywood Bowl’s first century. Both can be found at hollywoodbowl.com/first100years. Follow him on IG @froznla.
Episode Transcript
Part 1
I'm at Riis Beach, which is a gay beach in New York City, and it is a perfect day. The sun is out and blisteringly hot and I'm surrounded by queer and trans friends and crushes and people I matched with on Tinder and people that I wish I matched with on Tinder.
My friends and I put our towel down in a relatively quiet patch of sand, which is to say that we are still surrounded by multiple speakers playing different Lady Gaga songs like we are in a Lady Gaga multiverse. The sun is so hot. I start to sweat so I grab my goggles and I run into the water. That's when I realized that the ocean is filled with this mysterious substance, and I'm not talking about sperm, although sperm was also definitely present in the ocean that day.
But the waves are filled with these tiny gelatinous blobs, clear and oval and about the size of a mento. It feels like swimming in boba. And when I get out of the water, I see that the blobs have washed up on shore too, stretched out on the sand like a glittering ribbon of Jell-O. And I see a circle of people around the blob, so I go and I join them.
Sabrina Imbler tells their story at The Caveat in New York City, NY in May 2022. Photo by Zhen Qin.
We don't know each other, but we have ostensibly two things in common. We are gay and we are interested in communing with nature. So together we start to brainstorm what the blobs could be.
Someone guesses fish eggs. Someone guesses baby jellyfish. I'm obsessed with the ocean so I feel like I have to know what the blobs are. And we together we start to brainstorm like what we know to be true about the blobs.
We know that they don't sting. We know that they can be squished, like Jell-O. We know that they are entirely clear, except for a tiny speck of color inside. And we don't know if the blobs are alive or dead, but that doesn't stop one of us from picking up fistfuls of the blobs and hurling them back into the ocean as if it meant they could be saved.
And it doesn't matter that half of us are drunk or high or distracted by all of the hot people on the beach. We are together doing community science. We are observing the wild things around us and trying to understand what they are and how they live.
When I get home that that day from the beach, the blobs are still on my mind. But I realize I didn't take a photo. All I have is my memory, so I start furiously Googling ‘strange gelatinous blobs Riis Beach’. WHY were there tiny blobs at the beach? What on earth were these jelly‑like things on Riis Beach?
I find nothing, which made me confused. Like why would something as wondrous as these mounds of seemingly deceased gelatin not at least make the local papers?
And then a year passes and then another, and each time I go back to Riis, a small part of me hopes that I'll see the blobs again, but I never do.
And then it's April, 2020, the first spring of the pandemic, and I see on the internet that a 28‑foot long humpback whale has beached on Riis, its belly up and white fins outstretched like an angel.
When I see a photo of this whale, I feel moved, but I also feel annoyed. Like why did this one whale get a story in the local news when thousands of gelatinous blobs did not?
And then I remember that I am a science journalist, which means that it's my job to spend hours on the internet prying into the private lives of animals. Like why wouldn't I be able to sleuth out what these mysterious blobs could be?
So I start digging and digging through Google like a determined little mole until I think I've cracked the case. I become convinced that the blobs I saw were salps, which are kind of gelatinous zooplankton, the fragile, gooey creatures that spend their entire lives in the water column of the ocean.
Salps drift through the water in enormous chains, some curving like a snake and some coiling like a snail shell. One chain of salp is actually made up of hundreds of identical clones, each of which is an individual salp. So one salp is actually a colony of salps, all attached and moving as one.
And salps don't spend their entire lives in these chains. They actually alternate between different life stages, the colonial chain stage and a solitary individual stage. But despite this alternative lifestyle, salps are actually much more closely related to us than something like a jellyfish.
They belong to a group of animals called tunicates, which are related to everything with a backbone. Which means that day on the gay beach, I may have booped my distant spineless cousin.
But I don't know if I can trust this identification. I just learned about salps a couple of hours ago and gelatinous blob is kind of the ideal body form for a lot of the ocean. So I decided to run my idea by people who are smarter and wiser than me who have multiple degrees.
Sabrina Imbler tells their story at The Caveat in New York City, NY in May 2022. Photo by Zhen Qin.
I email a bunch of professors who study the seas around New York. The first professor says that he studies fish and not blobs so he can't help me. The second professor doesn't respond to my email. And the third professor tells me that salps are actually pretty rare in New York City and what I actually saw were probably comb jellies, which are a different kind of gelatinous zooplankton. But when I look at images of stranded comb jellies, they just look wrong. They're really round and symmetrical and they have these little white stripes along the side.
And then I email a park ranger named Dave who works at Riis Beach. Dave thanks me for my question and says it would be impossible to identify the blobs without a photo and also that his week is very busy trying to dispose of the carcass of a 28-foot long humpback whale.
At that point I feel defeated. I don't know who else to ask. I worry that I'm wasting everyone's time. And even though I ostensibly got an answer that the blobs I saw were comb jellies, I just can't bring myself to believe it.
And the longer I spend on Google Images looking at one image of gelatinous blobs and comparing it to another, I start to feel my original memory of what I saw begin to fade and blur, so I give up and I stop looking.
Later that summer, the first summer of the pandemic, I go to Riis for the first time in more than a year. There are no blobs but there are also no people. The beach is empty, devoid of humans and our music and our noise and our trash. Even though Riis has never looked so wild, it's also never looked so wrong, so against its nature.
The summer after, the summer after vaccines, my partner Ting and I become reacquainted with crowds. We go to a friend's birthday party where we meet a surfer named Momo who runs a surfing club for queer and trans people and people of color out in the Rockaway. It's called Benny's Club.
Ting and I have never surfed before but we want to make new friends, so we sign up for a lesson with our friend CV. We show up to the beach and the Benny's Club tent has this enormous pride flag just dangling from it. That's where we get our 15‑minute surfing lesson.
So for 15 minutes, they show us how to pop up, which is the act of like jumping onto your surfboard and sticking your feet on the foam and standing. And after 15 minutes they say, “You're Ready,” and they send us out into the water.
I feel so scared and like the waves, which looked really, really small in the distance are so big close up. They keep slapping me in the face and knocking me over, but I keep paddling out. And just as soon as I've turned my surfboard back toward shore, I hear my instructor say that there's a wave and it's time to pop up. And I'm so scared.
But I do it. I stand. I pop up and, suddenly, I'm surfing and I feel so cool. In the distance, I can see Ting and CV and the Benny's Club pride flag. I'm like waving on my surfboard and then I fall into the water. And I catch every single wave that day, meaning three waves. Which is a lot more than the zero waves I'd caught before.
And after I return my surfboard to the Benny’s Club tent, all I want to do is remember what the ocean looked like the first day that I surfed.
So I'm just walking along the shore and, in the ocean, I can see Momo and all these other queer and trans surfers popping up and sailing towards shore and screaming and laughing and falling back into the water. I'm so engrossed by what I see that I almost don't notice it when I feel something squish between my toes, something that feels unmistakably like Jell-O. I know what it is before I even look down. The blobs are back.
I gather them into my hands, just fistfuls of blobs and I'm running back towards the Benny’s Club tent and I'm so happy, because all I can think about is how I can finally take a photo and send it to Ranger Dave and he can tell me what the blobs are.
I see Ting and CV and I'm talking so frantically about the blobs that everyone around us notices. Momo comes over and he takes one look at the blobs in my hand, looks me in the eye and says, “Oh, yeah. Those are salps. I see them all the time when I'm surfing.” And I lose my shit and I start to laugh.
I feel so stupid for having emailed all of these people who I thought were the real experts of the waters around New York, all these professors and park rangers, but all this time I was asking the wrong people. Of course, someone who spends every morning in the summer swimming out into the waves would come to know the wild things swimming around them. It also felt exquisite that, all this time, a gay person had the answer.
And then Momo starts to tell us about the salps. How often they paddle out with their board and see them just below the surface of the water, coiling like a snail or curving like a snake. How often Momo reaches down and touches them.
Then I start to wonder. Maybe salps aren't that rare in New York City. Maybe you just need to know where to find them. And maybe I could have trusted myself this whole time.
Thank you.
Part 2
A few years ago, I moved to downtown Los Angeles and found myself in need of a new eye doctor. As we do these days when we need a recommendation, I turn to the most logical source. Strangers on the internet. Specifically, strangers from the popular website Yelp.com.
Now, I have my own methodology for how I use Yelp. I read only the one-star reviews. Because I figure if the complaints levied there are things I can live with, then it's probably a good fit.
This is how I found Dr. Hoff, an older ophthalmologist with thinning white hair and a well‑trimmed beard. Picture Santa Claus in a lab coat.
Now, Dr. Hoff's Yelp detractors cite two main grievances. One, he is exceedingly eccentric. And, two, he likes to talk, a lot. One reviewer recommends setting aside at least two hours for a routine eye exam. Another one sums him up in two words ‘annoyingly garrulous’, which is a pretty good vocabulary word for a one-star review.
To me, this all sounded like feature and not bug. I'm a writer. I like characters. So he likes to tell stories. Who am I to throw stones?
In spite of all the warnings about his eccentricity, my visit to his office couldn't have started off more normally. His assistant led me into his eye exam room. It looked exactly like every eye exam room you've ever been in. A few minutes later, the doctor shuffled in. He introduced himself. Told me a little bit about his practice and his career and his personal life and his daughter and her career, because she had just become a doctor herself. He beamed with pride telling me all about her accomplishments which then segued into a comparison between what it took to become a doctor in his day versus today.
I'm sitting there listening to all of this thinking, you know, we're always in such a hurry. I'm just going to let Dr. Hoff riff as long as he wants.
Eventually, he gets down to business and asked me for my medical history, which is then my turn to go into my life story. I tell Dr. Hoff that I was born with a design flaw in my left eye known as Duane Syndrome. It means that one of the muscles responsible for moving my left eye to the left doesn't work.
Derek Traub shares his story at Lyric Hyperion in Los Angeles, CA in August 2019. Photo by Mari Provencher.
Other than having somewhat limited peripheral vision on my left side, there are no real day‑to‑day consequences of Duane Syndrome, at least none that I was aware of.
Dr. Hoff asked me if anyone ever noticed the lack of mobility in my left eye, and I had to think about it for a minute because it hadn't happened for a long time. But, yes, there was one day in the third grade when my classmate came up to me on the playground and said, “Derek, are you cross‑eyed?”
I said, “No, I'm not cross-eyed.” I didn't actually know what cross-eyed meant but it didn't sound good.
She explained that sometimes one of my eyes would look at her while the other one wouldn't. This definitely didn't sound good.
Through a series of experiments, she and I discovered that when your left eye doesn't move to the left, if you want to look at someone on your left you need to turn your whole head or you're going to look half cross-eyed. On my right side, though, no such problem.
in essence, I learned what America would learn about ten years later from Tyra Banks. I had angles.
Dr. Hoff told me I was lucky I had such a candid classmate or who knows how long I would have gone without figuring this out. He had a point. He then asked me when I started wearing glasses and I told him that it was in my early 20s. And as the years wore on, my right eye with the full mobility kept needing a stronger and stronger prescription, while my left eye with the Duane Syndrome remained perfectly 20/20. In fact, to this day, the left side of my glasses are just a piece of glass.
As I'm explaining this to Dr. Hoff, it occurs to me for the first time that maybe the Duane Syndrome and my uneven vision are somehow connected. I asked Dr. Hoff about it and he thinks for a minute and says, “You know, I don't know. But if you had some time we could play some games and find out.”
I did have the time. I had blocked off the recommended two hours and I was genuinely curious what playing games with Dr. Hoff would entail.
So after the usual eye exam, Dr. Hoff had me look again through the viewfinder of the better one, better two machine. He closed the blinder over my right eye and, with my left eye, he had me follow a letter T that he projected on the wall and moved all around my field of vision.
Then he did the same thing in reverse. He closed the left blinder and, with my right eye, he had me follow the T.
Then things took a turn. Dr. Hoff closed both eye holes blacking out my vision entirely. He then asked me what I could see.
I sat there looking at the darkness thinking, “Maybe I shouldn't have ignored all those one‑star Yelp reviews.”
I said, “I see nothing. It's totally dark.”
He said, “Now, that's interesting, because I never closed the left eye hole. It's completely open.”
I blinked twice. I still saw nothing. I then told my brain, “Look through your left eye,” which is not a command I think I've ever sent it before.
Seemingly out of nowhere, an image started to appear, like an old lamp that sputters a couple times before flicking on brightly. A perfectly sharp letter T came into focus. I had been looking right at it without seeing it.
I look over at Dr. Hoff with an expression, “What the hell just happened?” And he explained that the reason why my left eye is 20/20 still is that I hardly ever use it. Because my right eye was more capable, my brain just defaulted to that one for pretty much everything.
People asked me if I was mad that no doctor had ever noticed this or explained it to me before, and maybe I should have been, but in that moment, I was honestly just fascinated.
Our eyes are our measures of objective truth. Think about our language. ‘Seeing is believing.’ ‘Be an eyewitness.’ ‘See eye to eye with someone.’ Our eyes are supposed to be our most reliable instrument, and here I am, 29 years old, discovering for the first time that one of mine is effectively decorative.
Dr. Hoff can see my head kind of exploding and, God love him, he spends another 45 minutes with me unpacking the many implications of what it means to have two eyes that don't work together, the most consequential of which is that I don't actually see in three dimensions.
Now, this is non-intuitive and it took him a little while to explain, but basically our brains compare the visual information received from one eye versus that from the other eye in order to triangulate the position of objects in three-dimensional space. A complex process called binocular disparity that I am incapable of because my brain only ever get signal from one eye at a time.
Derek Traub shares his story at Lyric Hyperion in Los Angeles, CA in August 2019. Photo by Mari Provencher.
I asked Dr. Hoff why the world doesn't look like a cubist painting to me and he explains that brains are great at finding workarounds. Mine uses other clues in the environment to paint three‑dimensional pictures. If an object is blocking another object, it must be in front of it. If it's small, it's far away.
But there are limits to what these workarounds can do, limits I wish I had known about earlier in life. I think back on my childhood and all the fly balls I dropped or the swinging high fives I flat‑out missed and then had to pretend like I missed on purpose to be funny, or those insidious Magic Eye puzzle books from the 90s where I never saw a single hidden image or, more recently, the 3D movies I went to that just looked blurry. No consequences of Duane Syndrome? There were consequences everywhere I looked.
We're conditioned by Greek mythology and Dickens novels to think that our physical differences carry deeper psychological meaning or grant us special understanding of the world. As far as I can tell, seeing in two dimensions doesn't do any of that for me, but it does mean I can stop feeling bad about how uncoordinated I've always been. And I also get to just skip those four Avatar sequels and for that I am supremely grateful to Dr. Hoff who spent more than two hours with me that day opening my eyes.
I walked out of his office feeling strangely uplifted. I realized it's not Greek mythology. It's Greek philosophy. All of Socrates boils down to this one idea, “Know thyself.” Life is a journey of self‑discovery.
And as with Socrates, we very often make these discoveries through dialogue. Whether it's with an overly candid third grader or an overly loquacious ophthalmologist, we have to ask each other questions. We have to leave time to play games and experiment. Sometimes we have to just talk and talk, because you never know when you're going to reveal things that were hidden right in front of your eyes, usually metaphorical things, but not always.
With all this still in my head, I sat down that night to write Dr. Hoff a Yelp review, a review I would never actually read because it was of course five stars.