Streamlined gills

Guilt or hope has brought me to conservation sites and an unexplained mysteries forum: Fossil Shark Genera, elasmo-research.org. Half an hour ago I googled something. Maybe "How can sharks sleep?" I've been reading blogs, scientific studies. I don't want to be full of shit. I've referenced sharks recently, but the motivation: what is guilt combined with hope? I imagine it's like repentance, like that human need for God.

All this while, The Avett Brothers and then Bon Iver have played. Only love is all maroon. / Gluey feathers on the flume. Thank you. Before the sharks, I researched Justin Vernon. He played a free acoustic set in Marfa, Texas, and I couldn't help but imagine being there. I asked my mother for a used guitar for Christmas. I plan to learn.

About sharks, apparently there are many misconceptions. Yes. They need moving water to stay alive, but some species have adapted. I once swam with Nurse Sharks and should have remembered this: they, in particular, spend most of their lives nearly motionless. Others have organs that push enough water across their gills while at rest, which is called streamlining. And certain caves in the tropical Indo-Pacific have abnormal levels of oxygen; when sharks find them, they can rest, "sleep" for hours, almost days, without suffocating. Scientists don't know how they locate these caves; somehow they just do, and then enter a stasis until instinct draws them out to hunt again.

I began thinking about God as Creator, who knew about sharks, all the oxygen they would need, even how they could adapt and stay alive when movement was impossible. I envisioned I made a shark, twisted it into an aquarium and expected it to live. To make life and then abandon it: isn't that the highest cruelty? Why some mourners hate God? I've begun and discarded so many stories; if I ever play, I'll abandon a hundred songs. Those aren't lives, though. I regret only the humans I've left; I'm guilty for them.

But still is there divine mercy: even in a small tank, God made the Lemon Sharks capable of survival. The story I just read: "Manometry experiments in Gruber's laboratory have revealed that, even facing into the current and propped up on their fins, juvenile Lemon Sharks use about 9% more oxygen actively respiring than they do if swimming in the water column and relying on passive ram-jet ventilation. In other words, a Lemon Shark has to work harder lying on the bottom than it does swimming." The effort is humbling. How do they find the caves? How do they find the strength for streamlined gills? I imagine sometimes they can't, but I believe the Lord sustains. No shark spends a whole life at rest.