Less than a week after an exceptionally surreal day—when pro-Trump militants stormed the US Capitol—I saw an exceptionally surreal photograph. It was not of the mob but of a manatee, specifically its algae-furred back, where someone had scraped the name TRUMP in capital letters. The grainy picture shows the manatee drifting in sun-dappled water, seemingly unaware that its body had been violated to become the brackish equivalent of a yard sign, a sick political joke. A 13-second video accompanied the image, the camera hovering over each crudely scraped letter as the manatee remains motionless in the murk.

The manatee was discovered swimming in the blue hole in the Homosassa River in the ancestral grounds of the Seminole and Timucua people, or what is now called Citrus County, Florida. The region is riddled with blue holes, underwater sinkholes that formed millions of years ago and now resemble chutes leading to seemingly depthless bottoms. The blue hole at Homosassa, where temperatures never waver from a balmy 72 degrees, is a safe winter haven for manatees, creatures with too little body fat to handle the cold.

Florida rests atop a platform of a kind of rock formed by vast hordes of tiny sea creatures dying and falling to the bottom of the sea over millions of years. Their fossilized shells compacted into a white carbonate limestone called karst. Karst landscapes are extremely porous, honeycombed with fractures, cavities, underwater caverns, and sinkholes. Limestone dissolves easily under freshwater, the carbon dioxide in the soil mixing with the carbon dioxide in the rain to form an acid powerful enough to dissolve. So any rain trickling into the ground enlarged any crack, pore, or hole, and filled it with even more water, dissolving even more rock, until the ground became so cobwebbed that it collapsed into itself, forming a sinkhole. When water levels rose to cover the sinkhole, it became a blue hole.

Blue holes get their name from their astonishing sapphire color, a blue much bluer than the surrounding, shallower water. The springs in the Homosassa River are carpeted with lush green eelgrass, and the water is so clear you can see every strand. Beyond the eelgrass, at the center of the spring, is the blue hole, stark and rugged, plunging 40 feet down through the surrounding limestone. At the bottom of the hole, the water looks almost cobalt.

So much of the way we talk about depravity depends on the language of depth and its furthest reaches: American politics reaching new lows and rock bottoms. Yet these seemingly fixed depths—one would think rock bottom is not particularly mobile terrain—keep changing, America digging, mole-like, for a deeper, rockier bottom to hit. In one of illustrator Matt Lubchansky’s cartoons for The Nib, “America Hits Rock Bottom,” one vainly hopeful person insists that each in an increasingly horrific series of events must finally be rock bottom, that people will finally wake up. A good argument can be made that this is wishful thinking, that the United States, a country founded on the genocide of Indigenous people and the enslavement of Black people, started at the bottom, and thus has little room to sink.

When they learned of the “ordinary” nature of the armed insurrectionists who stormed the capitol, many white Americans reacted with shock. In the Washington Post, one headline read, “Man who died in DC recalled as a wonderful husband and father.” The man in question, Kevin Greeson, was a Democrat for years before gravitating to conservative news outlets such as Fox and then even more right-wing outlets such as Newsmax and Parler, according to a report produced by Al.com and ProPublica. Shortly after the election, Greeson made several posts on Parler, expressing his support for the white supremacist Proud Boys and wishing for Nancy Pelosi to die of COVID-19 and for Obama to “be put to death.”

A blue hole is more than just a pathway of descent into some sunken place. It’s also the sudden visibility of a process that has been hidden for years. Every blue hole is the product of a labyrinth of fractured rock that has become latticed and hollowed out over millennia, which is to say that blue holes do not happen out of the blue. 

The hole at Homosassa is only 40 feet deep, meaning it is possible to dive against the current to the bottom. The deeper you venture into a blue hole, the more dangerous it becomes. There is no circulation at the bottom of a blue hole, and in the deepest holes the depths are anoxic, completely devoid of oxygen. In the Great Blue Hole in Belize, conches sometimes tip over the edge of the blue hole, only to fall to the bottom and suffocate. Long after they die, their tracks can remain in the sand, records of how they tried and failed to escape. Fossils at the bottom of blue holes can remain pristine for thousands of years, since the fungi and bacteria that would normally feast on bone are unable to survive without oxygen.

Still, there is life at the bottom of a blue hole, enough to be called teeming. Huge colonies of microbes can thrive here in mats as thick as an inch, feasting on sulfur and dissolved inorganic carbon that would be toxic to many other kinds of life. These microbes have evolved to be entirely dependent on sources of energy many of us never encounter, which fizz, quietly and secretly, in pockmarks across the planet. Blue holes are each isolated from each other and from the broader ocean, meaning each time one is plumbed scientists discover new types of microbes capable of filtering chemicals in new ways. Many blue holes in the ocean are too deep to be explored by a human or too narrow to be explored by an automated probe, meaning it is presently impossible to know what survives there, in conditions that would kill the rest of us.

The manatee, of course, cares nothing for this. The blue hole it lazes by is simply a source of warmth and comfort in the winter. It will never venture into the cobalt depths of the blue hole, where temperatures cool and no eelgrass grows. What a gift it must be to lead a life so languid that algae grows on your back.

So far, experts say the manatee does not appear to be seriously injured. They believe the letters were created by scraping the algae off its back instead of being carved, as it initially appeared, into the animal’s skin. One expert suggested it may have been done with a credit card.

Whether the manatee felt pain, or to what extent, does not absolve the cruelty of the act. Many outraged people have called for the arrest and prosecution of the person or people who defiled the manatee. If found, they could face time in jail or federal prison. I hate what those people did, and at the same time I do not want them to face the cruelty of this nation’s carceral system, which I hope one day will be abolished. I hope they learn one day to act kindly toward people and creatures who have never harmed them, and to think about how the manatee’s welfare may be entwined with their own. 

Early this summer in Florida, the Guardian reported that manatees were dying at accelerated rates, as waterways filled with boats that flouted rules against speeding through manatee habitat. Federal rules that might have protected them had been stripped in 2017, when the Trump administration removed manatees from the US Interior Department’s list of endangered species. Even if those protections return, the manatees' future is an ominous one. Rising sea levels will suppress the warm springs that provide shelter, even as they also swallow the homes that provide shelter to humans.

Manatees have the peculiar superlative of being almost laughably defenseless. They are creatures with only round edges, with teeth that can only grind, not bite. Manatees are so frequently wounded that biologists identify particular ones by the scars thatched on their backs, the traces of the hard edges and whirling propellers of boats. Most manatees have at least one scar or mutilation by the time they reach adulthood, and those unlucky enough to live by human waterways often have several. 

Since the Citrus County Chronicle first reported the sighting, another image has surfaced of the manatee. The photo, taken by diver Melissa Ponder, is strangely beautiful. It shows the animal from above, its nostrils spurting out froth. You can see a deep notch in the manatee’s paddle-like fluke, meaning worse things have happened to the manatee, at least in terms of physical pain. Worse things may still happen to the manatee in the future. But for now, by the Homosassa blue hole, the manatee’s back has begun to rewild itself, algae filling in the bare patches until the name disappears.