Many years ago, I was having my lunch, sitting at the dock by the Marine Station of the University of South Florida, on the shore of Tampa Bay in St Petersburg. The bay was flat and calm, and I was watching an Aurelia, the common moon jelly of the Atlantic Coast, gracefully swimming just below the surface, undulating like a slowly opening and closing gossamer umbrella.

This is one of the simplest multicellular animals on the planet, both structurally and physiologically, and one of the oldest. Members of his tribe have populated the world's oceans for over half a billion years. But it is also one of the most beautiful, almost transparent, flashing rainbow iridescence as light refracts inside the ghostly internal organs barely visible inside its gelatinous body.It is a creature so delicate you cannot handle it without it coming apart in your hands, but it is still capable of surviving and even thriving in the open ocean.

As I watched this magnificent creature, almost a foot across, I noticed it was approaching a floating oil slick--not a greasy glob of petroleum, but a barely visible multicolored sheen on the water, probably much less than a cc of oil, but spread out across several square yards of water in a film only a few molecules thick. It was probably the tiny residue from a two-cycle kicker or some other source of pollution, although I could not see any nearby. In fact, except for the angle of sunlight on the water, I was lucky to see it at all. But a little bit of oil goes a long way. It creeps across the surface tension interface where the plankton comes to bask in the sun. And it chokes all life it cannot poison.

When just a few inches away from the sheen, the jellyfish must have sensed it because it twitched, quivered, and immediately (with a speed and determination that amazed me coming from such a languid and graceful life-form) reversed direction and rapidly pulsed its way toward the depths, where it vanished. Even this primitive creature, barely alive by human standards, knew it had come across something foul and alien to it. It knew this was liquid death, something to be avoided at all costs.

I knew it was only a matter of time before Tom would start dragging up obscure statistics and carefully reasoned arguments to distract us from the magnitude of this crime and convince us this spill "wasn't all that bad", "that there have been worse ones", and that "the oceans will survive". And it is probably true, the ocean is full of stray oil, from other spills, oil seeping from shipwrecks, or from sewers on shore, or even from natural seeps occurring on the sea floor, like one I sailed through myself off Southern California. I suppose that makes this spill all right, even insignificant. And the sea is full of stuff much worse than oil, too. But Tom has to do what he has to do. He has bigger fish to fry, to coin a phrase, and Aurelia has no economic value that he's aware of. On the planet he lives on, Aurelia just doesn't matter, and we certainly can't let it distract us from what really does.

Yeah, the world will survive, and the ocean will recover, but it will be a little weaker, and a little changed. It will adapt, after all, it has survived continental drift and ice ages and meteor strikes and volcanic eruptions and all the rest. During the course of geologic time, it has always bounced back eventually; but we don't have geologic time, do we? Can we adapt to our own poison as we demand the world ocean must?

We started pumping petroleum about one and a half centuries ago, but we've only started poisoning the ocean seriously for the last half-century or so, and of course, the edge of the sea, where it kisses the land, is the most productive zone of all--where the marine food chain is anchored. All that huge volume of water the oil is supposed to dissolve uniformly into is mostly a desert. And oil tends to collect and migrate, even underground, not dissolve uniformly. It doesn't mix well with water, and it breaks down slowly. In fact, it doesn't mix well with anything, that's why it has survived unchanged for millions of years.

I've noticed a pronounced drop-off in the productivity of the Florida littoral just in my lifetime, and the stories I've heard the old-timers tell, of crab so plentiful they were a nuisance or schools of millions of mullet flowing up the rivers, break my heart. And the Florida Gulf coast has never even suffered an oil spill. Oil is not the only insult we heap upon the sea. It is only the last one.

Yeah, I'm sure the oceans will eventually adapt, but will we? Ask those folks in the Delta Country. They are simple, primitive folk, ancient like the moon jelly. But they know poison when they see it too. Maybe Tom should be talking to them, instead. Tell them how the delta will quickly recover, Tom, as if nothing ever happened. "Small potatoes, localized problems." I'm sure they will be much reassured.