How To Protect The Ocean
SUFB 075: Ocean Talk Friday
Dr. Nathan Robinson joins us on the program this week where we talk about a plastic fork that he pulled out of a sea turtle's nose; methane gas leaking into the air increasing our climate change emissions; and, the rise of citizen science for the oceans in 2015.
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Show Notes:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/session75
Welcome to the speaker for Blue Podcast, session 75. Today is Friday, I am very excited, it's Ocean Talk Friday. We're gonna be talking with someone different this time, a different Nathan, and it's gonna be all talking about a sea turtle with another piece of plastic in its nose, we're gonna be talking about something that's leaking into the atmosphere that's hurting climate change or making it worse, and we're gonna end off on a good note, and we're gonna talk about the best thing that's happened in the oceans in 2015, all on today's episode of the Speak Up for Blue Podcast. Stay tuned. (upbeat music) - Welcome to the Speak Up for Blue Podcast, helping you get involved in ocean conservation. And now, here's your host, loves football so much. I mean, he really, really likes it, Andrew Lewin. (upbeat music) - Hey everybody, welcome back to another great 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 oceanpreneur. And today is Ocean Friday, and I am super, super excited to have Nathan Robinson on the program with me today. Nathan, how you doing? - I'm great, Andrew, lovely to be here again, and yeah, great to see you. - This is awesome, we've had Nathan on twice now, this is his third time on the podcast, he's a regular guest, it's a hatchet, good job, that's right. And he always comes to us from, well actually the last two times you're in Costa Rica, where are you now? - I'm in Nicaragua, I'm in Granada. - So he's just everywhere, all over Central America. Mr. Travel, but he's following, you're following the sea turtles I'm assuming, is that what you're doing? - Yes. - All right, that's awesome. So we're gonna get into sea turtles, we're bringing in all that in just a sec. But I just wanted to let you guys know that before we start the show, we have a crowdfunding campaign going on to support the podcast, it's on patreon.com, or it's with patreon.com, and essentially it's a way for people to support podcasts and YouTube creators, just like myself, to help them out and make sure that the podcast that could get better reach, get better content, and allow me to spend more time on the episodes, more times on the stories, and maybe one day, go down to Nicaragua or Costa Rica or whatever Nathan is, help them out with some citizens on it, and film it, and then we can, without some plastic and some sea turtles noses, and we can provide them what they do there. We can see turtles and we can get the whole show and the whole shebang. So by providing some support for this podcast, we can really go in depth, and do some traveling, and get some more documentation on what people do around the world to help the oceans. So you guys can go to SpeakUpForBlue.com/patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N, to support that podcast, so I really appreciate that. So let's get into the show, Nathan, are you ready? - I am indeed. - All right, so the way this episode kind of turned out is Nathan, I think it was at the beginning of this week. Was it this week or last week? Anyway, it was recently sending me a video and saying, Andrew, remember the last time we talked, we talked about, it was episode 24, so you go to SpeakUpForBlue.com/session24, you get all the details on the first podcast that Nathan was on. We talked about a seach about that they found at sea who had something lodged in his nose, and you guys spent at least 10 minutes trying to get this poor thing, this object that's poor things nose. It was a brutal video to watch. We have it up there, but it is graphic, so I do caution you if you get queasy, please don't watch the full thing, but essentially what happens is Nathan, you pulled, what did you pull out of the nose? - Plastic straw, plastic drinking straw. - A plastic straw in a sea-troll nose that's been in the ocean for a long, long time, and it had a plastic straw in its nose. The pain, the agony that it must have been in was just horrendous, and you told us the entire story, you told us how the crew felt afterwards, and it was just terrible. This time, by the way, people, everybody, he's outside, there's some people around there, so just ignore that, I apologize for that, but we'll get some quiet eventually. It was quiet just before we started recording, too. - It was beautiful, we had 20 minutes of crystal silence. - Anyway, so now you emailed me with another link to an episode on your YouTube channel, and describe, describe what it was. Please tell us the whole story, 'cause this was shocking. - Yes, to say the least. - Um, so this is probably four or five months on from finding the straw. I was doing some research at a beach in Costa Rica called Osteano, and Osteano is famous because it has, what are called Arabadas, which are mass nesting events of sea turtles. So when these mass nesting events occur, you get thousands, tens of thousands of animals nesting at any given time on these beaches, 'cause once a month, maybe three to five days. - Okay. - And I was at one of the last, how about at Osteano, and we were doing some research, down there with the Leatherback Trust research team, and we were looking for epibiance, those little animals that live on sea turtles. - Okay. - And we were just finishing up, conducting our research with one animal, just kind of finishing up, measuring the turtle. And as this is going on, a Costa Rican tourist runs up to me, taps me on the shoulder, and says something, which tells me this, an object in a sea turtles nose, can I please come up and help? And she runs away, and we all come, look at each other, grab our stuff, and run back over to her. As I'm running over to her, I'm jogging with one of the other guys I work with. And he's like, did she say it was a straw? Well, I don't think so, she just said it was an object, and then we're kind of jogging a little bit more, and then we're saying, it must be a hook, 'cause we see hooks and sea turtles all the time, fishing hooks. - Right. - And we finally get to the animal, and the animal's actually facing away from us when we came up to her. And as we move around the side, you can just see the handle of a plastic utensils sticking a good four, five centimeters out of the turtle. And there's one, there's moments where everyone looks at the animal, and everyone kind of gasps, and everyone kind of looks up at each other, and then everyone makes eye contact, and everyone's got this kind of quizzical, like, really? - Yeah. - Again, look, and yes, it was a plastic, it looked like the plastic handle of some kind of utensil. - Right, right. - So this turtle's just finished nesting, and it's heading back to the water. And you can see it's obviously got an obstructive airway, and there's a serious risk of this animal potentially even kind of re-swallowing this straw or something, and we have a few minutes to make a decision, so we decide. The best thing to do is try to remove what this object did, and sit you right away. I get down, ask some of the biologists to help restrain the animal quickly. Hold her in place. I grab the object and kind of gently kind of give it a little T, C kind of, where it's holding. - See where it's going? - How much did it is, yeah. - How much did it is? And yeah, then get out my little sasami knife, grab the base of it, and I can feel that it's giving a little bit easier if I kind of pull down, so I pull down and pull out, and then it pops out. And then there's that moment where everyone looked at each other. I think it was a fork. A fork that was embedded head end into the sea turtles nose. - Unreal. - There's, once again, if it's very similar to it, I remember I told you the last time where we found the straw, after the straw came out, everyone's just baffled, has nothing to say, processing the event, and when it was a fork, there was a little, like, look back at the animal, and you can't, how did that even get in there? - Yeah. - And yes, and that's the story. - But I mean, that's just amazing, 'cause when we talked about it last time, we talked about the straw. It was the first time that really anybody has really ever seen this, in person. We haven't heard anybody else. I saw, there's a sea turtle list that has a lot of sea turtle scientists and conservationists and whatnot that are on the list, and they share a lot of their stories, and when this story got shared, people were pretty shocked. They had never really seen anything, or they never mentioned that they'd ever seen anything, so it was a pretty rare occurrence, and we talked about it, you've never seen it, and we said it was a pretty rare occurrence. This is four months, five months later, and we see a plastic fork. Now, straw, I can understand. It's bendable, usually, right? It has some rigidity to it, but it's still pretty pliable, and, but there's nothing big. It's pretty much the same narrowness throughout the whole thing. Now you got a fork. Oh, so how do you think it got there? Like, it stuck in the nasal cavity? - So I had this idea with the straw that the animal was regurgitating, trying to regurgitate the straw mass, so I end up in the nose, and I think the fork really confirms that idea. Now, the a turtle's owl cavity, nasal cavity, is kind of like hooked like this, this being the owl cavity, the mouth, and this being the nasal cavity. And when this animal's trying to regurgitate the object, if it's like a rigid object, like a straw or a fork, as opposed to being passed out the mouth, it actually seems like it's getting lodged up in the nose, and that's how you managed to get the head of the fork inside the animal while the handle was sticking back out, 'cause there's no way it could have happened in reverse. There's no way I can think of at least that this could have happened in reverse. - Yeah, like the fork part would not, I could see me part of it getting lodged in the nostril from the outside, but even then that would probably be easily, the turtle could probably easily take that out, whereas if it comes in the inside, I could see him ingesting it and then coughing it up, or doing it if they, I don't know if he throws cough, but trying to get it up, and then all of a sudden, because it's so straight, it just kind of lodges in there and gets stuck. Okay, let's talk about what this is becoming. Is this, like, obviously we can't say it's an epidemic, because we've only found it in two- - An epidemic of two. - Right, an epidemic of two, but, I mean, this is starting to get a little concerning, 'cause this, we talked about this before, you said it's within, like, the last episode, or the last event, it's probably within about what, 70 kilometers of beach, is that what you said, 70? - Yeah, it's about 70 kilometers away. - So, technically, I mean, with the way sea turtles move, it's not too far, what is this saying about the management of sea turtles along this beach? - Well, really, especially this one. - Well, it is still an NF2, two examples. Difficult to know whether it's a problem that's growing. It was, the straw is the first recorded instance that I know of, and I've confirmed with the kind of multiple people that we have on record of, an instance like this happening, and it's happened again. And the fact that it happened once, it's now happened twice, is evidence of a problem. Whether this problem is growing, it's difficult to say with these limited data. But we know there's more plastic in the ocean, the amount of plastic in the ocean increases, the amount of plastic production is increasing exponentially still, and as you increase plastic production, there's more plastic in the ocean. And I think there's also, potentially very interesting to look at is both of them have been the same species. They've both been olive-rittly sea turtles. Now, olive-rittly sea turtles are generalist carnivores. They eat pretty much anything they come across. If they can catch fish, they'll eat fish. They can eat crustaceans, they'll eat crustaceans. If they find mollusks, they'll eat mollusks. So they could be at a really high risk of, ingesting obesity like this. They could be, because they're so generalist, if anything looks kind of like food, they're probably going to give it a go. Well, say the green sea turtles that mainly just eat red algae in the Pacific Ocean and sea grass elsewhere, they're a little bit more specialized, they're probably a little bit more picky. So these olive-rittly sea turtles could be a good canary in the coal mine of what's going on elsewhere where these animals live. - Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's a good point. I was going to ask that, is what type of food do these turtles eat? Because as they eat, as they try a straw or a plastic fork, they might just be testing it out, thinking it's another object and testing it out, so we might see more occurrences in olive, really, whereas these are the green sea turtle might be more of an accident, like maybe one, maybe a piece of plastic is stuck within the sea grass or something like that. So there'd probably be less occurrence. In other words, olive really might be testing out some more than not, more than others sort of thing. But this, I don't know, this is really concerning. Now, what's interesting about this is on Wednesday, we posted an interview with Heidi Taylor, who's the co-founder of an organization in Australia called Tangaro Blue. And what they do is not only to clean up plastic along beaches, but the organization also trash and the trends of trash and try to go back to the source and stop that from getting reach of the beach. Now, this seems like a good idea for this stretch of beach looking at things that are long and narrow, like plastic straws, plastic utensils, because it would be, that would hurt spoons, forks, things like that, and try and see which rivers are coming out of before they hit the ocean, what are on those, what are on said rivers, what are vulnerable, things like that. This group, they're really good at tracking plastic. And I think it'd be almost like a good thing to have someone talk to these guys to say, look, 'cause they have a database, they keep a database full of this stuff. And then they're able to analyze what things are coming out, and what's the most popular items, all that kind of thing. And what they do is they go back and they do workshops with stakeholders in the area and they say, these are the biggest items that are coming out, how can we reduce them? And what they've done is they've actually changed policy in a lot of these places, because the community members are seeing a lot of plastic, and they don't like it, or a lot of debris, really, in general, and they don't like it. And so I think one of the examples, if I remember correctly, was, I think it was like a micro bead of some sort, and they got that micro bead. They went back to the company that does it, and they got a good way of trying to catch them, or reuse them, and they were able to reuse them, and it saves the company money for making more, plus it saves the environment from having them in the area. So, programs like that seem like would be a good idea, and maybe even try and find trends of maybe the vulnerability of all the really turtles to see if they actually get, how close they are to these plastics, right? - Very much so. I think the point you're getting at, which I think is fantastic, and it actually ties in with something I hope you'll talk about a little bit later, is accountability. I mean, this turtle ingested this fork somewhere at sea. It's probably somewhere, maybe, in the water of Costa Rica, in the waters of the Eastern Tropical Pacific. But plastic fork, I was asked an interesting question by students recently. I was giving a talk, and I was talking about the effects of plastic pollution, and they asked me, so does the impact of me littering, say, in Montana have the same impact as someone littering here in Costa Rica, who lives on a beach? Is that the same impact? And do I have the same impact if I start recycling, et cetera? And I thought it was a very interesting question, because on a short time scale, the answer could well be, well, if we're talking about sea turtles, no. But on a long time scale, all at first straw, you discard your fork. You live in Montana, you discard your fork, or you deliver in, say, Minnesota, you discard your fork into the Mississippi Ocean. The Mississippi River, sorry. And it goes, it throws the whole way down, and it ends up in the Gulf of Mexico. - The Gulf of Mexico. Thanks for my U.S. check. - Don't worry, I'm there for you. - I'm there for you. - And then it goes into, maybe it stays in the Gulf of Mexico, maybe it floats out into the Atlantic, and then maybe it floats. Who knows, it floats around the Cape of Good Hope, or floats wherever it floats up into the Arctic. And I'll give it a year, give it five years, give it 10 years. Every kind of particle in the ocean rotates its location in the world within 1,000 years. So within a long enough time scale, the odds of pollution can end up anywhere. And because they can end up anywhere, it's not as if you have a big plastic factory and all the plastic forks that ever get wasted, or once they use, end up sitting outside the plastic factory. No, they end up elsewhere. So what you have to do is you have to have this inbuilt accountability. You have to be able to say, look, this is the impact that's, say, non-biodegradable plastic utensils are having on the ocean. And then bring that back to the people who produce these products. And this is how you start to, everyone has a conscious, and the vast majority of people, the vast majority of people who are even working in that plastic factory don't want to see sea turtles die or be harmed by plastic ingestion. - For sure. - It's the accountability and bring it to the forefront and saying, showing concrete, this is the impact you're having on the world, it can help make changes. - Yeah, I mean, I think it'd be interesting to do, I don't know if it's, you know how they do, I've talked about this before on this podcast, where they do connectivity studies with larvae. Right, they take, you know, where larvae are basically baby fish or animals in the sea. And they are very much influenced by the currents that they are in. And depending on the currents and the way they settle, they can travel a couple of kilometers, two thousands of kilometers. I'd be interesting to, if there are studies, and I haven't looked them up, if there are studies for plastic, for the same kind of travel route. How, you know, if it gets, you know, if you look at river systems along, along say the West Coast of North America, and once they get into the ocean, what kind of path do they take and at what scale? You know, I mean, we all know they end up, like a lot of it ends up in gyre systems. However, like what path does it take? Where do they go? Do they go south? Like, you know, when you're looking at the West Coast of North America, you've got that Atlantic current, or sorry, the Alaskan current that's coming down, and it goes all the way down from DC, all the way down to Southern California. You know, is that, like, you know, if you put something in Alaska, is that gonna fall all the way down to Southern California? You know what I mean? - We should write a paper on this. - I think we have the idea. - You might want to cut out the next 10 minutes of conversation, so no one scoops us, but, the next, honestly, a few days ago, I was looking at one of these studies. It wasn't to a lovey, it was actually to a sea-tetal hatchlings. And it was people modeling the distribution of sea-tetal hatchlings to have the oceans. And there's a study where they say, sea-tales tend to nest on these beaches, 'cause on these beaches, the currents are such that when the hatchlings produce, they get pumped out into the open ocean. That's where they want to be. And I was thinking about it thinking, well, they're modeling what they're trying to model is effectively an inanimate object, or that's what they are modeling, not what they're trying to model. Platic is an inanimate object. And then so these beaches are good because they pump everything offshore, then maybe that means that there's something to do with plastic here. Maybe these beaches should be really clean because all the plastic is getting pumped offshore. And then maybe the beaches where you don't have sea-tetals, they're the ones at risk, 'cause they're the ones where the currents keep the sea-tetal, the plastic in shore, but it also means they keep sea-tetal hatchlings in shore. And I think there's some fantastic questions you could do, maybe using plastic as an indicator of these currents, like quantities of plastic, as well as in tying them in the biological side of things. What is the impact of the fact that plastic is floating to these areas that could also be used by larvae, could also be used by sea-tetal hatchlings, could also be used by countless other species, 'cause currents affect everything. Yeah, I think it's one of those things that I think those studies need to be done to show just the vulnerability, areas of vulnerability to plastic for any species, really. Especially the ones who have been found with straws or forks and the nostrils for cut sticks, like come on people, like this is ridiculous, but look, the real, I guess the point of the story is these objects cause a lot of pain to these animals. The first video especially shows how much pain that all the really turtle was in when you took it out. I can just imagine the pain when it actually got lodged in there, and we were talking about this before we started recording, it could have been days, weeks, months, even years that this thing was in its nostril, and just imagine if you have anything stuck up your nose for any couple of seconds, it hurts for God's sake, it hurts, and even though this one that you had, luckily was easy to pull out, it wasn't, you can tell this turtle was not comfortable as you pulled it out, but compared to the first video, it was a lot easier to pull out, I think he got fortunate there, which is great, for both of you, cause I mean that's a lot of stress on you, but obviously the pain for the sea turtle, but I guess the point is people try not to use these objects and throw them away, like if you have to use a plastic fork or plastic utensil, wash 'em, reuse 'em, wash 'em, reuse 'em, you can do that. If you go to a picnic, bring real utensils, don't bring plastic ones that you can throw away, it's such a waste, and it doesn't do anything for the environment, use 'em once and you throw 'em out, I hate when I go to either a picnic or a function, and I see plastic forks or plastic utensils, and I'm just like, these are all gonna get thrown out, they get thrown out in the trash most of the time, not in the recycling unless you're in a place where they do it, and it's gonna end up in the environment, and then chances are it's gonna end up in an animal's mouth, whether it gets stuck in its nostril or not, or it's a sea turtle or not, these things get to the ocean, we have proof, two videos of proof of these things happening. - I think it really just speaks to a human empathy as part of the solution here, and when you think, the vast majority, well, the reason we use plastic forks as opposed to regular knives or carrier, a set of kind of bamboo cutlery in our bag is for ease. We don't want to have to carry around the knives, the metal knives and fork or the bamboo and knife of the fork, and the easier solution is the plastic straw. But if we accept that that's what we're gonna do, then we also have to accept the pain that we can potentially inflict on the damage, and it even caused the death, there are plenty of animals that have died because they've choked on plastic material, they've ingested. It's the strange imbalance between the discomfort for us is having to wash a bag. - Yeah. - Like a metal knife and fork or a bamboo knife and fork versus the life of a sea turtle or a whale or a sea bird. And when you put it in terms like that, it's the net. - Yeah, and you're doing it very politely, and I appreciate that because you are doing it with-- - I am British. - Yeah, you are British. - I didn't want to say it, I thought of it, and I was like, you're saying it in a very British-- - It's okay, if you let me say that comment, it's okay. But the thing is, it really comes down to laziness. You know what I mean? And convenience, and it's just unnecessary. We've just gotten to this point in our lives where it's just like, oh well, we've got a bunch of people coming over, let's just use plastic utensils. But then you look at the ramifications of that, and you say all of this stuff is gonna end up in the garbage for the most part. And then where's that gonna go after? Let's think of Ford and say, where does this go after? Compared to, let's just maybe go out and use our cutlery, metal, or like you said, bamboo cutlery, and allow people to have it, and then just wash it after. You know, like let's, we'll just do the work and just wash it after. Like, it really comes down to laziness. And we are a lazy society, and everything has to be convenient and quick and things like that. But sometimes you just gotta put it in the work, wash the utensils, use, you know, wash the plastic ones. I don't mind people reusing them if they're reusing them a lot. But don't worry, they come in such big bags, and there's like 1,000 seems like they're in there, and then so you got forks, you got like 50 forks, and you got 50 spoons, and you got 50 knives, and then you put them all together, and you're just like, that's 150 things that can kill the sea turtle, you know what I mean? For what? For reporting a party on, and having plastic, or paper plates, and plastic utensils, and you're just like, really, like, come on. Step up, like we gotta settle and think forward, and really think about it. You know, we've all done it at some point in our lives, 'cause we've all been exposed to it, and it's just like, no, let's start doing our part, kind of thing. - Yes. - You know. - It's responsibility, it's matronis, it's, you think. - Yeah, and if you're, you know, I think everybody should, you know, I know this is kind of a little extreme, but when you put on a party and you're thinking about something like having a straw, or, you know, you're going out and you're gonna see, oh, there's gonna be plastic utensils, watch the videos before you watch these videos, and then ask yourself, do I wanna use anything that's long and plastic? Seriously. (laughing) - I've been invited to a couple of, like, friends, meals, since the straw, it's just a straw video came out, and I like the fact that every single time someone uses a straw around me, they always do like, oh, I'm sorry. And the other is a party, then there is a big thing of plastic forks, and the lady was honestly like trying to like, hide them as I put them on the table. And I don't, you know my opinion, and I don't need to repeat, you've, like, I know I haven't seen the video. - Yeah, you've obviously seen the video. - I'm gonna quietly judge for my distance, but. - I'm never coming back to your place. (laughing) - Exactly. You know this dinner party was terrible. - Yeah, your response should be, don't worry about me. - Think about this, this is the turtle. And then send him an email with that link, with the two links. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - So the people would just be like, ah, just like, watch this. - And that's the reality. The reality is, the plastic fork, the plastic straw's impact on me is probably minimal. - Yeah. - Whether I'll ever encounter one of these plastic straws again. It is about wildlife, it's about the sea turtle, it's about the whale, it's about the sea bird. That's. - Exactly. Those guys, if the sea turtle was at the dinner party, the sea turtle would be pissed. (laughing) - It's true, it's true. You know what we gotta do, we have to, we have to come up with a t-shirt for this. And we're gonna sell it on the thing, and it's gonna be the anti-plastic straw, anti-plastic fork. And it's gonna be like a thing, maybe we'll put like a straw in the nose, and have a sea turtle, and then just put like, you know, next time you go to a party for a straw, or before, think about it. - Perfect, then next time I go to one of these, and someone, I see someone sits next to me and has their drink with a straw, or they're having the pasta fork, I can just point. - Yeah, just point. A walk in a restaurant and be like, do you think I want a straw? Like, look, I found, you know, I encountered this. But anyway, I digress, like we're getting off topic here, well, kinda, not really, but we got two more stories to go. So let's jump in the stories. But to be honest, what we're gonna do, we're gonna put, I'm gonna post both of those videos on there, and the first one especially, is a little graphic, so people just be careful if you watch that and you get a little queasy with kind of blood and things like that. But, it's effective. I know a lot of people have seen it and be like, oh my God, I'm never using it. And now I'm gonna post a link to a shop that I actually found online that sells glass straws. Perfectly safe, and it's an alternative, you know? So if you wanted to have a straw at home, or something like that for your kids, what have you? I'll put the link on there so you can go and buy. I don't get any money from it. I'm not advertising for it. I just think it's a great alternative. So, we'll do that. But let's get into our next story. You know, it has to do with climate change. You know, it's been about 30 minutes since I haven't talked about climate change. And, I've, it came across this article on Business Insider, and it was called, it was basically like, that the title is, This Gas is the worst for climate change, and it's leaking all over the place. And essentially, spoiler, the gas is methane. And I believe in the article, it says 25 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, over 100 year timescale. So, fairly effective at heating up our system, right? Or here on earth. And what's happening is they're talking about, there's major leaks, they talked about a major leak in Los Angeles, from natural gas, that's leaking, you know, a ton of methane into the atmosphere. And the only reason they found out that it was leaking is because regulations in California said, you have to put a scent on the gas so that you can actually smell it. So, this leak was so bad that they had to, they had to evacuate a very high-end residents, I think it's called Porter Ranch in Southern California, near Los Angeles, because it was so bad. People said they experienced headaches, nose bleeds, nausea from the fumes, and it just got a lot bad. And I think there's gonna be some lawsuits if there's not already. So, the odor, they were able to detect it, but the article really kind of brings out how many leaks are happening that we don't know about. You know, there's legislation in California to say, let's scent it, so at least we know when it's leaking, you know, we have a problem. Normally, you can't smell methane, like gas leaking. So, this is a big problem. What are your thoughts on this, on this, Nathan? - I think it's kind of, at the moment, we asked it, we'd had some fantastic kind of global success past week with the climate talks in Paris. Some of the first big successes we've had as a global community. And I think this article in some places, shows are gonna bring things back into reality, a little bit. And it shows that we have had some big successes recently, but we have a long way to go. And it shows that what we're going for this transition from say coal to gas, this isn't the solution. We're trying to work ourselves towards something. And as we kind of move through these technologies, I mean, with all these technologies, there's going to be limitations. And there's gonna be problems that we haven't foreseen at all. So, we have our climate models, and we have our predictions for global warming. We have the understanding of how this is going to progress over the next 100 years or so. But we're not accounting for all these things that we might also be missing. - Right. - And that scale part of this for me was that this is not even being observed by the, it was, I think in the article, it was mentioning that the EPA bottom, there's a bottom up sensors tend to underestimate these leaks because they're taken out of the ground from the factories. And it was the independent researchers conducting the top down surveys by airplanes, et cetera, started realizing that I think it said this leak was 90% larger than they originally thought, which is a lot, a lot of the sense. - That's a big error. - Yes. So, I think this is a huge issue. I think it's a huge issue we'll have to deal with in this fight against fossil fuels, in this fight for renewable energy. - Yeah. Well, yeah, you know, I agree with you because this is something, you know, like you said, we've had some major talks, some major goal set for climate change in the last few weeks. A lot of countries, 195 countries have come out and said, look, we have to reduce our emissions to 1.5 degrees pre-industrial times. We're going to do that. Now it's time to put everything into action. So there are a lot of places where we can reduce emissions that we know of. This alludes to the problem of what if we don't know about them, you know, what if we reduce all the ones that we can and we think, hey, we're going to be there. You know, we're going to be at that level. You know, all the models predict that if we reduce, you know, oil consumption or fuel consumption by this amount for every country, then we will get to that point at this time. But then all of a sudden we get there and it hasn't been reduced because we have methane. And of course, this is obviously a very, very coarse estimation prediction kind of thing. But this could happen if methane is 25 times more effective at trapping air than carbon dioxide. If you reduce all the carbon dioxide, but the methane is still leaking, you know, using natural gas plants, you know, there's a huge, that's a huge problem. You may not be reducing anything. I mean, you'll reduce some parts of it, but you're also allowing something else to go because apparently natural gas might be better for the environment. You know, that's, that was what it was touted when it first came out. It was a great alternative to fuel. You saw a lot of, we saw in Toronto, at least in Canada, we saw a lot of buses that were on natural gas and we're like, oh, look, they're being environmentally friendly. Holy cow, no, it's not because there's a lot of potential for gas leaking and we've seen it here. I mean, this is a very big case, but what about all those little cases that are happening, right? - Completely, I mean, talking once again about, we're talking about accountability with plastic and we can bring in accountability here. And I think the solution, once again is, if we have this issue where the leak is allowed to go on until someone notices and there's no real incentive to find the leak until someone, with, say, a more, maybe a moral incentive or a scientific incentive decides to discover that these leaks are occurring. Or even a humane incentive. People trying to figure out why you said people were getting sick and people were being nauseous, people having nose leaks. These things happen. I was, as I read this article, I was trying to think of a way of how do you, how do you kind of, how do you make the, maybe a fine kind of relative to the crime as it were? And I was thinking this could be a perfect example of carbon tax, you not only tax the carbon you produce, but if you have a leak, then you also tax all the carbon that you produced from the leak as well. This way it scales up with these events like this. And what was worrying, I thought, in these articles, not only the, and this could just be the media spin on things, the, all the language was about, oh no, everything's fine, the regulations will be passed next year, there's no real issues. There was nothing talking about what we're actually gonna do to fix it there, and the enormous leak of methane. And I found that to be worrying, there was no discussion of what to do with the problem. - Yeah, for sure, and I think, you know, it's one of those things where I think it's monitoring and, like you said, accountability. So the regulations have to include, you know, every time there's gotta be some inspections by a third party, not obviously by that company, but some kind of consultant that comes in and inspects any kind of leaks, tests for leaks all the time. You know, whether it has to be on a weekly or monthly basis, that should be part of the reporting that goes to the government, because one, I mean, this is a dangerous chemical in the atmosphere, not just for climate change, but like we said, it causes discomfort and pain to other people who are in the vicinity. So this is something that's not only just a climate change issue, but it's a health issue for local residences who are near these plants. So there definitely has to be some accountability. I've seen it as a consultant before, where, you know, mining industries, oil and gas industries have to continuously maintain their items. It is up to the government to make sure those regulations are enforced, and are put in one, put into place, and then enforced. We saw that with the BP oil spill that the maintenance wasn't enforced and look what happened. Right, the maintenance wasn't done, and then all of a sudden we have hell breaking loose in the Gulf of Mexico, and it's gonna affect it for decades. So with methane, you're looking at air, you know, it's just, and it's an unscented gas. It's just, it has a lot of danger to it. You have to make sure that this is regulated and enforced constantly, because this is something you can't let go, especially now with the evidence of these big leaks. And the fact is 25 times more efficient at trapping heat. And we're attacking, we're, as a world, we're tackling climate change? No, this can't go on. There's no, we just don't have a solution. You can't do that. You know what I mean? You gotta just kinda continue on. So your final thoughts on this, and then we'll move on to the next story. Yeah, as you were saying, we need more eyes, we need more people monitoring this, we need more accountability, and we need to make a difference. We need to be the voice that stands up and says, if we really don't wanna see fossil fuels, then let's support renewables. Let's cut out the middleman, as it were. Let's go right ahead. That's the only way we're gonna hit our, these goals that we're setting up there that have been recently set at the time, at the Paris summers. Yeah, no, I completely agree. I completely agree. So methane bad people, we have to monitor it, we have to make sure our government's regulating it, and we just, we can't let up. This is a climate change thing. Our governments have said that they are gonna tackle climate change. This is one way of tackling it is make sure these leaks don't happen. I mean, one, it's a waste of gas. You know, it's a waste of gas, so it's a waste of money to these companies. So there is an incentive for these companies to actually keep them in if this is gonna continue for a long time. So anyway, let's move on to our last story, 'cause this one, we're both kind of excited about. We were talking about it earlier, potentially a project coming out of it. That's a point in time. But we're looking at citizen science. There was an article on, I guess it's, is it Queensland, QZ, QZ? I don't know where that's from. I'm assuming it's Queensland? Anyway, it's an article on saying the best thing to happen to the oceans in 2015. And they call it the rise of the citizen scientist. And we're gonna get to that in a second, but they've named a couple of things that were awesome that happened. Of course, you got the, we mentioned it just before. The global agreement to reduce carbon emissions was reached in Paris. There was Hawaii's statewide ban on single-use plastics. In California, passed a ban on products containing any kind of microbeeds, which again, we've been talking about plastics a lot today. And so all these states in the US and places that are just tackling global climate change, plastic pollution, two of the biggest, you know, issues that we're facing in the ocean. So this is great. And now we've got the rise of citizen science. And for those who don't know, we've talked about this before. We've had people on the show who have citizen science projects. And I'll probably link to a bunch of them in the episode and the show notes, which will be speakupforglue.com/sessions75. But what are your thoughts on citizen scientists? Nathan, 'cause I know you use some citizen science in your project, so I kind of know the answer. But what are your thoughts on just where citizen science is at right now? - I really love the term in this article. And it was open science. Citizen science has been around for a long time. It's been around for, and when you go volunteering, you're a citizen scientist. And the kind of volunteer-based citizen science has been going on for a long time. But similarly, at the same length of time, there was also been naturalists recording the migrations of birds for years. And these aren't say scientists per se, but these are just guys with an interest for nature who have been going out during their, they just like it. They like to go out and see the birds and they've recorded it. This is whatever study. And they become part of this bigger scientific network. And so many projects around the world depend on citizen scientists. There are the vast majority of sea turtle research and conservation programs. The vast majority of, huge hours of human efforts, looking on beaches, looking for sea turtles to protect nests and protecting females or spent in the water to monitor sea turtles and check their threats that sea turtles face at sea. The vast majority of this are citizen scientists. - So, let me just interject for a sec. What would you do? Like, how would your projects become? Like, what would become of your projects if you didn't have these volunteers, these citizen scientists come in? What would happen? - They wouldn't exist to be in the long time. - Yeah, the amount of effort we need to conduct the projects that conservationists and researchers need worldwide in terms of. My instance, we have the project that I help run and play Monday, we have teams of people on the beach every night from October to March, every year. We've been doing this for 25 years now. We need people to help us patrol these beaches. That's a lot of patrolling for, say, just one, two, three, four people to do. - Yeah, how many beaches do you patrol, say, per night? Do you think? - We have, well, we have two major beaches playground that I play with in Tarnas and we patrol them at three teams, but each one of these teams probably walks about 10 kilometers, 15 kilometers per night. It says 15 kilometers per night times the three groups. So, you've got 45 kilometers of beach being patrolled each night. Then you've got to think this is just one project and this goes on for six months of the year. And I can keep listing the other projects going on down the coast. I know you work with sea turtles forever and they, once again, have citizen scientists patrolling beaches, protecting missing turtles a little bit south of where I work. North, we have another project called Platt Caviol, which is run by citizen scientists. We have two beaches either side of the National Parkway work. They're run by or powered by, I should say, citizen scientists are the, they're the workhorse of the scientific community. That's what, let's happen, that's what I'm guessing going. - So, the benefit of citizen scientists at the project is pretty much, it allows the project to exist, plus it allows you to collect data for the project. Whatever project you're doing, whether you're monitoring, I mean, the monitoring, you collect data. You're not just monitoring to protect beaches, but you're collecting specific data to analyze, to kind of look at future predictions of where nests are, things like that, and so forth, right? I'm being very general here, but I'm just assuming that that's some of the things that you're doing. I'm sure you go more in depth, like looking at animals that are actually attached on to the turtles, shells, and so forth, right? What is the, so we know the benefit for the projects and for the actual scientists who are running these projects. Let's talk about the benefits of the citizen scientists. What are, why do they come out? Why do they work? I mean, this work is not necessarily easy work. This is, you know, we're talking about on the ground, you have, a lot of them are traveling to Costa Rica, or other places around the world. They're spending their nights patrolling these beaches for, you know, one to two weeks. They could be off on a beach, anywhere else, or even in Costa Rica during the day, drinking, having a great time, eating with their plastic straws and plastics, and everything like that. And having a great time. But they decided to come here, they decided to come to your place, they decided to work with you, to sweat it out, you know, and go in it. So what is the benefit, why are they there? So a lot of these, a lot of our assistant scientists come for the experience. They want to see what it's, they want to see what kind of what goes on, what this work is like. They also want to be engaged. They, the beautiful thing about this kind of citizen science, I think, as I like that, is open science. Is it, to me, it breaks down this idea of what it means to be a scientist. A scientist isn't some guy who lives in his little ivory tower and does runs his little experiments. We're all scientists. When you, when you measure a sea turtle, or when you're almost, you go to a beach and you wonder what's on that rock, and you lift up that rock to deliver something outside, you're a scientist. And this engagement with, from the scientific sense, answering research questions, people want to be part of the scientific progress. In terms of conservation, these matters that are important to people. People, as you can see by the coverage we've received with the folk video and the straw video, marine conservation, conservation in general, is a subject that a lot of people in this world are very concerned about. And they don't want to be passive, they don't want to be passive viewers and just watch about it or read about it online. And a lot of the people don't even just want to be the passive kind of slack divists, or click like on Facebook. They want to go to these beaches, or they want to go to these, go to the beach, or they want to go to the ocean, or they want to go to the field, or they want to go to the forest. And they want to be part of an idea that they believe in. And that is what gets people to travel halfway around the world, to walk for hours of every night, to, we always joke about it with our thought volunteers, that it's, they call it a paid vacation, but it's a vacation that you pay for as opposed to the opposite. And yes, the opportunity to be engaged in something you really believe in is the power of citizens' hands. - Yeah, and I agree. And also, I think being there, especially with your project, to see, I've never actually seen a sea turtle in person, like, you know, live in front of me. And to see that, or see an animal, that size that moves like it does, it doesn't matter whether it's a sea turtle, or whether it's a whale, or whether it's a shark, or anything. I think iconic species, I guess. Just, it fills you with so much joy. And it's just like, you're just in shock a lot of times, when you see this, like, I can't believe I'm this close to a sea turtle. You know, and I'm watching it nest, and I'm protecting it. This is awesome. And then you get to go home, and you end up people ask, oh, you know, what'd you do? Did you go to a beach, you lie on the beach, did you just kind of relax? Like, no, actually I help protect sea turtles, you know, on a beach to make sure that, you know, they don't get poached to the nest, don't get poached, and I got to see them, I got to measure them, I got, you know, to actually be engaged with them, and be like, wow, that is so cool. That's gonna come out of their mouths. They're just gonna be, this isn't me, they know. There's a story that I've told in this podcast a number of times, so I'm not gonna tell the long version. I think I've told you this as well. But when my daughter was young, I brought her down. We were in Miami, I brought her down to the beach. We saw a sea turtle tracks coming up the beach and going back down the beach, like almost in a row, and there was this mound. And it was a sea turtle nest. We called the authorities, went to the hotel, called the authorities and said, hey, there's a sea turtle nest. I know they need to be protected, so they came, they protected it. My daughters spent the whole day around that mound, not near it because there was fenced off, but it was a popular beach. There was people all over the beach, and there were people were throwing their trash around, it's, you know, cigarette butts and all that, and other than the cigarette butts, they would take the trash and they would throw it away. They would literally protect that beach. That was, my daughters were four and two, so it was four years ago. They still talk about it to this day. They asked me to tell them the story of when, you know, they protected the beach. They are proud of it. And this is, you know, they're eight and six now, and, you know, these are little kids, and they actually are proud of you. I can just imagine them for an adult to feel what they've done. Monitor, you know, eventually after their trip, there's going to be hundreds of kilometers of beach, and to protect sea turtles. And to say that, they go home and they can say that, and they can talk about it, and then it gets around. And for me, that communication is so important to tell other people, and it really fills your heart. But now there is a problem with citizen science, and we were talking about this earlier. Being, the long-term engagement. Like, do you get a lot of, do you get a lot of people who keep coming back? Do you know what I'm saying? We do get people who keep, we do get people who keep coming back. I wouldn't say we get people who come back multiple years in a row. And I think this is, I mean, for citizen science, because once again, like, these people, it is, they might have a fancy, their fancy is, they want to, they want to protect sea turtles. But mostly people also want to protect whales, and also want to protect sea birds. - Right. So you get this kind of move around, and you get, what you do, what I think is a better example of this is, quite often it's very rare to hear someone to say, especially, it's very rare to hear people say, oh, this is my first trip, and then if you chance them, they've never kind of volunteer again. Most people, once they volunteer, they go from project to project to project to project, and it becomes a thing. They've become a lifelong citizen scientist. - Yeah, for sure. And I think, the one thing that I find this lacking online, because, you know, I'm an online guy, I communicate online, I'm all about that to really get the message, but it's to engage citizen scientists online. There's really no platform to keep them engaged, track their projects, and track what they've seen. And I think, in the new year, you know, I was telling you earlier, I'm trying to come up with goals. I think this is something that Speaker for Blue wants to do, is to start saying, hey, I'm a citizen scientist. I want to keep track of all the stuff that I've done. I'm gonna have a profile, and I'm gonna log into that profile and say, hey, this is what I've done. And we were talking, you mentioned, hey, maybe give them different levels of expertise, in terms of, you know, I've done whale watching, I've done, you know, taking pictures of whales, I've done protective sea turtles from the sea turtle nest, and all that kind of stuff. And then you have level one, level two, level three of expertise, you know, sea turtle expertise, and whale expertise, and all this kind of stuff. And then that, I think, will keep them engaged, and maybe even say, hey, and then for other projects, like we've mentioned before, too, is some projects aren't, not many people know about them. They need to, as scientists and people putting on projects, we always need more and more citizen scientists. And so projects always need it, so that they can actually continue. And this could be a good way of saying, hey, these are the projects that are available this month, these are how many spots are left. Boom, let's get on going, you know. - In that, I think it's fantastic. And I often think that is the connection between some of the scientists who need the citizen scientists, and the citizen scientists who want to help, sometimes there's no bridge there. - Yeah. - And I think we really do, to really help flourish citizen science, to become kind of what the article discusses it, is their kind of revolution for marine science, and the revolution for conservation science in general, is building the connections. But how do we find better ways for this scientist, or these scientists working this area, to engage this scientific, these citizen science communities, so that they can best work together, stay engaged, keep projects running, and enroll as many citizen scientists as possible. - Absolutely, yeah. I think this is something that in the long term, we're gonna work on, because it's just, I think it's needed, and I think citizen science is on the rise. And more people are getting out when they do vacations, it's not necessarily just sitting on a beach. It's what's under the water. What's coming on the beach. You know, they're starting to ask questions, and it's time to let, and people are becoming more active on their vacations too. You know, and you see a lot of these projects popping up, and I think they're very valuable. - And I think you made a very nice point earlier when you said, well, I'm an internet guy, and I work online, and this is how I reach my communities, this is how I do my part. And what I think is cool about this, citizen science, this open-source-ness, is there's room for everyone. It says no longer just about, say, flight, Costa Rica, and working on a beach. We also, to be a citizen scientist, this could be analyzing data. And there's, what is the galaxy zoo where you can start to, this one example where you can be part of science, you can go on and you can go through these photos of the night sky, it's that identifying potentially unknown stars, things like this, should be part of the scientific discovery, you're sitting in your living room. And another great idea is even the, I know you made a podcast on this recently, and actually just managed to obtain one of these, was an open ROV. - Yes. - Yes, slowly in the process of building one. It's definitely not quite finished. I'm going through some of my kind of high school level soldiering to get back together. Hopefully, we want this all together. - That's awesome. - Not only work, but we watch proof. They're my goals. - Yes. - But you can be an inventor, and you can help science, and you can help science in ways you could never imagine by working on these products, and this open-source-ness to this thing, is being that whatever your skill set is, and whatever your interests are, through the power of the internet, you can be involved in countless projects, and countless ideas to change the world, make the world a better place, help conservation, progress science, all these things. You're an inventor, you could be sitting in your house in Indiana, and you can be helping marine conservation in the Philippines through your new way to develop the open ROV. Things like this, I think are fantastic. This is the blossoming flower of kind of citizen science. - Oh, no, I agree, and I think that's, especially for ocean citizen science, I think we need to build this community, this platform that people can share experiences with, 'cause a lot of times, you know, when you're looking at a trip to go somewhere, or even if you're going to do it locally, you want to know what the project's about, how the operator was, and was it a fun time, was it grueling, or something like that. So, you know, people want to make sure they know what they're going, getting into, because a lot of times, they just don't know, this could be a place where they could actually do so. So, we'll see if that comes out, I'm hoping that will. And, you know, we can get some citizen science projects in, and maybe we'll get the Leatherback Trust in it, maybe. - Yeah, if you ask nicely. (laughing) - I'll do it in my British way. (laughing) - There we go. - But no, I think this is a great, you know, I love ending the show on these kind of topics, 'cause like I said, citizen science is on a rise, it's gonna be here, we need it, as an ocean conservation society, we need it, and it just has to get done over and over again. So, this is great. But anyway, I'm gonna end it, 'cause we're just up on the hour on the show. But it's been fantastic having you on, Nathan, I really appreciate it, you coming on, and we'll have you back on again. (laughing) - Thank you very much, it's been an absolute blast, I love doing this instance. - Yeah, it's been so great, who knows where you're gonna be next time in Central America, maybe we can guess, I don't know, Honduras, maybe, do you go on the Caribbean side, or are you just mostly on the Caribbean side? - I've never been to the Caribbean side. - Okay, wow. - I've entirely stuck to the Pacific side. But we'll see, maybe just for the next, next time we invite me on, I'll go and take a trip, just to keep you guys guessing. - Yeah, you know, I think we're gonna have to have a segment, like where in the world is Nathan Robinson? (laughing) All right, maybe that's what we'll do, next time you're on, it's like, we're in the world, so you gotta come up with a new song every time. - So I'm gonna help the end of it. 'Cause I haven't actually moved that far from where it was before, the next time. - Yeah, no, I don't know, you're gonna have to, you could do, I mean, Australia. All of a sudden, just for the show, that's what we'll have to do. - Why not? - Exactly, yeah. - If you wanna fund Nathan Robinson to go to Australia for the next episode, go to patreon.com, or go to speakupforblue.com/patreon, support the show, and maybe one day, I'll put it on a goal that will send Nathan somewhere around the world in the real podcast. - Wherever you want. - Yeah, but I'm gonna tell you I'm going with him, and we're gonna do it live, and we're both gonna do it on the same camera, so. But no, if you wanna spend the podcast, you can go to speakupforblue.com/patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N, and support our work, and like I said, we wanna just bring you more information as many times as possible during the week, and just go in depth, more in depth on these articles, and just bring you ocean science and ocean conservation to your home while you're sitting at home, or while you're walking your dog, or while you're out for a jog, or while you're working out, or whatever you're doing when you're listening podcasts. So thank you very much, Nathan, again, I really appreciate it, it was been a lot of fun, and stay on the line, 'cause we're gonna chat for a little bit, but yeah, that's the end of the show. You've been listening to speakup for Blue Podcasts, it was Ocean Talk Friday, a great one too. Have a great Friday, have a great weekend, and have a conservation. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)