“Hello, garden eel here:” insights from emerging humanature relations at the aquarium during COVID-19

ABSTRACT

Over one billion people worldwide were under social isolation restrictions between April and May 2020. While humans felt the weight of being isolated under lockdown, nonhuman animals accustomed to continuous human connection had minimized exposure at different animal tourism sites and institutions – such as zoos and aquariums. One interesting case comes from garden eels, which according to their caretakers, were particularly susceptible to isolation from humans and required immediate action: Facetime calls with humans. In this research insight, I explore the new technologically mediated humanimal communication practice between humans and garden eels at the Sumida Aquarium in Tokyo, Japan. “Remembering humans” is explored as a humanature cultural discourse that emerged from humanity’s social distancing phenomena, seemingly bridging humanature connection amidst the multitude of discourses that removed humanity from nature. This discourse also functions within a form of tourist gaze in tourism institutions. Even though small in scope, this cultural discourse analysis brings to surface one way we have discursively engaged with our solitude during quarantine: mirroring it on more-than-human animals’ experiences. Further investigations about this, and other humanature emerging communication practices, are needed to better understand how the social isolation phenomena impacted communication meanings about humanature relations.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19 social isolation
• cultural discourse analysis
• aquarium
• humanature relations
• anthropomorphism
• chin anago (garden eels)

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr. Leah Sprain for her support in advising my research, and my father, Benedito Carlos de Souza Tate, for helping me with the Japanese translations of the materials. I want to also thank Laura Nash from University of Colorado’s Graduate Writing Support. I would also like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their very constructive, supportive, and insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I use Tema Milstein’s terms humanature and humanimal in order to highlight the ways in which “communication serves to structure, discipline and transform these relations” (Milstein, 2013, p. 162). The use of humanature and humanimal— terminologies that remove the separating dashes (‘human-nature’)— bring forward the indivisible whole we are embedded in; it is a reflexive symbolic move that pushes us to think about our connectivity (Milstein, 2013; Milstein & Castro Sotomayor, 2020).

2 Garden eels belong to the subfamily Heterocongrinae within the Congridae family. The Sumida Aquarium has different species including the spotted garden eel (Heteroconger hassi) and splendid garden eels (Gorgasia preclara) (Kakizaki et al., 2015). I use “chin anago” and “garden eel” interchangeably throughout the paper.

3 During a 3-day period, over 1 million people connected or tried to connect to the garden eels via video calls (“Tokyo aquarium holds video chat event for eels that 'forgot' about humans,” 2020).

4 iPad is a touchscreen tablet computer developed and made by Apple Inc.

5 FaceTime is a proprietary video telephony product developed by Apple Inc.

6 EarthCam Inc. (www.earthcam.com) is a network of webcams around the globe that showcases views of a variety of locations, including livestreams of more-than-human animals in zoos. McArthur’s experience with EarthCam was seeing Kiko’s birth.

7 Apps for Apes (https://redapes.org/multimedia/apps-for-apes/) is used in iPads to provide enrichment for orangutans at zoos.

8 Due to the scope of this article, it is not possible to determine based on previous scientific research how visitor’s video calls might have influenced the chin anago behavior. There are varied ongoing research projects investigating more-than-human interactions with technology and behavioral adaptations: on dolphin communication and cognition using touchscreens (https://www.rockefeller.edu/news/19742-researchers-create-interactive-touchscreen-dolphins/) by Drs. Diana Reiss and Marcelo Magnasco, interspecies gaming design between humans and pigs (Driessen et al., 2014), and ultraviolet vision detection using a designed UV light display (Powell et al., 2021).

9 The 11th day of the 11th month was selected because of the resemblance between the chin anago coming out of the sand and the number “1.”