Crumbs of Suleiman ibn Daúd's Feast

Mythology is the inspiration for these ten-word stories to question the relationship between humans and the world. Five of these stories are about five days of the Hindu festival of Dīpāvali: Dhana-Trayodaśī, Naraka-Caturdaśī, Lakṣmī-pūjana Amāvāsyā, Bali-Pratipadā, and Yama-Dvitīyā.

The moral of the Islamic myth of Suleiman ibn Daúd trying to feed all the animals of the world for one day, and not even preparing enough food to satisfy one leviathan fish, is that a rich man should not imagine himself equal in ability to the providence of Allah. However, by our modern understanding of ecology, the story would have this sequel: the leftovers of Suleiman ibn Daúd's preparations washed into the ocean and provided food for cyanobacteria, microorganisms that are usually invisible to humans because they only reproduce as fast as they are eaten by other plankton.

Cyanobacteria have to expend considerable energy fixing nitrogen gas into ammonia, which they assimilate into amino acids and other biomolecules required for growth. When Suleiman ibn Daúd provided nitrogen to cyanobacteria in the form of organic molecules, their reproduction was no longer limited and they bloomed, spreading thickly over the ocean surface. At night, the cyanobacteria could not get solar energy, so they began to perform aerobic respiration using the organic molecules, depleting the surface water of dissolved oxygen gas. Any fish passing under the bloom did not get enough oxygen to survive. Thus, Suleiman ibn Daúd's effort to provide food for animals backfired when fish asphyxiated and died.

The moral of the sequel is that when when humans are indiscriminate with food, the result is cultural eutrophication: an excess of nutrients in the naturally competitive oligotrophic marine environment, which disrupts the balance of plankton and larger marine life in the food chain.

Cover Credit: @PriyaArshiSarun