How To Protect The Ocean
SUFB 089: Sharks Found in Underwater Volcano
Sharks were found by a team of scientists in an underwater volcano that is active. It wasn't erupting, but the water was too hot and acidic for any diver to go in the water. The scientists, on a National Geographic trip, lowered a specialized camera underwater to view the sharks.
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Show Notes:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/session89
Welcome to the Speak Up for Blue Podcast, session 89. Today is Wednesday and it's a bit of a random day. I was supposed to have an interview with a guest that I've been trying to have an interview with a while. Our schedules have been conflicting. And then, of course, we had some tech problems. So we're going to have to delay this for a couple of weeks, but I will have another interview next week, hopefully as technology cooperates. But in the meantime, today's episode is a bit random. So we're going to talk about my dealings with government as a bit of a goal, a news resolution goal that I have. And we're going to talk more about sharks, so stay tuned. Welcome to the Speak Up for Blue Podcast, helping you get involved in ocean conservation. And now, here's your host, Love's football so much. I mean, he really, really likes it. Blue one. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another exciting episode of the Speak Up for Blue Podcast, your voice for the ocean. I am your host, Andrew Lewin, founder of SpeakUpForBlue.com, marine ecologist and self-proclaimed ocean printer. That's right. All my entrepreneurial dealings have to do with protecting the ocean. Today, like I said in the pre-intro, is a bit of a random day. I was supposed to have an interview with James Prigram last Friday. I was supposed to record it. We had some technical difficulties. This is stuff I have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. We tried to record our interview on FaceTime, and my computer kept crashing on my end. So I apologize, James, for that. He's been very patient, and we're going to hopefully do record the interview tomorrow so that it will come up in another couple of weeks. Next week, next Wednesday, I'm hoping to have a special guest, a very special guest, another special guest on the podcast. So stay tuned for that. Today, I just want to say first before we start, I want to thank our supporters from patreon.com. I'd like to thank Claire and Chris Jefford for their donation, or their support. And I'd also like to thank Dr. Judith Weiss for her support. If you want to support our crowdfunding campaign, if I'd speak up for Blue, you can go to speakerforblue.com/patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N, and you can help support this podcast. So let's get into this random episode. There's two things I really want to talk about today. The first is one of my New Year's resolutions. Actually, I try and say a goal because New Year's resolution is I don't just want to do it in the New Year and then let it fizzle off. This is something that I want to have ongoing, and I've mentioned a lot on the podcast before. I always mention one of the best things you can do to forward your ocean conservation values and try and drive change is to regularly contact your local member of parliament here in Canada or your government official, whether it be in the House or in the Senate. And so today, as I record this episode on this Tuesday night, I actually had an initial meeting with my local MP, Karina Gold. Now, she just got voted in back in October. She's a liberal candidate or was a liberal candidate. Now, she's a liberal MP, a member of parliament. And although her focus right now is something different, it's more on the Syrian welcoming Syrian refugees and making sure that everybody gets where they need to get to, and they're welcome into this country and the dire need that they're in. But her focus is not on the oceans. However, she's very environmentally conscious, which is great. And I actually initially contacted her and congratulated her and followed her campaign through Twitter, which is awesome. And she's very active on Twitter, and she was actually really responsive, which was fantastic. And she remembered me from Twitter. She married my handle and whatnot. And that's how we kind of initially got to dealing. And once she won the election that night, I tweeted her, I said congratulations to all those who won, because I was happy to see a change in government. We needed a change, and I've gone through that before. But as time went on, I told my wife, I said, "You know what? I keep telling people to get involved with their local government official, whether it be federal, provincial, or municipal, or county, if you're in states." So I decided in the new year, or whenever I could, I'm going to engage and offer my services wherever needed. And try and push for something that I believe in, and that's conservation of aquatic bodies. Now, she is a member of parliament, so the federal government. So she has contact with our Ministry of Fisheries and Oceans. She has our contact with a lot of different people in Ottawa, where our capital is. But she also has a local writing sort of jurisdiction. She's very dedicated to preserving and protecting and making sure our values of the Burlington, or the city that her writing is in, is protected, and all the citizens are semi-happy, I guess. Or the issues are addressed. So there's a two-part feature to that. So one, I kind of want to get involved locally, you know, from a city of Burlington perspective. So I want to make sure that, you know, I'm able, if somebody has a problem, I'm able to voice my opinion through whatever avenue I can to Karina or her staffers. The other aspect is I know a lot about the environment, I know a lot about science, and I can provide some type of advice, or you know, she could rebound ideas off of, or provide more information on what she needs, if she's in a bind, because you've got to remember, these members of Parliament are extremely, extremely busy during the day. Their dockets are always full. And they need advice, and they need advice quickly sometimes. So she is planning on putting together an environmental committee of about 10 to 12 people, where she can actually rely on people to kind of give them not necessarily advice that she's going to follow, but maybe rebound ideas off of, get a little bit of information, backup information on some specific issues or non-issues or proactive projects or whatnot. And so I don't know if I'm actually going to be a part of that committee, but I want to put my hat in the running. Now, of course, I have to be careful because I do work for the federal government. So there's conflict of interests, protocols that I have to take place. I cannot offer advice on the behalf of fisheries and oceans, because that is a conflict of interest, and it's not in my pay grade to do such things. And I don't want to do that in that respect, because I don't want to get in trouble. I don't want to get anybody else in trouble, or I don't want to get Korean in trouble. So we're going to deal with a lot of environmental issues on a general level and maybe engaging the community with some of those environmental issues and see how that goes. So I just want to let you guys know that this is what I'm doing. And I'm hoping over the year and in the future I can share that through this podcast and kind of come up with some of the best practices, advantages, disadvantages, frustrations, non-fustrations, and successes that I go through in this process to help you and hopefully inspire you to contact your member of parliament or your government representative so that you can start the same kind of dialogue. So that's essentially what I wanted to say on that. Of course, nothing much right now because it wasn't an initial meeting, but I was really happy how receptive she was, very bright woman, and I'm looking forward to dealing with her in the future in whatever capacity that I can. So the next thing I want to talk about is actually a little story that I found, actually my best friend sent it to me. This is great. I'll tell you one thing. This is amazing that people that I know, that I never really talked, they knew I was involved in ocean conservation and the ocean and marine biology and stuff, but they didn't really know exactly what I was talking about and stuff. Those people, the same people are talking to me, are sending me articles and are sending me stuff saying, "Hey, this might be good for you to read or this might be good for you to listen to." So this is my best friend, Kevin, who has sent me this article that he found. And it was really cool. I don't know what site it's on. It's on Emmet Mother Nature Network. So obviously, something that's very environmentally friendly. They shared a video. It's a National Geographic video of researchers and explorers going to an underwater volcano in the Southwest Pacific Ocean. It's an active volcano called Kavachi, if I'm pronouncing that properly. They say it's surrounded by hot acidic seawater that can make it too dangerous for human divers, and that's when it's not erupting explosively. So even when it's erupting constantly, but even when it's not erupting, it can actually, you know, the acid and the heat of the water can actually harm divers. So what these scientists, a team of scientists did is they went in and they put a camera down, and they allowed the camera to go down. I'll share the video on the show notes, which will be SpeakUpForBlue.com/session89. And what you're going to see is you're going to see the video of it go down. I guess they put the video down, but it wasn't a live feed. So they put the camera down, record the video, and then brought it back up, and then watch the video on the boat because they wanted to see what the data they had. And when they first put it down, they saw just a cloud of smoke, essentially. It was very acidic, very, you know, not clear, right? And a very murky kind of thing. And then it went down, it got clear. And still, water temperatures are hot, probably still various acidic waters. Then they noticed some things moving around. There were animals. The first thing they saw was a, I believe it was a shark ray that they saw. And, you know, it was amazing to see an animal that size be there and look unharmed. I don't know if it's been adapted to this type of water, the heat, and maybe the acidity. I don't know if it just comes in when it stops erupting, or maybe there's a food source or something of some kind. I don't know. Neither did the researchers, but that wasn't the only ray that they saw. They saw hammerhead sharks, they saw silky sharks, and they were just, they were floored. They were just like, "Are you kidding me? How are these sharks surviving in this area?" So, again, not a lot of information was given, it was just a quick video. And the article really focused more on comparing the sharks to Sharknado and called it Sharkano, which I'm sure a lot of people would like. But I think this is something that's going to be interesting to look into further. If they can look into it further, I don't know how much more research they can do on it. But to find out why those animals, those large predatory animals, are in an area that's very hostile in terms of water quality and temperature, and why are they there? And if are they there during the eruption? I can't imagine if they are. If they are, they would die, you would think, right? And I'll share. I'll show you some pictures of what happens when kavachi seamount is actually erupting, and there's a picture of it when it's erupting in 2000. You just see smoke coming off the top. It's just heat evaporating off the top of the ocean surface, and it's really cool to look at, but kind of scary to know that sharks go in that area. So, I think it would be interesting to see, from a scientific perspective, what I would like to see is see studies that are done about the water chemistry at different depths, and if that changes. Because one thing we didn't see is on the video where it was murky, and of course you can't see very far, but it was murky and looked like a lot of clouds. A lot of smoke was there. You didn't see any animals, but below it got very clear all of a sudden, and then you saw those animals. So, you wonder if there's a bit of a separation of temperature and maybe acidity in those areas that allows the sharks to come in during the time when it doesn't erupt. So, I don't know. This is just a hypothesis that I have, an educated guess, if you will, from a scientific perspective. That's what I would like to see. I'd like to see the structure of the water column and what that water quality would be like. The other thing I'd like to see is some samples from those sharks, some blood samples to find out if there's any adaptation to heat or acidity, or any other kind of anomaly that would be associated with volcanoes and water quality. I think those would be kind of cool. So, interesting video from National Geographic kind of came out of nowhere, which is kind of cool, and it kind of follows our shark theme that we've been having all week. It's not a great white shark, but these are other different types of interesting sharks. Just to let you know, they also spotted a variety of life, including jellyfish crabs, stingrays, and of course, the sharks. So, it'll be interesting. It'll definitely be interesting to see what has happened. I'll share the article with you on the blog post, and then we'll continue from there. But that's all for me today. Like I said, it's a shorter episode because I wasn't expecting to do an episode like this today. But I appreciate you listening, and I really appreciate it. If you want to support the podcast, you can go to SpeakUpForBlue.com/patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N. We have a crowdfunding campaign to support the podcast. Grow this podcast, and it's reached. The equipment is that we buy to make the audio sound better. It's quite expensive. I do this out of my own pocket, and it'd be nice to recruit those costs and just get support from people who want to listen to ocean conservation. I've had a lot of people come in who are scientists and non-scientists who come in and say, "We love your podcast. We really appreciate all the work you do." So, I want to continue this, and I do love doing this. But I do need some support in return, and that would help out a lot if you could do that. So, that would be great. And, of course, with Patreon, there's different levels of support that you can do. And please do remember, it is a monthly support system. So, if you are donating, remember that it will be taken out monthly. So, don't need too much, if you're not expecting to. Anyway, thank you very much for listening. You've been listening to SpeakUpForBlue.com. I am your host, Andrew Lewin. Happy Wednesday. We will see you tomorrow for a great, great podcast on a scientific article for abundance. Trans. Sees the abundance. Trans. Great works. Sharks. But, until then, happy conservation. [Music]