Multispecies Archives

Multispecies archives are archives made or sustained across human and nonhuman life. In Melody Jue: Ocean Memory, Melody Jue treats ocean memory as distributed among seawater, ice, microbes, coral, abalone, whale songs, chemical gradients, wreckage, rocks, sediments, and cultural practices.

The source broadens archives beyond human documents. Mud cores and coral rings matter, but so do microbial memory, immune response, olfaction, underwater memorials, and the transformation of wreckage by aquatic life.

Key Claims

• Archives can be living, chemical, sensory, geological, and cultural at the same time.
• A multispecies archive does not preserve the past unchanged; it can transform, metabolize, erode, shelter, or re-sense the past.
• Ocean Acidification and pollution threaten archives by altering the conditions through which organisms sense and preserve traces.

Connections

• Ocean Memory — main archive frame in the source.
• Chemosensation and Ecological Memory — sensory and adaptive archive mechanisms.
• Mandy Suzanne Wong — abalone and ama-diver example of overlapping human and nonhuman memory.
• Jody Deming — sea-ice microbial memory example.