A Civilization May Yet Die

A Dugong near Marsa Alam in Egypt. Photo by Camille Ménard, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

As our power-mad president tapped out that genocidal threat, a whale shark in the Persian Gulf was navigating waters it has known for millennia. It is the largest fish alive¹ — the size of a school bus, spotted like a galaxy, moving with a gentleness that is hard to reconcile with its scale. If a diver comes too close, it curves its huge body to avoid them.