The Hindu Business Line : Tsunami news and numbers are for the survivors

PART two, chapter one of Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne is titled `The Indian Ocean,' which he describes as "a vast liquid plain, with a surface of 1,200,000,000 of acres, and whose waters are so clear and transparent that any one leaning over them would turn giddy." The Nautilus floated between fifty and a hundred fathoms deep, explains Verne.

After a few days, on January 27, at the entrance of the vast Bay of Bengal, Verne and his crew met "repeatedly a forbidding spectacle": "dead bodies floating on the surface of the water." They were the dead of the Indian villages, carried by the Ganges to the level of the sea, and which the vultures, the only undertakers of the country, had not been able to devour, you'd know from the story. "But the sharks did not fail to help them at their funeral work."

It is doubtful if sharks abound as during Verne's times: "They were Cestracio philippi sharks, with brown backs and whitish bellies, armed with eleven rows of teeth. ... their throat being marked with a large black spot surrounded with white like an eye." Yet, there is the probability of some of those accounted for as missing in the recent seismic wave train may be washed ashore miles away, robbed of lives.

And that may happen long after tsunami has moved out of the news pages, as Morten Stærkeby, of the Department of Biology, Oslo, Norway, narrates on http://folk.uio.no through a story to explain forensic entomology, the science of using insect knowledge while investigating crimes. "The dead body of a man floating with a life-belt was found in the open Baltic near the Swedish island of Oland on June 4, 1966. He was from a Finnish ship that had gone down in the Baltic on January 14, 1966." Stærkeby explains how the autopsy found fly larvae 10-12 mm long in the chest, and these belonged to the species Coelopa frigida of the family Coelopidae. Since entomologically this species was associated with the seashore, one finding was that the body at some stage had been by the seashore.

Compared to bodies that decay, bottles thrown into the sea with messages have had a longer survival rate. As Turks and Caicos National Museum (www.tcmuseum.org) informs, the earliest recorded sender was the Greek philosopher Theophrastus (310 B.C.). "In 16th century England Queen Elizabeth I appointed an official `Uncorker of Ocean Bottles' making it a capital crime for anyone else to open the bottles," narrates the site. It seems the Queen believed the bottles to contain secret messages from spies!

Reverting to victims of the recent tragedy who are yet to be tracked, it should be harrowing for their kin to hope for an end to their search whenever officials add one more number to the count of bodies recovered. My search for `bodies washed ashore' threw `Dog detected Laci's scent at marina,' a story on www.thedesertsun.com recounting how a Labrador helped track the body of a dead woman. Though the report is about Berkeley Marina in California, and a crime that happened two years ago, I guess there is clue that animals can help in occasions such as these.

Well, news and statistics about tsunami are for the survivors. So are horror stories that inundate the media, to whet the appetite of all of us. One wonders if we are all so concerned, or simply vicariously doing what everybody else does, doing the in-thing of mulling over one more mishap. An activity that will go on for a few days, weeks, or months, before we get busy once again with petty problems, such as politicians after they return from their whirlwind trips to affected areas.

SayCheek@TheHindu.co.in

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