The Marine Biologist Who Couldn't Stop Counting

In 2016, marine biologist Diva Amon descended nearly four miles to the floor of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the central Pacific Ocean. She expected barren mud. Instead, her submersible's lights revealed a world teeming with life — translucent sea cucumbers drifting like living lanterns, bizarre xenophyophores the size of softballs, creatures so strange they defied immediate classification. Her team eventually catalogued over 5,000 species in that single stretch of deep ocean, and more than half had never been seen before.

"Every time we thought we'd mapped it all," Amon later reflected, "we found another layer of complexity we hadn't imagined."

The psalmist would have understood that breathless wonder. "How many are your works, Lord! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures" (v. 24). The writer looked at the sea — "teeming with creatures beyond number, living things both large and small" — and recognized something that modern science keeps confirming: creation is not a finished exhibit behind glass. It is a living, breathing dependence. Every creature waits on the hand of the Almighty for its food. Every breath is borrowed. When God sends His Spirit, the face of the ground is renewed.

We live in a world so lavishly made that we are still discovering rooms in the house. The only fitting response is the one the psalmist chose — not analysis, but doxology. "I will sing to the Lord all my life." Praise the Lord, O my soul.