by Edith Widder
*5 This is what’s known as fishing down the food web, where, once the most desirable fish are eliminated, increasingly less desirable species are fished out until we’re all eating jellyfish stew.
*6 Courtney Stephens and Alison Gopnik, “Why Ask Why? An Interview with Alison Gopnik,” Cabinet Magazine, Fall 2005, cabinetmagazine.org/issues/19/stephens.php.
*7 William J. Broad, “A New Ship’s Mission: Let the Deep Sea Be Seen,” New York Times, September 17, 2020.
Epilogue
A CASE FOR OPTIMISM
These days, you need to be an optimist if you are going to be an environmentalist. You must believe you can make a difference. Otherwise, why bother?
In 2005, I helped found an environmental nonprofit, the Ocean Research & Conservation Association (ORCA). As the submersible program at Harbor Branch began winding down, I realized I needed to focus on some increasingly pressing concerns related to the health of the ocean. Reports from two monumental studies* had recently grabbed my attention. The consensus was that the ocean was in crisis. To address the danger, both reports emphasized a great need for more advanced monitoring technologies.
In a hospital, everyone appreciates the importance of monitoring. If you go to the emergency room with an undiagnosed illness, the first thing the doctors do is start monitoring your various life-support systems—your heart, your blood, and your lungs. They need to do this to figure out what’s wrong and then determine whether their treatment of choice is making you better and not worse. We need to do the same for our planetary life-support systems.
We also need more monitoring to provide improved forecasting. As our climate becomes increasingly unpredictable, better forecasting of sea level rise, storm surge, floods, tsunamis, and hurricanes will save untold lives, and the ability to better pinpoint whom to evacuate and where to deploy sandbags will save beaucoup dollars. This is what’s known as “environmental intelligence,” and in a rapidly changing world, it is one of the most cost-effective investments that any nation can make in its future economy and security.
In starting ORCA, my thinking was to focus on developing technological solutions to collect that environmental intelligence, with improved cost-effective monitoring being the primary focus. The Moored Eye-in-the-Sea fit neatly under that umbrella, as did the high-tech coastal water-quality monitors that we were developing, called Kilroys (so named because we hope they will eventually be everywhere, like that ubiquitous GI of World War II fame). As conceived, the Kilroys were small, solar-powered systems that were attached to moorings and used cellphone technology to communicate a wide range of water and pollution parameters to the internet. Normally if you build something half the size and at two-thirds the cost of comparable systems, you should be golden, but our momentum was slowed by the economic downturn in 2008. With state and federal monitoring programs being slashed to the bone, my business plan, which depended on selling Kilroys to finance conservation science, was made null and void. I needed a plan B.
My goal with the Kilroys was to track pollution to its source and find ways to stop it, so I started casting about for even less expensive ways to accomplish the same thing. It set me to thinking about how living organisms were being impacted by pollutants entering our local waters.
I have the great good fortune to live on the shores of the Indian River Lagoon, a 156-mile-long estuary along the eastern seaboard of Florida. Once called the most biologically diverse estuary in the United States, it is a shallow-water lagoon bordered by lush mangrove forests and inhabited by amazing wildlife. When David and I first moved here, in 1989, we would routinely see roseate spoonbills flying over our house every morning, manatees would come up to our dock and drink from our hose, otters would climb onto our dock and use our dock pilings to scratch their backs, and, at sunset, the sound of mullet jumping and slapping the water would fill the air.
Estuaries are the nurseries of the ocean, where many open-ocean inhabitants come to spawn because of abundant food and hiding places among habitats like mangrove roots and seagrass meadows. They also provide sustenance for terrestrial wildlife, including many year-round and migrating birds. As a result, estuaries are among the most biodiverse habitats on the planet—right up there with coral reefs and rainforests. If you are going to pick a key ocean ecosystem to focus on protecting, this is it.
The wildlife sightings that we reveled in when we first moved here are now vanishingly rare. Water quality has declined, much of the seagrass has disappeared, and we see dolphins with cauliflower-like fungal lesions called lobomycosis and sea turtles with huge, debilitating fibropapilloma tumors.
The estuary is being poisoned by pollutants from agriculture and lawns running off the land as well as leaky sewage and septic systems. I wanted to pinpoint where the toxicants were coming from. Testing for specific chemicals can be very expensive, especially if you have no clue what to test for, so I started looking for a living system that could be used as an indicator, a canary in the coal mine, if you will. This is what’s known as a bioassay and, not too surprisingly, the one I settled on was bioluminescent bacteria. I had begun to investigate a bioassay already on the market, called Microtox. It was based on harmless bioluminescent bacteria. Because their light output is linked to their respiratory chain, any toxicant that poisons respiration, as most do, interferes with light output. I wanted to use Microtox to test for toxicity in sediment samples taken from the bottom of the estuary. Several investigators had tried to do this already, but it had proven unreliable and was largely abandoned. To meet the challenge, I hired a scientist, Beth Falls, who has a true explorer’s can-do approach, and she found a way to make it work.
Because pollutants often persist in sediment much longer than in water, this bioluminescence assay allowed us to locate pollution sinks—the places where pollution was most concentrated in the estuary. In order to share our findings with the public and with policy makers, ORCA began producing pollution maps. Our maps look just like weather maps, on which red is hot and blue is cold, but on ours, red is toxic and blue is nontoxic. These maps don’t tell us what the toxicants are, but they do tell us where to focus our sampling and mitigation efforts. This approach saves huge amounts of time and money. So much so that we have now greatly expanded the methodology, sampling sediments for a whole range of pollutants, including nutrients, and using maps to measure the impact of mitigation projects. Our tagline for ORCA, “Mapping Pollution, Finding Solutions,” summarizes that approach.
We have been fortunate enough to get a lot of community support for these efforts, initially working with local high school students to collect and analyze the data and, more recently, with ORCA-trained citizen scientists. Getting local citizens involved is a force multiplier; it greatly expands the amount of data we can collect, and it helps create powerful, knowledgeable advocates for our precious estuary. Just as a well-informed electorate is a prerequisite for democracy, a science-literate citizenry is essential for maintaining the health of the planet.
But in talking with that citizenry, as well as with my own incredibly hardworking team at ORCA, I am aware of how much eco-anxiety we are up against. This is a widespread but counterproductive suite of emotions that can cause people to tune out and give up. As a result, over the years I have developed a talk on optimism, in which I start out by joking that I am not an optimist by birth, but by marriage. I describe how my husband, David, is one of the most optimistic people I’ve ever met. In fact, when we were first married, I thought he didn’t have a very firm grip on reality, because sometimes his optimism seemed to defy logic, but he is not a Pollyanna. He believes in preparing for the worst but expecting the best.
What turned me into a convert was the number of times over the years that I have seen him locate a pony in a heaping pile of manure just because he was absolutely convinced it had to be in there. It is only the optimists who will find the solutions, so I have been saying for
a while now that we need to stop preaching hopelessness and instead focus on empowering the next generation of explorers with the tools they will need to find those ponies.
To clarify what kind of optimism I mean, I used to talk about what’s called the Stockdale Paradox. This was a story that came out of the business book Good to Great, by James Collins, in which he shared an interview he did with Admiral James Stockdale, who had been a prisoner at the infamous “Hanoi Hilton” POW camp during the Vietnam War. Seven and a half years of abject misery and unspeakable torture did not break this man, who managed to maintain not only his own morale but that of other prisoners in the camp. When asked about his coping strategy, Stockdale said, “I never lost faith in the end of the story, I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”
Asked about the prisoners who were broken by the experience and didn’t make it, he said, “Oh, that’s easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart. This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” The duality of Stockdale’s capacity to balance the merciless reality of his seemingly hopeless situation with the unwavering belief that he would eventually triumph is why this is called the Stockdale Paradox. It is a form of optimism, but one that many people find confounding.
In recent years, I have found it easier to convey the kind of optimism I’m talking about by referring my audience to Matt Damon’s character Mark Watney in The Martian. Yes, I totally get the irony of that, but it’s a fantastic book and a brilliant movie that completely captures the ethos of what it means to be an explorer. Although Watney’s situation—presumed dead and abandoned on Mars—seems beyond hopeless, he doesn’t delude himself about his circumstances. He confronts his reality and just keeps working the problem, taking on challenges in the order of their priority.
And so, to close, let me leave you with these two thoughts:
Optimism is a thing worth fighting for. We have to keep trying and never give up the faith that we will prevail.
And, to paraphrase Mark Watney, in the face of overwhelming odds, we’re left with only one option: We’re going to have to “science the shit out of this.”
Skip Notes
* The Pew Oceans Commission, in 2003, and the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, in 2004.
Bioluminescence in front of the submersible: like the Fourth of July! E. Widder
Different bioluminescent displays, clockwise from top right: squid (Abralia veranyi), krill (Meganyctiphanes norvegica), dragonfish (Melanostomias bartonbeani), jellyfish (Periphylla periphylla), and worm (Tomopteris sp.). E. Widder
Edie and David on their wedding day. James Molloy
Dinoflagellates poured over the author’s hand. Tom Smoyer
The dinoflagellate Pyrocystis fusiformis, as seen with the lights on (top) and as photographed by the light of its own bioluminescence (bottom). E. Widder
The deep-sea diving suit Wasp, designed for diving on oil rigs to depths of 2,000 feet. E. Widder
Ready to dive, bundled up against the cold that rapidly penetrates the metal suit.
The deep-sea shrimp Heterocarpus ensifer spews bioluminescence from its mouth like a fire-breathing dragon. Sönke Johnsen
Unidentified anglerfish. E. Widder
Animals camouflage their silhouettes by producing light from their bellies that matches the intensity of downwelling sunlight. Krill like Meganyctiphanes norvegica (left) produce light from ten photophores. Hatchetfish like Argyropelecus (center) and lanternfish like the myctophid (right) also use distinctive patterns of photophores on their bellies for counterillumination. E. Widder
Left to right: José Torres, Edie Widder, and Bruce “Robi” Robison with the Deep Rover in Monterey Canyon in 1984. Sea Studios
Bioluminescence hitting the SPLAT screen in the Gulf of Maine, showing the different character of the minefield at different depths. Top: a thin layer of bioluminescent copepods (Metridia lucens) at 53 feet; field of view is 3.28 feet across.
Center: predominantly dinoflagellates (Protoperidinium depressum) at 200 feet.
Bottom: a jelly-dominated region at 816 feet where a comb jelly (Euplokamis sp.) was responsible for brilliant explosions of light, producing large clouds of bioluminescent particles that passed through the SPLAT screen. E. Widder
First field tests of the HIDEX-BP. Left to right: Jim Case, Steve “Bernie” Bernstein, Edie Widder, Mike Latz, and Dan Ondercin. Courtesy of the author
Graphic showing the interior design of the HIDEX-BP. Inset (bottom right) shows bioluminescence stimulated by the HIDEX-BP stimulation grid, photographed through a transparent full-scale model of the HIDEX-BP. E. Widder
Author (left), preparing to pull a gulper eel from the detritus sampler. Courtesy of the author
The gulper eel (Eurypharynx pelecanoides). E. Widder
The Johnson-Sea-Link submersible carries four people: a pilot and passenger in the observation sphere, and a sub-crew member and passenger in the dive chamber. HBOI
Edie in the dive chamber running the spectrometer. Courtesy of the author
The glowing sucker octopus (Stauroteuthis syrtensis). E. Widder
Al Giddings (right) describes the workings of the Johnson-Sea-Link submersible to Fidel Castro (left), with the help of Fidel’s translator, who stands between them. E. Widder
MBARI’s remotely operated vehicle deploying the Eye-in-the-Sea. E. Widder
The deep-sea jellyfish Atolla wyvillei. E. Widder
The bioluminescent burglar-alarm display of Atolla wyvillei is a pinwheel of light that swirls around the edges of the bell (left). At right is the e-jelly used to imitate that display. E. Widder
Eye-in-the-Sea on the shore of the Brine Pool. E. Widder
Just eighty-six seconds after the e-jelly was activated, the Eye-in-the-Sea recorded this squid, a creature so new to science it could not be assigned to any known scientific family. E. Widder
The bamboo coral Keratoisis flexibilis releases astonishing amounts of slime and lights up like a Christmas tree when you rub against it (inset). E. Widder
Brandy Nelson and Edie Widder readying the Medusa for deployment near the site of the BP oil spill. Sylvia Earle
The three scientists on the giant squid expedition (from left): Tsunemi Kubodera, Steve O’Shea, and Edie Widder. Leslie Schwerin
The Triton submersible, with an e-jelly suspended from a pole projecting in front of the submersible. Kelvin Magee
“The Holy Grail”: the first video recording of a live giant squid in the wild, filmed by Medusa on its first deployment with the e-jelly. E. Widder
Attack of the Kraken: The giant squid homed in on the e-jelly and then attacked the very big thing next to it, the Medusa. E. Widder
Close-up of the giant squid, showing its striking coloration, like brushed aluminum, and very large eye. Courtesy of NHK/NEP/Discovery Channel.
Enypniastes eximia, first described by ROV pilots as headless chicken fish, are swimming sea cucumbers. Their bodies are covered with sticky blue bioluminescent particles that rub off, turning any predator into a glowing bull’s-eye. Top, courtesy of NOAA Photo Gallery. Bottom, E. Widder.
A Humboldt squid is attracted to the e-jelly attached in front of a Triton submersible, diving off the coast of Chile for Blue Planet II. E. Widder
Two still frames from Deep Rover pilot Toby Mitchell’s iPhone video of the Humboldt squid basket-feeding on krill. Toby Mitchell
For David
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A long, long time ago, in 1997, I wrote a book called Light Soup, which I intended as an introduction to bioluminescence. I found an agent, who shopped it around to various publishers, who all said the same thing: “You need to make it more personal.” As a scientist, trained to never write in the first person, I had no idea how to do that, so I put it on a shelf.
