How To Protect The Ocean
SUFB 121: Ocean Talk Friday
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This week's Ocean Talk Friday was recorded on Blab.im, a live streaming platform that allows viewers to interact with hosts. Nathan and I hoped on Blab to discuss:
1) What whales do at night;
2) How sharks use a particular sense to navigate up and down the coast;
3) How an artisanal sea cucumber fishery is being ruined to serve larger markets; and,
4) How scientists don't study the good news stories because they are harder to fund.
Join us next week on Blab to be a part of the conversation!
10 Ocean Tips to Conserve the Ocean:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/wordpress/sufb_optinpdf
Show Notes:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/session121
Welcome to the speaker for Blue Podcast, session 121. Hey everybody, it's Ocean Talk Friday, and we've decided to switch up the way we do Ocean Talk Friday. I've hosted it with a Nathan before using just Skype. We decided to use a different platform, which was a platform called blab.im, which is a live streaming platform that a lot of people can interact on, which is kind of nice and you can record. So we recorded the podcast on Wednesday night, which we normally do for Friday for today when you're listening to it now. So today we talked about a couple of things, four stories. One, we talked about what whales do at night. We talked about how sharks migrate using a sense that you may not really think about all the time for using, especially for migration. We also talked about sea cucumber harvesting and how we're looking at artisanal fishing versus a larger commercial fishing shop for international markets. And then finally, we talked about something that in the ocean conservation, ocean science kind of field that happens a lot is getting funding for the doom and gloom, but not necessarily getting funding for the positive outcomes, which in science communication, what we do at speaker for Blue, what we try to do is talk about all the positives that are happening with the tools that have been developed in the past. So we're going to talk all about that packed show. It's a little bit longer than normal because we were learning the platform and stuff. So thank you for watching and stay tuned for this episode of the Speaker of Blue podcast. Welcome to the Speak Up for Blue podcast, helping you get involved in ocean conservation. And now here's your host. He still puts his hands in the air because he doesn't care. Hey everybody. Welcome back to another exciting episode of the Speaker for Blue podcast, your voice for the ocean. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, founder of speakerforblue.com, marine ecologist and self-proclaimed oceanpreneur. And today is Ocean Friday. And like I said in the pre-intro, probably a longer pre-injo than normal, we decide to switch things up a little bit. Nathan and I, we have Nathan on the podcast. He's not ready right now. I've decided to pre-record this intro. But he joined us on BLAB, which is a new platform, it's a live streaming platform where people can actually interact with the hosts of the show. You can have a show or you can have people come on and ask questions or type in questions. So we decided to try it out to see what it would be like to host it on BLAB. You can record your podcast or your, your session and have it developed. And that's what we did today to develop it for this podcast. And I'm thinking of actually making that a regular thing, having a live show where I would record the show and then that would become the podcast after. I like it because my time is very limited and it doubles, it keeps my effort the same, but it actually doubles my exposure for a live community and maybe allow it some interaction with audience members as well as allows me to record it and kind of double my effort for the podcast afterwards. So still planning on that in that phase, but we decided to try it out for Ocean Talk Friday, which is one of my favorite episodes. And today we talked about four different things, which I mentioned in the pre-intro. I'm not going to double it again. So before you listen to the BLAB feed or the BLAB recording, I just wanted to say thank you to the people who are supporting this podcast and our efforts to get Ocean Conservation out there and awareness out there on the podcast platform and hopefully other platforms in the future. That is Chris and Claire Jeffer, Dr. Judith Weiss and Ron and Judy, I really appreciate your support. If you want to support Ocean Conservation Awareness and just Conservation in general, you can go to our Patreon campaigns, a crowdfunding campaign at SpeakUpForBlue.com/patreon. You can put a number to support us monthly and it allows us to build sort of our momentum, our community, and our ability to spread ocean conservation on different platforms. We want to go into the digital magazine market. We also want to go to the YouTube market, the video market with some specialized videos. So thank you very much for those who are supporting us and thank you for listening. Just really thank you for listening. It's Friday today. I hope you're having a great Friday, you're almost at the weekend and thank you for listening to this podcast. I really appreciate it continuing to listen. We're almost at 100,000 downloads so it's kind of fun to see that. So stay tuned. Here is our BLAB. Hey Nathan, how's it going? Welcome to our first BLAB for Ocean Talk Friday, how are you? I'm good. This is pretty cool. This is cool. We've been doing this before and it's kind of funny because we're doing Ocean Talk. It's normally called Ocean Talk Friday but it's actually Wednesday because that's when we normally record this because it goes live on Friday but for all the people who are going to watch or if people are going to watch at all, we do this Ocean Talk Friday for Speak Up for Blue podcast and we talk about essentially four articles or four topics that we found interesting this week that we want to talk about either from the podcast or articles that we've read and we didn't get a chance to cover them on the Speak Up for Blue podcast. So we just kind of went on and decided to talk about them, just the two of us and give our opinions on it. So because we're on BLAB and this does get recorded and it gets shown again and again and we're going to do start doing this on a regular basis, Nathan, why don't you just give a little background about who you are and what you do? Okay, my name is Nate Johnson. I have a master's in marine biology from Texas A&M Galveston. Where in the shirt now, actually? My research was on systematics and taxonomy, population genetics of invertebrates. So in the marine invertebrate lab, our shirt, if you can read the back, says support global warming. It was a pretty great fun by my advisor. We're all proud of it. And now I work for a small nonprofit in Galveston called Artists Vote. I manage habitat restoration projects and land stewardship and more terrestrial conservation. Okay, right on, that's cool. And for those of you who don't know who I am, well, my name is Andrew Lewin. I'm also a marine scientist. I call myself a marine spatially ecologist, but essentially marine, that's a fancy word for marine biologist. And I'm into conservation and I do have a nine to five, but this is the Speak Up for Blue.com is a website that I started and run with Nate. We essentially run it because we want to get more people aware of what's happening in ocean conservation, the ocean issues that are arising, how we can implement solutions to reduce or hopefully eventually eliminate those kind of issues. And really, we just talk about ocean stuff, ocean conservation stuff in the ocean. And we like doing this, the speakupforblue.com. We also run a Speak Up for Blue podcast, which is what we're recording for right now. And I believe I will start recording these live and recording the podcast. We're recording these live sessions for the podcast in the future because we want to get more people involved. And it's nice to the more people who watch this as we go along, we'll be able to ask questions and we can answer them on the go and stuff like this. But we run a Speak Up for Blue podcast on iTunes and on Stitcher. And it's just a fun thing we do. We almost have 100,000 downloads. Actually, we have a little bit of a bet that I think I'm going to win. Of one, we're actually going to get 100,000 downloads. It's not going to be me. But yeah, so anyway, let's get started with the show. So we're going to talk about some topics that we found interesting over the week. So Nate, once you start off, I think we're going to start with the shark one, right? Yeah, the first one comes out of Scientific American. And it's a story about how sharks navigate through mostly open ocean. So the thought behind this is sharks are one of the most migratory marine animals or groups of marine animals out there that travel long distances. If you've ever seen shark week or any sort of shark research going on today, a lot of it revolves around tagging them, figuring out where they go during certain times of the year, why they go there. And the one common thread is that they travel up and down country coastlines like it's nothing throughout the season. So most of this time is spent in the open ocean, there aren't a whole lot of features to really visually navigate where you're going. So researchers wanted to figure out how exactly they find their way to these different sites. And the theory or the major hypothesis that they use olfaction or smell because that's one of the more potent senses for marine animals, usually chemical cues or senses of smell are what is most often used in marine environments. So there's a short video, it's a minute and 52 second long video on Scientific American about it. But the original article is on plus one. It's entitled, "Olfaction contributes to pelagic navigation in a coastal shark." And the researchers looked at leopard sharks off the coast of California and to test this what they did was they blew their 23 sharks, 12 of them were controlled so they captured them, tagged them and released them six miles offshore from where they collected them. So the idea was you transport them to a new area, you give them a certain amount of time to get back to see how they do. So half of them were the control group and they released them and they're in a relatively straight line, pretty much straight back to the area. The other 11, I believe it was, had, let me get the term, right? Their sense of smell was obstructed. So they put cotton wool soaked in petroleum jelly in their nostrils, basically block any smell. And after 12 hours, I think, was the duration, they found that not only were they not close to the shore, they'd only made it maybe halfway back to shore, or half as far as the other ones did, but they were swimming in random directions. So it seemed like they really didn't have a clear direction of where to go. So they think that there's probably something else because it wouldn't really be evolutionarily responsible for a species to develop just a soul method of transportation and navigation. But what they think is that sense of smell in all factions seems to be the major guiding system for sharks, and that there may be other things thrown in there if their sense of smell is disrupted. But as you could tell from this study, there doesn't seem to be much other of a prevalent sense of direction because they're just kind of going anywhere. So it's interesting research, especially with group as diverse as sharks in one of your interviews this week. I spoke with Chris Loge who kind of reiterated that we don't know much about them. So anything from the research like this is very important. Well yeah, and it's interesting too because I remember one of the first research papers I read on sharks was actually a hammerhead paper where they were saying they used the electric magnetic fields in the ocean, they follow valleys to actually, that's how they navigate and migrate up and down the coast. So it's interesting how different sharks use different senses and maybe not sight as we would all think that they would to actually navigate up and down a coast where depending on their probably best features, like you said, sense of smell or with hammerhead sharks as they can sense the electric magnetic fields, you can get a different approach of how they migrate. And I think it's kind of interesting how they use that best feature or their most prominent feature to actually migrate along these lines. So I think it's kind of cool. What species of shark did they look at? I think it was leopard sharks, leopard sharks, which are pretty small sharks and not very big. It's kind of interesting because they're found along the coast, which is kind of nice and it's nice to see that a study uses a different shark, probably these are a little bit more manageable to study and handle. But other than sort of like the big sharks that we see the quote unquote, I just can't see that quote unquote, man eaters that we see and stuff and I just think it's kind of interesting that we don't normally hear stuff on leopard sharks and going back to the Chris's interview on Wednesdays, that's what he studies. He studies different sharks, smaller postal sharks, to get a knowledge of what's happening along the coast and he has some pretty interesting topics to study like the horn shark and things like that. But what do you think about this article? I like it. I find these types of navigational studies really interesting because I don't think it's anything that people think about until you think about it. And then I think it's a lot more interesting because sharks, whales, marine mammals, large fish, anything that migrates a long distance needs a way to figure out where it's going because they're not just aimlessly floating around and from the small amount of research that I know it seems to be a variety of different tools to do this. It's not everything doesn't use old faction, everything doesn't use vision. It depends like you said on the species or the group. So I know sea turtles for a group that uses a lot of magnetic field information. Marine mammals like seals, there have been some papers saying that they use the pattern of stars in the night sky to navigate their way. So now we have old faction I think for some shorebirds or other sort of animals I'm sure vision is a role in situations as well. So it's something that's really interesting to think about when you think of what type of environment these animals have to adapt to. You know vision may not play a huge role because there may not be much of a point for developing strong eyesight. Whereas on land that's pretty much the major for mammals at least that seems to be the major sort of adaptive sense. So I think these are really good. I think they can provide a lot of insight into management strategies. Things that disrupt their sense of navigation. It's obvious for whales, marine acoustics are a huge deal but no one thinks of how changes in the ocean chemistry may affect the olfactory senses of sharks but it could have a very significant impact. So I think it's really interesting. I'd like to know more about the sort of thing I really enjoy reading these homing and navigational studies. Yeah, I mean I like talking about this especially on the podcast because this is not something we normally hear about just like you said like the public. It doesn't normally hear that a shark will use its sense of smell to actually navigate and get around when you know if you think about some of these coastal waters the visibility may not be good. And scuba divers will know this best where if you don't have visibility you know you can't really go anywhere or you don't know how far you can go or you don't know what's ahead of you and when you're looking at you know being a shark or being an animal that can't see it has to use some of its other senses because it has to sense not only where it's going but what's in its way predators around is there food around what kind of habitat are they in cold you know what's in the water that will make allow them to continue. And I think using that extra sense will actually help them you know and sharks have of course a sixth sense on top of that where they can sense you know movement by other animals. And I think that is kind of an interesting aspect as well we just don't normally think about it we just see them swimming and we don't know where they're swimming off to we don't know how they're swimming we don't know why they're swimming in certain areas. But now we have a feeling like oh they use a sense of smell to actually migrate up and down the coastline that could be very turbid and then we don't normally see that right because we're not in a water that's turbid so we don't understand that hey you can't use your sight to actually get something. So I think that's kind of interesting. So when you watch the video it says that they altered the smell by stuffing cotton balls in the noses of these sharks and then we have them and then they showed the pattern and they were all over the place and then the next thing they say something was like the researchers assume that the sharks got home alright and I was like the most way to design a study is just kind of toss them out there and say ah they're probably fine but then it said the cotton balls dissolve after like a certain amount of time and they're safely back hopefully in their habitat but I thought that was a really interesting way of figuring out how scientists designed these types of studies to have something up their nose and you know or we'll share their figure it out somehow yeah I just think it's hilarious how they that's what they thought of it's like okay well how do we get them to stop spraying to see if we continue on the same pattern well let's stuff cotton balls like they took an undergrad and was like here we're gonna try some stuff on you tell us when you can't smell anything anymore let's just see where he goes and where she goes and see if they're all over campus. Yeah actually when I was in grad school I was part of a journal club where we would meet and talk about research once a week and the theme here was home and navigation so we covered a lot of these papers and one time we thought it'd be really fun if we did our own study where we'd all go out to a bar in the middle of the city one night and like three people would have noise canceling headphones three people would have blindfolds and we'd say like you gotta meet at this person's house. I could just see you guys on the news three students die because of students. It would be the people with blindfolds too like if you had headphones or cotton balls up your nose you'd be fine. Yeah yeah for sure for sure but I mean imagine how these sharks must have felt totally disoriented maybe not even able to see properly and then they you know it's kind of interesting how they go all over the place and then and then when you take them out or when they're out they go back to a normal pattern I think that's really yeah yeah I think that's really cool. Anyway let's get to the next story we're gonna talk about something really different right now we're gonna talk about sea cucumbers yeah this one is in Al Jazeera America and it talks about the sea cucumber essentially it's a fishery the sea cucumber industry in the banana islands I believe off the coast of Sierra Leone and so if you don't know sea cucumbers are I mean they're exactly what they sound like they're little kind of derms they look sort of like a curled up cucumber they're closely related to sea stars and starfish their member of that file as well and and they usually hang out around the bottom of shallow coastal warmer areas they feed on a lot of detritus that sinks down or a lot of small benthic organisms and plankton and algae in the banana islands there is a small fishery for them because they are seen as a luxury food item in a lot of East Asian countries they mention China specifically I'm not sure if there are other countries as well and they're also used in some traditional Eastern medicine so similar stuff we see to a lot of shark fins and manta ray gill plates and in the banana islands the locals typically die for them at night and they catch enough to make a living it's not a really high income area so they don't make a lot of money but they make enough to support themselves and they sell it to the Asian markets essentially and the story talks about how it follows this one diver and they interview him and he says you know he can you usually make up to maybe a hundred dollars in a day in an area where people live on about two dollars a day but then you have these international folks coming in from these East Asian countries who you know obviously want to maximize their profits and their revenue so they always try to find ways to catch more so they use say their equipment that allows divers to stay down longer they use lighting or you know visual mechanisms to let them fish longer at night and the locals are concerned one that this is overfishing the population but also that you know when you have these people coming in from other countries they're not necessarily coming in with the best sustainable practices in mind because if they overfished that one area you think they just find another area whereas the folks who live there they don't want to overfish and utilize all the resources because then they have no income they have no way to live off the land so you know the reason I picked this one is because you don't hear of sea cucumbers and overfishing in the same sentence pretty much ever I mean I don't think you can even technically say this is a fishery but it is it's an industry and they do mention that there's some scientific data to show that around the banana islands off the coast of Sierra Leone sea cucumber populations have dropped and they are a really important primary consumer in the area so they played ecologically important role and it's just a very sort of condensed example of I think a lot of the same situation other areas and other ecosystems are facing whether it's with overfishing sharks overfishing fish overfishing lobster you know it's the same general idea you have people who are focused more on revenues and profits to the point of not sustaining their business for the long run you have locals who may practice the business but really don't want to see it overfished and over harvested so I thought you know this is just kind of an example of that it's the same conflict we're seeing is happening in a variety of different locations and a variety of different ecosystems but the general conflict is the same yeah no I mean we see this often right it's almost like when somebody has something good you know locally and it's really working well somebody comes along with the bigger and better idea saying hey let's make this huge let's make a lot of money off this we can serve this market and this market and such and such market and of course when you're serving the Asian market there's so many people it just that are there now you're looking at a huge market they love different things you know the Asian culture is based especially the food culture is based on like tastes and very and texture like so very different texture and if you've ever seen a sea cucumber I mean oh there's there's some different options for it you know but but you know it's it's a pretty it's kind of an interesting animal that has a very interesting texture and I know in Canada there's a fishery for it and other places as well there's a fishery for it and I think it's just one of these examples where you're like holy cow you know we've got something nice going on here and we can supply our own food or we can supply our own market and then all of a sudden you're like okay now let's let's just totally expand this market and serve a different market and we're gonna basically fish this till it's gone and it's just once you do that you're like you know this is BS like what why are we doing this you know why are we ruining such a small little fishery that's probably sustainable you know probably manage pretty well and expand it to something that gets out of hand and unfortunately it's this local community that pays for it and I think we see this over and over again and you know it was interesting I was talking to Chris Lowe about on Wednesday about this is we should keep this revitalization of small fisheries artisanal fisheries keep them small and keep them local and allow local populations to local communities to be able to not just exploit but survive a sustainable livelihood off these areas and instead of expanding and getting greedy and trying to make more money and then losing that fishery right I think we see this we just see it too I have to well and that's why you have disciplines like natural resources management because when you're managing an industry that relies on I mean all goods are scarce but a scarce good that also plays a role in a system that you can't easily quantify its value to then extracting it or over harvesting it isn't just like you know you're running out of some piece of technology it's it's like you're running out of a vital resource that you can't necessarily replicate you don't necessarily understand the ramifications of losing it so yeah I mean it's it's harmful on a variety of levels it's harmful from an eco system perspective it's harmful from the perspective of the local economy it's harmful from a diplomatic perspective because I can't imagine you know whatever sort of regional government might rule over the the banana islands you know I'm sure they don't appreciate having international folks coming in and disrupting a system that's provided a way of life for a lot of folks there so you know I I hopefully will see these types of things like you said make it smaller I think that's kind of the only way to really mitigate this because the end isn't necessarily going to change you're going to have to find a way to reduce the amount of supply your your brain is the industry yeah absolutely and to be honest I think when a fishery like this happens this is where I think organizations like nonprofit organizations can really help out when you have an artisanal fishery like this it's always good to almost partner with this with the local community to monitor what they're actually bringing in and what they're at the actual population or the actual food or fishery that they're trying to do monitor that population or that community and look at the effects and then if you look at the effects and you say hey if you know you guys are doing things sustainably but somebody else comes in you can actually almost set quotas or almost set limits to say hey you know no you can't come in here because you're going to completely disrupt this fishery and this local communities gonna see a collapse of this fishery because you want money going elsewhere because a lot of times it is international you know people coming in and saying hey you've got something good going on I want in I'm going to offer you this short term gain and I'm going to take all this stuff but the long term consequences are going to are going to stay with you even though you have this short term gain and I think by monitoring and using science and just sort of population structure or stock assessment just very basic scientific monitoring you can actually help these local community out you just teaching them to empower you know what they're doing and going from that from that perspective I think would really help out this is just just thinking out the top of my head but there's a lot of organizations out there like Oceans Watch that's based in New Zealand and I think now they're based all over the world they have offices all over the world but they go into local communities in like the South Pacific local islands who don't really have the expertise or the knowledge to monitor populations or establish and protect areas so they come in Oceans Watch comes in and they teach them how you know okay here's how you set the boundaries here how you do like a reef check survey for the reefs you know manage you know populations and just kind of overall health of the reef and all of a sudden they empower them and they they have these these managers or these monitors that go out there and monitor the reef and secure it and force the boundaries of the unprotected area and they all of a sudden they have this empowerment of this community and they take it into their own hands and now they have monitored whether it be a fishery because they need to survive off of it or anything like that and I think organizations like that play a really big role in establishing this empowerment of this community. But I agree I think monitoring and we'll talk about this later I mean monitoring is one of the more difficult things to do for any sort of you know ecosystem or you know marine protected area of monitoring and forcing it but it's incredibly important because that's what gives you information to take proper steps forward so I agree if you have a nonprofit or some other sort of NGO that has the capability to do this in these in these countries you can really do a lot not only from a research point of view because you'll have more scientific data but from a policy and management point of view you can empower local community like you said and that's that's ultimately how the change is going to come about. Yeah no absolutely absolutely all right that's a great story I when we first when I first saw that story I wasn't sure how how much we would talk about it but that was a good one yeah I like that one all right well let's find out what whales do at night yeah the short answer is we still don't know but they we know a little bit more than we did before so this is again from Scientific American it's it's just a story covering a variety of different endeavors to try and better monitor and study whale populations specifically larger threatened ones like the right whale they talk about the blue whale figure out what their behaviors are after the sun goes down because most if not all of the data that we have was taken during the day so you know from the theoretical point of view a lot of these whales are plankton feeders so we've talked before about how plankton do these diurnal migrations they stay they tend to stay lower in the water column at deeper depths during the day but then at night they come up theories to feed to escape predation it's not well known but they it's a very common thing to have these diurnal migrations so anything that feeds on plankton usually you see a similar behavior so fish that feed on plankton invertebrates they'll rise up also during the night because that's where their food is so they just kind of assume that whales go through similar things and that you know maybe they're less active maybe they're deeper during the day but at night they probably rise closer to the surface and they probably feed on plankton now since we have more technology to be able to monitor these things so they mentioned infrared cameras digital acoustic tags that sort of thing they found that they do seem to be active actively feeding at night but it really depends on the species so blue whales for example I think they mentioned said that they typically are more sedentary at night they don't necessarily feed they're not diving a whole lot they're just kind of hanging out on the surface and that's one reason why you see blue whales are very susceptible to boat strikes because they can't they're not really active they can't see the boat coming and the boats don't really see the blue whales because it's at night so they're they're a lot more susceptible to boat strikes other whales let me get the species right real quick right whales they don't they didn't find a clear trend showing that right whales actually do feed closer to the surface at night but they did find that they were more active so what they think is that they are feeding but these general diurnal migrations that were seen at lower depths to lower depths may not apply for right whales because they may be diving deeper than a lot of recording equipment can actually monitor so they there is to suggest that they're feeding at night which suggests that they're active and you know maybe they're saving up more energy during the day but they didn't really find any evidence to suggest that they feed just at the surface which makes it difficult from a conservation perspective because if you don't know what depth they're typically at it's difficult to implement protective measures you know you can't necessarily say you your nets have to be this depth they can't be any deeper because that's where whales feed it's it would be pretty difficult to just say you know get rid of any sort of activity in these areas but they you know they're all these researchers are optimistic that as we get more technology as we get greater capacity to study these whales will have a better idea of what they do for half of the day which the fact that we don't know this shows kind of what sort of research gaps are out there yeah yeah I agree you know what's interesting is you know we talk about the cameras the infrared cameras we can't see you know too far into the depths at night what's interesting is when I was talking to I know we've been mentioning Chris Lo a lot but he's really into technology and he's built he in this in the interview he mentioned that he's having this this this this robotic instrument being built that will track that will stay behind a shark and will track its movement so it has the shark will be tagged it'll track its its tag it'll stay about a hundred yards back and it'll track with which way it moves it has a camera and so forth I wonder if that sort of robot would actually help monitor whales as well marine mammals at the depths at night I don't know I don't know I don't know the full details of it but I think it would be kind of interesting to to to find out right to see how deep these these animals go and I mean it's an interesting it's an interesting question like what do whales do at night all a lot of the research is based on site and how you know we wait I remember doing marine mammal observing and you know sometimes you'd see a marine mammal they would go they'd dive down and in 20 minutes later they'd pop up somewhere else and that you know that was another sighting and we would record that sighting and where that sighting was and that's how we record things and I know you know you can tag them and and people have done that and I don't know the rules around that especially in the US with the Marine Mammal Protection Act but I think it's interesting how you know you can use this technology to find out more about them and to find out stuff at night with usually when you when we record information on something that's always visual based to find out something at night poses new challenges but definitely questions that I think we need to answer because we don't know what a lot of animals do at night let alone let alone marine mammals right yeah no I mean you're exactly right as far as how difficult it can be to sort of get this type of information I think a lot of people just kind of assume you know whales and sharks are so popular we probably know everything there is to know about what they do when they do it but then we actually try and think of like okay if you were designing a study how would you track a whale and you know like he said there are certain tags that you know if you're if you're in the field or you have knowledge of these things you might be able to go out stick little tags on your I don't know either what the type of regulations are but a lot of these tags can only stay on for so long so best case scenario you may just get like a week's worth of information which is still very good but you know you got to think that unless you have a really fancy camera that can measure water quality you know acoustic information and have video on it as well you're only getting a portion of the story so you don't necessarily know what's influencing these behaviors so up to the point where we had tags right all we could really do is go out on boats wait for them to come up say there's a whale you know maybe we can figure out where it's going next but it's not like we have a team of scuba divers who are just all the time following these whales around so yeah there's a huge amount of information we don't know about them there was a there was a professor at A&M Galveston who studies marine mammals by he does a lot of videography so trying to attach like video cameras to certain marine mammals or animals and trying to get their feeding behaviors and he can summon our wants it's probably one of the coolest things I've ever seen but he showed a video of I believe with the humpback whale that they tagged and they put it on the door still the top side towards the tail fin towards the fluke and so we recorded for a little bit and you could see the rest of the tail because it's facing backwards and it was a group of humpback whales around it and they must have noticed that something was on that whale because after like a minute or two their tails just started hitting the whale until the camera came off and yeah and so they lost the camera in the process which was probably a lot of europe but good got valuable information on how a pod will take care of this I mean like what is on your back let's get it off slap them let's get let's get rid of this thing I don't know what it is and then all of a sudden yeah granted I mean there's not any scientific data to show that they definitely knew it was a camera they're trying to get it off they could have beaten up all the whale but I mean it was it was really surprising because it you know the presser was saying it was right after they put on it was right after you know the boats seemed to go away so they kind of went back to their natural behavior and yeah they just knocked it right off so I don't know how difficult it would be I've never studied acoustic tagging I've never done any of it but I have some friends who say you know if you can get a few good tags in any given study ones that actually stay on ones that actually give you reportable data that is a win so it's not guaranteed that just because you put a tag on something you're gonna come back with some information especially when the tag is on the outside of the body like it would be on a marine mammal I know the place where I work they do tags but they they insert the tag inside the belly of the fish obviously safely and it doesn't harm the fish but that ends up staying in longer whereas like if it's something on the outside then yeah I can get it can get hit off it can get scraped off it can fall off on its own they're not designed to stay on forever so that the animal doesn't have it on forever so there's a lot of there's a lot of things that take place you know to to make sure that this thing doesn't stay on this marine mammal so you never know sometimes you know we were talking when I was talking to Chris he's talking about tag staying on for 24 hours you know and then you have to go retrieve the data and bring it back to record it so you know a lot of these things you're not getting a long-term data set or one individual you're just getting short-term data set so the technology is there and it allows us to see what they're allows us to see where they go and maybe you know with other parameters allow why they go there allows us to answer that question but for the right now we just kind of know their movements during a specific times of the day especially for visual kind of observations like a lot of marine mammal surveys are all about so that's that's quite interesting I like that story so yeah so that's good um this is kind of cool we've had a couple of viewers come in and out but I didn't like so if you see me kind of distracted just let you know I'm actually posting it on Facebook and on on Twitter and stuff like that so I'm trying to navigate this this blab kind of layout and and and listen to you as well so I hope I'm not looking to distract it or anything like that but let's talk about the last story for this for this recording I guess or this blab in our podcast but we're going to talk about something different it's not necessarily an article that's actually based on the conversation I had with Dr. Chris Lowe last on Wednesday this past Wednesday so that would be session 119 so if you want to go to look at that article and listen to that podcast you can go speak up from blue.com/session119 okay so 119 we talked about a lot of different things and near the end of the podcast and afterwards we had a conversation and we had a conversation about how science and conservation is predicated on the doom and gloom you know we talk about things that are going wrong you know scientists making observations we highlight things that are going wrong so that we can correct it or that we can have people understand it so that the proper tools can be put into place whether there are policy tools or regulatory tools or just you know educational tools we put in place to rectify that problem and now you know and we talked about how maybe funding is a lot of scientists get are funded because of that reasoning so they'll say you know we talked about sharks on Wednesday they'll say oh this species of sharks a hammerhead sharks are not doing very well we need to study more we need to study why which is a very valid reason but it seems like and they get funded for it it seems like that is really the only way you can get fun it's like almost like a scientific business model and I find now we see a lot of that but we don't see a lot of we don't see a lot of you know saying we need to assess the species to see how well it's doing we have all these tools in place whether it be directly affecting those species or not but we want to see we want to assess we want to get funding to do a study to assess what what's what's happening and how well they're doing how the population case in point the great white sharks in the Pacific in Southern California and along the coast of California they're actually doing really well they're doing better than expected and Chris was saying he didn't know why they were doing so well he didn't understand he looked over the numbers over and over again looked at different things and what he noticed was in the interview he said what he noticed was you know marine mammal populations were up sea lion population which is their major prey that was because of the marine male protection act when sea lions back in the 1920s there's only two thousand of them and then when the marine protection came in in the 70s it just now there's their population just cat like just went nuts because people weren't killing them be fishermen weren't killing them when they when they were around their fishing nets and everything like that so you couldn't harm marine mammals which is their major food source then you have the clean water act so now you have coastal populations that are doing a lot better because the water is a lot cleaner and he said if you know you forget we don't know because you know we weren't around in the 70s we didn't realize how bad the water quality was all especially along the coast in the 70s and this clean water act actually you know did a lot of good for the water quality we just don't realize it because it's a lot better now and we kind of forget we tend to forget how bad it was back then so all these tools that were implemented for different reasons have actually played a big role in allowing the great white shark population in the Pacific to actually do very well or in the US to do very well and so you know it's interesting to say like if you came out and you said you know what I guess what Chris was worried about is you came out and said this population is not doing well and constantly saying these populations aren't doing well this community is not doing well this habitat kelp forests aren't doing well all this stuff is not doing well the people in the house of commons or the government would go in and say well let's start to peel back the clean water act or the marine male protection act because populations aren't doing well it's not working so why are we spending all this money taxpayers money to actually put these tools into place if it's not working they actually they can actually do that if they if they get to on this track that these populations aren't doing well and these tools aren't helping them on the other hand you know people are probably worried about actually before I go on that side what do you what do you think about that that thought process I think you're right I think it exists I mean I know so so I mentioned earlier a lot of my job is land management and you've noticed with you know a lot of and it's not just my organization it's a lot of organizations around Houston and the Gala scenario noticed that you can write grants that say we want to conserve you know 500 acres of land or something like that and that's usually a pretty safe grant you know might be expensive but everyone likes to save land it's very easy yeah or I shouldn't say it's not very easy to do but it's it's relatively easier to get funded that project than a project that says we've saved and now manage 500 acres we need money to keep it going because right you know that's kind of monitoring that's kind of upkeep it's not a sexy thing grants don't necessarily want to fund that but it is just as if not more important because you and then it goes back to to what you're saying about I think people who fund research sometimes aren't even scientists so there's that that goes into it but but other times they know that the funding is limited so they want their money to go to those drastic important need that they can think of and a lot of times these days the most pressing drastic need is saving species which are saving ecosystems which not I'm not saying that it shouldn't be that you know there's a lot of research out there focused on how to protect certain things that need to get funded but then you're right you have these studies where you know we really need to find out how is this population doing really need to do something that's more of a basic stock assessment to verify that this protective measure works or figure out that it doesn't work and that's something else will work and I think it comes down to people don't want to pay money to fund something that may just help them what they thought already existed so for example with the protective sharks if you put a study that says we want to mount a great white shark population because there's anecdotal evidence suggesting it's doing quite well and you come back and you say yeah it's doing great for these reasons they would say like that makes sense did you tell us something we didn't already know and yeah you know from a scientist's point of view yes we definitely told you something you didn't know but from a public's point of view we told you something that you probably could have guessed was the reasoning and there's there's a difference there and so I think if you can develop a study that shows something new that people definitely don't know or definitely don't know how to do like how to protect a species you're more likely to get funded than to something like we need to just confirm or potentially re-examine this thing that has gone you know as we've looked at before but now we have new technology we can look at it better so I think it just comes down to the those types of decisions that if you only have a million dollars to distribute to research and you have one researcher saying we need to protect this dying breed of coral and you have another researcher saying we need to monitor how coral reefs have done over the past 20 years you can make the argument that they're equally important from a scientific and political or management perspective but one of them is going to tell you oh yeah they're doing fine thanks for deciding that we shouldn't fish this method this destructive method and the other one might say we found a way to save this coral species so I know that was kind of a rant but I think that's sort of how I feel about why that's the case I'm not justifying it I don't think that's a healthy thing for you know a healthy pattern for research to have but right that's how it that's how it seems to me no I agree with you I think I mean it's a it's there's valid points to look on both sides you're right if there is um you know a project they say there's two projects in front of a funding body one project saying we just want to find out how well this this species is doing or this habitat or whatever it is uh we want to find out how well is doing there's there's some evidence that says oh hey this could and then we want to find out or the other is hey this species or this habitat is not doing very well we need to monitor it to find out why and then look at policy changes to or recommend policy changes to say this is why it's not doing well is what we need to do um the one that's in trouble is probably going to get funded and that makes sense it definitely makes sense I still think we need to I think and I think these I think these studies go on I don't think they don't get funded but I think we need to communicate it better um from a communication standpoint science communication standpoint from the speaker for blue standpoint um we need to communicate saying hey this and we do it to a certain point because when we find those articles um or we find the papers word saying hey this population is doing well we've discovered something new and how to manage it you know it actually works out yesterday's podcast Thursday's podcast we talked about I talked about um uh the the um La Plata dolphin you know the species the the individual the species that was actually featured um in Argentina where the dolphin got plucked out of the sea and passed around and ended up dying it was just a tragedy but I decided to look at oh hey here's the research on it and it actually says they found out that there's more genetically genetic differentiation within the population and that has implications for management that is a good study and we need to take more time to um to communicate that you know as science communicators you and I and the rest of the science communication community um and I think that's that's sort of I think what we need to focus on a lot instead of just saying hey this is a problem this is how you solve it it's like hey these tools that we we work so hard to put in place back you know 30 40 years ago and even you know it actually works so the tools that we're suggesting now would probably be even better to make these populations or fix this problem down the road it may not happen tomorrow where the solutions come in place or we see the benefits from those solutions but it's going to happen eventually and if we put these tools into place and we can actually do it so it kind of gives us a case to you know make more regulatory tools or implement more regulatory tools or even just just educational tools to get people to act and I think it be instead of just people saying oh well no it's just doom and gloom doom and bloom I'm going to throw out my hands and that's the end of it you know so I think there's a lot of different ways you can look at this and on the other hand you can look at people's the public looking at a population doing well say great white sharks and then all of a sudden they're like well if they're doing so well we have so many of them we see so many they pose a danger to us you know you get some crazy politician which there are many crazy politicians out there you know what's that not in the US no like only saying people yeah sure yeah yeah okay but yeah you know you get like this crazy politician all of a sudden says well no we got to get rid of the shark or we got to hunt the shark and because doing so well and all of a sudden put something else into place that is the opposite there is that scary scenario as well so it kind of works both ways but I just thought it was something interesting to bring up and to think about but I do think as communicators we need to bring that out more to tell people hey these tools that people fought back in this in the 70s and the 80s to implement they actually worked and they actually worked really well and we're seeing the benefits now so if we put in more things for climate change and reduction in carbon emissions and things like that we will see the benefits maybe 10, 20, 30 years down the road but there will be benefits it just won't happen overnight and I think people need to realize that but there is hope in the field yeah yeah and I think I mean we this goes into even a deeper discussion which I think would be worth having and at some point about the differences of applied science and basic science or what kind of term basic science because you know even studies for example when we keep bringing back about you know let's monitor the pacific white shark population that I would even consider applied science I mean you could very easily connect why that matters to future policy and fisheries and you know all that sort of thing but then you have this whole other branch of science and I think the reason I focus on this is because a lot of my graduate school work was essentially basic science my research was looking at saponculins which are these small peanut worms and PCA within them so like these two populations look exactly the same but we think they're different species and I found it really fascinating but even other people who aren't within grad school would be like why are you studying worms you know is are they an important food source are they endangered like what's going on I was like you know I'm sure they're relatively important they're not endangered we just want to know this and that's kind of yeah that's the theory behind basic science is you do it for the knowledge you gain not because it necessarily is going to tie into some other thing and you know if you do research on it there's a ton of really amazing things that have come from basic science the ability to replicate DNA which comes into a huge range of research and medical practices nowadays came from someone just poking around that bacteria and figuring out how they replicate so it goes back to what you're saying and that there's a lot of science that may not be easily tied to applications in the next couple years which a lot of times is how these funding decisions are based because they don't know what their budget is going to be 10 years from now so they might have to pick something that they know will have a measurable impact in a year or two but that doesn't mean that there's not really important science that doesn't have huge ramifications over the next 10 to 20 years we just don't know it right away yeah and in you're right I mean there's definitely you know when you talk to a lot of the public they want to know how research is applied to regular day things and actually you even see that now with politicians and looking at NSF funding where there's a lot of there's republican politicians who are saying well why is this getting funded we don't need to fund this kind of stuff we don't need to know kind of stuff government shouldn't be doing this which is absolutely false you know government should be doing research should know more about its its oceans and its coastal waters and what it manages it could have serious implications now of course there's a lot of applied research when it comes to government because they have it's an applied you know format you know you have to make sure you protect certain resources fisheries biodiversity and so forth but the public really gets into that kind of stuff and I think doing studies where you're looking at evolutionary strategies of different animals you're looking at this genetic differentiation between populations that could have an implication for specific specific species or habitat or whatever you're looking at but it's also knowledge I mean science is knowledge of and especially marine biology is just knowledge of the ocean and the species that live in it and why things happen and the more we know the more we can extrapolate I mean you never know you never know those worms may have some kind of human application after that's after a while right but you would never know that well and the thing is like I because a lot of people have asked me that and they that's that's what a lot of people say sometimes I feel like they say that to kind of make me feel better like you know maybe we never know but but the point is you're right we may never know they may have really important application to this cryptic species work but even if they don't that doesn't take away from the importance of it because you know I think while obviously it's great to sort of hit the jackpot with a basic science research study that changes science over the next 30 40 years you're not going to have that every time you develop a basic science project so if you you know sort of measure it by the impact that it has down the road I think you're going to narrow the amount of projects that get funded and while I mean I certainly understand the need to you know if a government's going to give you money to fund a research project you should have some sort of way that it benefits the government so I understand the need for that application and the whole point of science to further benefit you know our society and learn more about how we can better manage these areas and sometimes just you know learn about the natural systems but when money's involved you got to find a way somehow to apply it the tricky thing is just just because something doesn't have a measurable or necessary impact now doesn't mean that it won't later and it's just kind of a slippery slope to get into by measuring something based on its application to something else I think absolutely no I completely agree this has been awesome I like this platform I like I like Blab we had a couple people popping you know yeah I think we do this more naturally I got bras I can give you props too this is kind of cool I think I think we're looking at things you know this is a kind of a cool way of of interacting with people and over time people hopefully people will start attending these things and this is kind of a bit of a test and it's kind of fun and it's nice to be able to have a platform where we can interact and look live actually the stream was pretty good too and we're recording this so this is this has been fantastic of course that we're going to repurpose this for the podcast if you're listening to this that's not live you're not going to miss anything and if you're listening to this afterwards and you want to you know take this on the road you can do it through the Speak Up for Blue podcast go to Speak Up for Blue dot com force of www dot Speak Up for Blue dot com for slash podcast you can subscribe to our podcast and you can get me to do five days a week the ocean talk Friday happens obviously on Friday April we've recorded you know on Wednesdays just for our schedule purposes and yeah so this is this has been amazing we've had some great topics to talk about and we're going to continue this I think this is going to be a regular I think I'm going to try and record Speak Up for Blue podcast on BLAB because the way I see it is this I don't have a lot of time but this actually doubles my benefit you know doubles the platform a podcast platform and I use the same effort it's great because when I was messing around with BLAB earlier there's a lot of stupid stuff on this website so any sort of intelligent like formal podcast where one of us doesn't have like a flat brim cap tilted sideways and you know it doesn't have a blacked out screen dropping the F bomb every you know fewer I think it's a positive I think I think so too I think we're hopefully we're contributing to the collab tent thank you for no offense to the people I believe yeah absolutely and I've I've actually the way I found it is actually through some business podcasts who actually knew this as a podcasting like an interview style and they use it because you can record the video and the audio which is what we always do so it's kind of nice that way so but yeah this has been this has been awesome so we'll end it here and of course there'll be an outro for the podcast but I'm gonna start doing this on a regular basis I haven't figured out a good time to do it because I want to do like because I do five days a week I want to do okay let's let's see what time I can do it at you know like is it nine o'clock every night do I do Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday you know how does that work out how does the schedule work how do we work you know Ocean Talk Friday in because we recorded on on Wednesdays maybe we'll just do an ocean talk and then on the podcast it'll be on Fridays and on blah blah it'll be it'll be live so but we'll see we'll see how it works out but it looks good I like it it's a good idea all right so that was our experiment with blab.im which is a live stream platform where it allows you to record I am seriously thinking of putting a live show on using the speaker for blue podcast material to do a live show recording that and putting a as a podcast for those who you who missed it or want to just listen to it on your phones while you're walking the dog out for a hike on the beach or wherever you are in your car on the way to work so that'll you'll see that in the near future hopefully but until then I hope you enjoyed the show you've been listening to the speak of the blue podcast I am your host Andrew Lewin co-hosting today with Nathan Johnson we really appreciate listening happy friday and happy conservation [Music]