Early in her career, the ocean explorer and scientist Dr. Edie Widder received a phone call from a distraught physicist. The physicist was working on a major project aimed at detecting neutrinos, elusive subatomic particles that can give off faint flashes as they move through water. He and his colleagues needed the darkest place they could get, so they placed their ultra-sensitive light detectors deep in the ocean, beyond the reach of the sun’s rays. But there was a problem. The sensors were detecting a lot of light. A colleague suggested the light could be from animals. ‘Could it be true?’ the physicist asked Dr. Widder, now a world authority on marine bioluminescence. ‘Yes,’ she told him. And then, after a long pause, he followed up: ‘Is there some place in the ocean where there isn’t any bioluminescence?’ ‘Not that I know of,’ Dr. Widder replied.
“The open ocean is a place without hiding places,” Dr. Edie Widder tells us, explaining the origin of bioluminescence in the ocean’s creatures. “As the ocean filled up with predators that could see at a distance and swim fast, the only hope for prey was either to out-swim their predators or find a way to hide. And the best way to hide was to go down into the darkness. The problem is, the food is produced at the surface through photosynthesis. So animals would hide in the dark depths during the day, and only come up and feed in the surface waters under the cover of darkness. As a consequence, most of those animals spend most of their lives in darkness or near-darkness. So there’s been a lot of selective pressure to develop more sensitive eyes and advanced visual signaling, which is where bioluminescence comes in.” (Photo courtesy of Penguin Random House.)
Like many of us land-lubbers, the physicist had assumed that light-making among ocean creatures is an exotic and rare phenomenon. But that’s wrong. The majority of animals in the ocean — which means the majority of animals on the planet — are capable of making light. From top to bottom, the ocean is absolutely teeming with unforgettably beautiful and extraordinarily diverse light shows made by living things that we’re only beginning to understand. There are deep-sea shrimp that spew glowing mucus like fire-breathing dragons to distract predators. Single-celled algae that glitter en masse as a form of burglar alarm. Crustaceans that put on complex, twinkling courtship displays. Fish that counter-illuminate their bodies to match the water above them for camouflage from creatures looking up from below. Squids that backlight their body tissue in flickering patterns that seem to coordinate group hunting. These are just a few examples of the roughly 75 percent of ocean animals that can make their own light. According to Dr. Widder, there are possibly quadrillions of light-producing fish in our seas.
Deep-sea shrimp, Heterocarpus ensifer, releasing bioluminescent “spew.” (Photos by Sönke Johnsen and Katie Thomas, licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0.)
“The science is very clear about fisheries,” Daniel Pauly, the world’s leading fisheries scientist and Principal Investigator of the University of British Columbia’s Sea Around Us initiative, says. “You have to get rid of subsidies, you have to manage them, you have to prevent the fisheries essentially from committing suicide. A fishery left on its own will build capacity, will build bigger engines on bigger boats, more people will get in, and it will destroy the resource. That’s what it does if there is no management. It’s like your kids – if you leave them alone with a pan of chocolate, they will eat until they get sick. You have to tell them don’t eat the chocolate, or give them one chocolate at a time. This is the paradox, that the NGO industry is seen by the fishing industry and fisher communities as the enemy. We are the people that prevent them from committing suicide.” Photo by Alison Barrat, courtesy of Sea Around Us.
Born in Paris to an African-American GI and a French woman at the end of World War II, Dr. Daniel Pauly rose from a difficult and extraordinarily unusual childhood in Europe to become one of the most daring, productive, and influential fisheries scientists in the history of the field — and the first to illuminate the global extent and significance of overfishing. He did this by, as he quoted from Matt Damon’s character in The Martian, “sciencing the shit out of it.”
Dr. Pauly as a boy. “I’ve read a bit about children that had difficult youths,” Dr. Pauly says. “It turns out that most of us end up badly, but there is a small percentage that is resilient. And I have been one of them.” Photo courtesy of Daniel Pauly and Sea Around Us.
A professor and principal investigator of the Sea Around Us Project at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Pauly has devoted his career to studying and documenting the impact of fisheries on marine ecosystems and advocating for cutting-edge policies to address it. The software, scientific tools, and methods he and his research team developed have transformed understanding of how humans are impacting oceans. His research makes very clear that fish are in global peril — and so, in turn, are we.
If our species manages to reverse course and avoid the “watery horror show,” as he calls it, for which we’re on track, it will be thanks in large part to his and his colleagues’ vision, courage, and decades of tireless work. In this episode, we speak with Dr. Pauly about the “toxic triad” that characterizes modern fisheries (catches are underreported, science is ignored, and the environment is blamed when fish populations collapse as a result), how “shifting baseline syndrome” — a term he coined — results in slow and inadequate responses to overfishing and climate change, why fish are shrinking and struggling to breathe as oceans warm, and why we need to end high seas fishing and government subsidies of international fishing fleets.
In 1995, Dr. Pauly — photographed here on a boat in the Philippines — coined the term “shifting baseline syndrome” to describe how each new generation accepts the state of the natural world in which they were raised as “normal.” Lack of historical data and awareness warps perception about the severity of ecosystem transformation actually taking place. “It is happening so fast that young people now are not used to the winters that old folks like me recall,” Dr. Pauly says of climate change. “They don’t recall snow all over the place. They don’t recall cold in the winter, because often it’s not cold anymore. And if you add two generations, the stories they will read about how things were will not be credible anymore, and they will not be motivated to make any sacrifice to get back to the past. And so we can have a situation where we have every generation accommodating itself to a change that overall can be devastating.” Photo courtesy of Daniel Pauly and Sea Around Us.
“We must now, more and more, have the scientists speaking up,” Dr. Pauly says. “Because if they don’t, they leave the field to the politicians and to the pundits and to people who don’t know, and who make an agenda that is science-free. Science is actually not only what you can do, but also what you cannot do. It is okay to know what kind of things you shouldn’t be doing.” Photo courtesy of Daniel Pauly and Sea Around Us.
Ian Urbina aboard an Indonesian patrol ship called the Macan as it chases several Vietnamese fishing ships in a contested area of the South China Sea. Fishing boats in the South China Sea are notorious for using “sea slaves,” migrants forced offshore by debt or other illicit means. 56 million people globally work at sea on fishing boats. Photo courtesy of Ian Urbina.
Over 40 percent of the Earth’s surface is open ocean that is over 200 miles from the nearest shore. These international waters exist outside national jurisdiction and almost entirely free of rule of law. World-renowned investigative journalist Ian Urbina spent five years reporting about what life is like for the humans who roam these seas and about the astonishing array of extra-legal activity that goes on there. Urbina travelled to every continent and every ocean — often hundreds of miles offshore — to report stories from this vast legal void. These narratives are compiled in his best-selling book, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier.
On the high seas, environmental crimes — such as overfishing and illegal dumping — are closely linked to human rights abuses on vessels around the world. Video by The Outlaw Ocean Project.
In his years of non-stop voyages, Urbina risked his life to bear witness to the inhumanity faced by humans in these waters. He witnessed shackled slaves on fishing boats, joined high-speed chases by vigilante conservationists, rode out violent storms, and observed near mutinies. He lived on a Thai vessel where Cambodian boys worked 20-hour days processing fish on a slippery deck, shadowed a Tanzanian stowaway who was cast overboard and left to die by an angry crew, and met men who had been drugged, kidnapped and forced to cast nets for catch that would become pet food and livestock feed. These stories and many others together make The Outlaw Ocean, a masterpiece of investigative journalism and a riveting portrait of a sprawling and often dystopian world where humans, animals and the environment are regularly treated with depravity.
Urbina is transferred up the coast by local, armed Somali police forces. “For all its breathtaking beauty,” Urbina writes, “the ocean is also a dystopian place, home to dark inhumanities. The rule of law — often so solid on land, bolstered and clarified by centuries of careful wordsmithing, hard-fought jurisdictional lines, and robust enforcement regimes — is fluid at sea, if it’s to be found at all.” Photo courtesy of Ian Urbina.Continue reading Ep. 26 – Ian Urbina on the Outlaw Ocean
