Mario And The Need for Becoming

I met Mario in Tateyama, Japan, long after he had transitioned into a male. I should note, first and foremost, that Mario is actually not a handsome man, as one would think with me, but a very large Longtooth Grouper. Intrigued yet? My dive guide, the fantastic Kan-san of Bromie, mentioned him casually (the way one might note the tides or the weather).

“I went to see Marilyn one day and realized that she was no longer female and had become male, so I thought I had better give him a new name. Mario.”

There was no hesitation, no drama, just the simple poetic fact. Maybe that’s what caught my attention, the ease and care, the simplicity of nature and how Kan expressed it. I’ve watched many of my friends transition and have seen their struggles. The way the ocean handled this, as well as Kan, with respect, with balance; that simple sentence stirred something in me. Since then I’ve gone back year after year to see Mario, to swim with him, and to better understand how a fish could embody something we humans still struggle to honor: the naturalness of change. What struck me the most was how effortlessly the story was told, no whispered tones or long pauses. Just biology, plain and simple. When the dominant male in a group of Longtooth Groupers or Kue, in Japanese, disappears, the largest female steps up. It’s a seamless transition guided not by choice or laden with controversy but by the needs of the reef and himself. I remember thinking how change underwater is treated as ordinary, while on land we turn change into politics. The ocean seems to understand something we forget: that transformation is not a statement, it’s just life embracing its full potential.

I arrived in Tateyama on that day several years ago, for the first time with my partner in crime, Michi, on a rather biting winter day. The sun was bright, the air was crisp and the water was apparently an appalling 14 degrees. I had never dove in water this cold and I wasn’t looking forward to it. However, after seeing an IG clip of what lurked below these Japanese waters I was completely willing to fend off hypothermia to get down there. If you know me well enough you know it was sharks. Sharks were luring me into the frigid Pacific and not just a couple of sharks but a huge bunch of Banded Houndsharks. There was only me and one other diver that day, as Michi wasn’t coming. My soon-to-be dive buddy was a native Hawaiian who also had some reservations about jumping in on this winter’s day. After I was suited up in untold layers of neoprene we started our dive briefing and it was here that the above conversation took place. Although I came for the sharks I must admit I had a newfound curiosity in meeting this grouper.

I sat on the boat heading out to sea, with near-frozen waves lashing against the side of the boat rather violently. I really, really started to question this decision. This mental rollercoaster didn’t last long and in one big stride I was in. The water felt fine for the first second until it actually broke the seal on my wetsuit and a wave of cold hit me. To be fair, it was bearable compared to what I was expecting. I descended down a line into perfect visibility. I mean perfect! In winter months it’s harder for algae and stuff to grow due to the cold, so the vis improves a lot. It took about two seconds of looking around to see what I had come for: sharkies. There was a huge mass of them.

Bromie, the dive center in Tateyama, has become quite famous for these sharks and Kan-san keeps a very fatherly approach tending to his friends. I won’t go into too many details about the dive except you absolutely need to go. And do it in the winter as well because I would wager it was one of the best experiences of my life. I say that a lot but this time, well…

I was getting acquainted with the site, reeling with joy as sharks and rays swam above, under, and directly into me. Talk about a kid in a candy store.

As I tried to manage the sensory overload, I turned around to see Kan-san in his bright yellow jacket holding up his underwater sign with big capital letters spelling out MARIO! Well there he was. He looked, well, he looked like, umm, well he looked like a grouper. Yup just a big grouper. It was interesting that I would become so attached to him from this rather unseemly first meeting. He swam around gulping water. He demanded fish from his diver friends, and well just kinda groupered his way around. I swam alongside him and as I’ve come to understand, he barely took notice of me as most fish don’t, they are just going about their business. The dive was crazy good but it was time to safety stop. As we did, Japanese Cormorants danced around trying to make meals of my fingers. We surfaced and I was half a hair from an icy death until a very nice guide grabbed the neck of my wetsuit, pulled it open and poured a rather large ladle of scalding hot water down the front of me directly onto my penis. A moment of shock and then a very warm relief.

We did two dives that day, the second potentially better than the first and then regretfully headed back to Tokyo. It was a day I will never forget and lingered with me for a long time. Maybe it was the absolute awe of the dive site mixed with these new feelings of fondness for this particular grouper that has made me come back to Tateyama each year, perhaps a longing to understand what is so easy underwater and so violent on land. Why one person’s need to change is so difficult for humans when it’s nothing but the most natural thing in the world.

A few months later I found myself in an online class on Cephalopods hosted by Atlas Obscura. If you aren’t familiar with this organization I suggest you google immediately. You will thank me, as many of their online courses are intriguing and borderline absurd. I was learning about octopus, squids, and those swirly things that are older than most things (what are they called, Nautilus right?). Suddenly, the teacher started telling us about how the male Great Australian Cuttlefish will actually pose as a woman, in fishy drag, to impregnate a female. I mentioned this to a friend of mine, Su, and she casually rebuffed, “Yes that’s how my husband got me.”

I guess it’s a thing then. This was the first time I heard a marine academic say “gender expression in sealife.” My first thought was, “What kinda woke crap is this!” but my mind immediately turned back to Mario. This is, in fact, a thing. Groupers, clownfish, even coral itself have ways of fluidly moving from sex to sex or even tapdancing in between. From dragged-out horny Cuttlefish to Mario stepping up to take control of his clan. Nature is always adapting to change and sex/gender is not left out. Across the reef gender isn’t static, it moves like the tides and currents themselves.

The final time I went back to Bromie in Tateyama I got Michi to break her long hiatus from diving to come see the joys I’ve been privy to for years. We got very lucky as we managed to get to the dive center on the one day between one typhoon leaving and another one coming in. Even though it wasn’t quite yet winter, it was freezing again, but this time I was prepared. I wasn’t prepared for the flu I got as a result of jumping into the Pacific that day but it was still worth it. I emailed ahead to ask if I could have some video of me and Mario as I was eager to write this article about him. Again I lucked out as the currents subsided long enough allowing me a brief moment on the side of the dive site Mario calls home, to meet my friend again. He’s an older grouper now, still strong, however, no longer the dominant male of the reef. A younger grouper has taken his place. But Mario still moves through the waters with quiet confidence, that does not need to command attention to be felt. Even in the hierarchy of fish there is a reverence for what was, and all the divers who come to Tateyama know of him. He will always be part of this place.

In the reefs off Tateyama, this Longtooth Grouper does not question its reflection. When the dominant male disappears, the largest female quietly begins to change. Hormones surge, cells rearrange, and within days, she becomes a he; fulfilling the same biological rhythm that has pulsed through life for millions of years. There’s no identity crisis here, no politics, just an ancient intelligence woven into the coral itself. Perhaps that’s what the ocean keeps trying to tell us: that transformation is not defiance of nature, but one of its oldest expressions. From clownfish to humans, life bends, adapts, and reshapes itself to survive. Gender, in this light, is not a boundary, it’s a current, vast, flowing and alive.

If a grouper can do it with such quiet certainty, maybe we, too, can learn to see difference not as deviation, but as one more shimmer in the sensational ever-changing tide of life.