by Edith Widder
Back on deck, I was practically levitating with excitement. What fantastic, mysterious creatures these squid are! We had been granted the oh-so-rare opportunity to observe them in their inner sanctum, and, as so often happens, the experience created more questions than it answered. I desperately wanted to know what had startled those squid! If it was sound, I wondered if noise produced by our support vessel had had any bearing on when we saw squid and when we didn’t. Had I really seen them flashing bioluminescence that one time? What was all their body flashing meant to communicate? And how does the bioluminescence potential in the water impact their behavior? At that moment, I felt that I could happily spend the rest of my life studying just this one amazing patch of the sea.
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Gaining a better understanding of how this bit of ocean works relates directly to understanding how Spaceship Earth functions. Buckminster Fuller, a man of many titles, including inventor, architect, systems theorist, and futurist, popularized that phrase to emphasize what it means to live in a biological system with finite resources. If we damage our life-support machinery beyond repair, there is no possibility of a resupply ship showing up in the nick of time to save us. With that in mind, you might think that the importance of understanding how our world operates should be self-evident, but experience suggests otherwise. We humans have a really unfortunate history of not understanding the value of what we’ve got until it’s gone. The collapse of fisheries around the world is just one of far too many examples.
One such fishery that I have direct experience with is Georges Bank, in the Gulf of Maine. Just seventy miles due east of Cape Cod, Georges Bank is an underwater plateau that is larger than the state of Massachusetts and was once a lush Garden of Eden, thanks to the confluence of two major ocean currents: the cold, nutrient-rich Labrador Current, sweeping down from the north, and the warmer Gulf Stream, coming up from the south. Where these ocean rivers meet, a profusion of plankton fed a rich ecosystem of marine life, including herring, cod, swordfish, haddock, yellowtail flounder, scallops, and lobsters, as well as more charismatic megafauna like dolphins, porpoises, turtles, whales, and seabirds.
North American Indians undoubtedly benefited from the ocean’s bounty here, as did the seagoing Basques, from northern Spain, who claimed to have discovered these bountiful fishing grounds nearly half a century before Columbus supposedly discovered America. The history of this fishery follows those of fisheries around the world, going from waters so overflowing with life that early chroniclers described scooping the fish out of the water with baskets to overexploitation. As fishing stocks declined, modern fishing technology found ways to compensate, using aircraft and sonar to relentlessly track down schools of fish in the open ocean and going after bottom fish with massive trawling operations that decimated vital seafloor habitat. The use of enormous factory ships made it possible to haul in as much cod in a single hour as typical seventeenth-century vessels caught in a whole season (about one hundred tons). Although government agencies were advised that fishing stocks were being dangerously depleted, they nonetheless caved to short-term commercial fishing interests, until the fisheries on Georges Bank inevitably collapsed.
Most of us know the children’s story of the goose that laid the golden egg: A peasant discovers a goose that lays one golden egg a day. Selling these eggs makes him rich, but the richer he grows, the greedier he becomes, until, in an attempt to extract all the gold at once, he slices the goose open—finding nothing while forever losing the source of his wealth. In the case of Georges Bank, the goose died in the early nineties, which led to a far-too-late fishing ban that was instituted at the end of 1994.
The presumption was that, given time, the fishery would recover. But this presumption assumes that if you create a gaping hole in the web of life, it will restock with whatever was removed. Often, though, that niche is filled by something far less desirable. Ecosystems depend on feedback loops to maintain stability. If one or more of these feedback controls are radically altered, they become increasingly unstable, with the result that even small changes can produce very big effects. These are known as tipping points.
I was witness to what can happen when a tipping point tips, on my very first Johnson-Sea-Link dive, in 1989, which was in Wilkinson Basin, just north of Georges Bank. As soon as we entered the water, it was immediately obvious that this had become a jelly-dominated system. There were huge numbers of comb jellies (Euplokamis sp., Pleurobrachia pileus, Bolinopsis infundibulum) and siphonophores (Nanomia cara). This made for spectacular luminescence, but it also heralded a significant stumbling block to the recovery of the fishery, because not only do fish and jellyfish compete for plankton, but jellyfish consume fish eggs and fish larvae.
Multiple stressors contributed to the breakdown of the Georges Bank fishery. It wasn’t just the removal of the fish. There was also the elimination of critical feedback loops like jellyfish predators, including leatherback turtles and swordfish. Nutrient runoff and sewage outflow from land produced regions of low oxygen that favored jellyfish over fish. Acidification, resulting from the ocean absorbing increasing amounts of carbon dioxide, drove down the pH, which was bad for fish but good for jellies. And changing temperatures and current patterns also favored jellyfish. The result was that the survival odds had so overwhelmingly tipped in favor of jellyfish over fish that reducing fishing pressure was no longer sufficient to return the system to balance. Had that complexity been understood earlier, it’s possible that the fishing ban could have been implemented in time to save the goose.
This is why it’s essential to invest time and money to explore and understand this patch of ocean off Peru and Chile, where Humboldt squid are the most heavily fished squid in the world. So far they seem to be holding their own. This is partly because it’s a relatively new fishery. Squid used to be considered of low economic importance*5 and were therefore left alone. It also benefits from being an artisanal fishery where the primary method of harvesting the squid is jigging—catching squid on hooks—which helps limit not only the catch but also the bycatch, all the recklessly wasted marine life that is caught with less selective fishing gear (like nets) and then simply discarded back into the ocean.
Historically, governments have allocated serious money toward studying ecosystems only after they collapse (and often not even then). This occurs in response to the populace screaming, “Fix it! Put it back the way it was!” But how can we possibly do that if we didn’t study it while it was working? We haven’t even adequately explored the ocean, let alone carried out the kind of long-term studies and observations needed to develop a truly useful operating manual, never mind a repair manual.
In the meantime, humans aren’t just pressing gently on the complex levers, gears, and switches that control the planet’s life-support machinery—we are jumping up and down on them, with about as much forethought as children bouncing on a waterbed. It’s been fun while it lasted, but things are beginning to go catastrophically wrong.
In response, some people have adjusted their perspective away from what seem to be insurmountable problems here on Earth, or, at the very least, problems that are out of their control, to focus on space exploration. Our need to explore is so inherent that we embrace space exploration on the very slimmest of rationales. The music soars, the rockets thunder, and the narrator opines, It is our destiny to explore the cosmos…We need space exploration in order to inspire the next generation of explorers…It serves to stimulate the public’s imagination…We need to study other planets to better understand Earth…Explorers are us. These points are all true, but are they rational, given the increasingly hot water surrounding us?
Our focus needs to be on exploring our own planet before it’s too late. We know that our oceans are what make our planet livable, and yet they remain mostly unknown. We need to launch a new age of exploration, one that is focused on our greatest treasure, life.
As
far as we know right now, Earth is unique in its ability to sustain life. How it manages this miracle is still largely a mystery—one that seems worthy of further examination if we hope to go on enjoying its benefits. I embrace exploration—all exploration—because there is always new knowledge to be gained. But in the face of limited budgets and hard choices, I turn my head away from the stars to look instead at our oceans. I choose life and our own existence, as well as that of swaying kelp forests with playful sea otters and neon-orange garibaldi fish; seagrass meadows with laconic grazing manatees, fantastic leafy sea dragons, and columns of spiny lobsters on parade; coral reefs composed of elaborate, interwoven poster-colored living architectures surrounded by a swirling kaleidoscope of glittering gems like electric-blue damselfish, lemon-yellow tangs, and opal-hued parrotfish; translucent blue waters swarming with planktonic life and harboring vast shoals of silvery fish wheeling and plunging alongside titanic blue whales breeching and dolphins leaping and twirling, whistling and clicking; icebergs drifting in the sunlight, providing respite for polar bears, walruses, and puffins; and, of course, deep-sea coral gardens awash in twinkling bioluminescent splendor and patrolled by giant sixgill sharks and giant squid drifting at the edge of darkness. I know I’m biased, but seriously, how can the barren surface of Mars possibly compare?
Many of these amazing natural wonders are disappearing on our watch, long before we’ve been able to suss out the intricacies of their existence in the universe. As we strip the natural world of all its bounty, slaughtering one golden goose after another in the name of get-rich-quick schemes, we are complicit in the ultimate Ponzi scheme—kicking the can down the road for our progeny to deal with. In the face of this decimation, the notion that we should be focusing our time and resources on visiting lifeless rocks is so patently absurd that future generations struggling to survive among collapsing ecosystems and an unstable climate may reasonably ask, “What the hell were you thinking?”
Most people recognize that the drive for exploration is in our DNA, but it behooves us to examine what purpose that drive serves. For primitive humans, gaining knowledge about something, like which mushrooms are poisonous, had enormous value. Knowledge was and is our most valuable resource. It is the thing, more than any other, that sets us apart as a species. We assimilate knowledge both collectively and cumulatively.
Collective knowledge means that not everyone in a community needs to be able to recognize which mushrooms are poisonous, as long as at least one trusted member of the tribe has that knowledge and is willing to share it. And cumulative knowledge means that lessons about which mushrooms are poisonous don’t need to be relearned the hard way by each succeeding generation, because we have found ways to accumulate such data and pass it on, first through an oral tradition and later through the written word and now the World Wide Web.
For a long time, the fact that bad information—like Earthquakes are caused by sinners—could be passed on as easily as good information—like Don’t eat the death caps!—slowed progress. But once the scientific method was developed and provided a means to test for truth, knowledge accumulated exponentially, and civilization flourished.
Our ever-expanding ability to share information sets humans apart from any other species on our planet. This ability has fostered a different, faster kind of evolution than that initially produced by Darwinian natural selection. Known as human cultural evolution, it is a process that is not constrained by the random genetic variations that selection acts upon. The staggering power of this new kind of evolution stems from the fact that all that is learned in one generation can be passed directly on to the next. That doesn’t happen in any other species.
What is astonishing about this explosion of human communication, which far and away exceeds any other animal signaling system on the planet, is that we can’t manage to communicate the most important information of our time: that we are decimating the natural world and, in so doing, imperiling our own existence.
Our survival instincts are failing us because the threats we are facing are not the kind we evolved to perceive and respond to. If we don’t see the danger, we often have a hard time believing it’s real—something made painfully clear by the range of maladaptive responses exhibited to the danger posed by Covid-19. The conclusion of many of those studying the response to the pandemic, as well as to climate change, is that knowledge without feeling is an inadequate motivator.
For some people, using fear as a reason to act works, but for many others the danger feels too remote. Our problem is how to reconcile the danger presented by the impending, but not quite immediate, doom of climate change with the proximate problem of missing the mortgage payment or paying the cable bill. In the face of such different demands, the one that wins out is the one that feels pressing but is ultimately far less important. To turn this around, I think we need to adjust our viewpoint by focusing on the positive rather than the negative. This is because, as any parenting guide will tell you, nagging and cajoling your offspring into doing something they don’t want to do is usually counterproductive. Positive motivators work better.
According to child developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, “making it fun” is also how nature gets us to do things that are good for us. In fact, she makes the provocative claim that, just as orgasm provides positive reinforcement for making babies, the feelings of surprise and joy that are associated with figuring out how the world works are just as powerful. Now there’s an idea worth spreading: Exploring is better than sex: an equivalent high without the baggage!
If you’ve ever tried to “childproof” a house against the exploratory instincts of a two-year-old, you know what a powerful drive she’s talking about. According to Gopnik, feelings of intense curiosity and surprise are so overwhelming in young children that “they put themselves at mortal peril for the sake of figuring out the causal structure of the world.”*6 From my own personal experience and those of many of my colleagues, I can attest that the intensity of those emotions do not diminish with age. They are there for everyone to tap into, and right now we need them more than ever.
We will venture into the deep ocean, because that’s what humans do: We explore. Even as government funding for ocean exploration has continued to shrink, private funding is on the rise, and new deep-diving technologies are being developed. In 2012, film director and deep-sea explorer James Cameron privately funded the development of the single-person submersible Deepsea Challenger, which he dove to the deepest point in the ocean, in the Mariana Trench off Guam (35,756 feet). In 2018, wealthy American businessman Victor Vescovo launched the Five Deeps Expedition, diving to the deepest points of the five world oceans in a submersible called the DSV Limiting Factor, which he commissioned to be built by Triton Submarines. And in 2020, billionaire philanthropist Ray Dalio launched the 286-foot research vessel OceanXplorer, with three submarines, two undersea robots, a helicopter, onboard wet and dry labs, livestreaming and video production capabilities, and a goal of connecting people with what he calls “our world’s greatest asset.” I love the fact that in describing the wonders to be revealed, Dalio related an experience diving in the deep Pacific in 2013: He was in pitch darkness when a camera flashed and stimulated waves of bioluminescence from the surrounding creatures. “It was like a fireworks display,” he said. “Everything was responding. It was unbelievable.”*7
The question is: Have we learned enough from history about the shortsightedness of exploration simply for exploitation? We need to be smarter about how we approach our planet’s last frontier and our own future, which means fully embracing the certainty that our most precious resource is not oil or metals—it’s life.
Humans have an amazing capacity for changing our perspective. We can zero in on the inner workings of a cell or the mechanics of subatomic particles, or we can expand our field of view to imagine an infinite cosmos. It is our capacity to adjust focus as needed that is our superpower. Right now, our future on the
planet depends on concentrating on what makes life possible, which means we need to be able to see life with new eyes.
Bioluminescence makes life that was once invisible and obscure brilliantly observable. In the deep and vast darkness of the largest living space on the planet, a single, tiny flash announces the extraordinary experiment that is life. It is utterly remarkable, and too little appreciated, that a creature as small as a dinoflagellate—less than forty microns in diameter and invisible without a microscope—can be seen by its flash several feet away! In fact, most of the animals in the ocean are likewise self-tagged with very distinctive forms of bioluminescence, providing us with a means to view life as never before. If the purpose of life is to understand itself, then perhaps living light can help illuminate the path to that destination.
Skip Notes
*1 Described by The Atlantic (January 16, 2018) as “the greatest nature series of all time.” (Also credited with stimulating a swell in applications for marine biology studies.)
*2 Never mind that the only word I know how to whisper in Humboldt Squid–ese is “Lunch!”
*3 Footnote censored due to profanity.
*4 The Chilean navy was suspicious of our diving operation, despite the fact that we’d acquired all the necessary permits and had a Chilean scientist observer on board.
