Speaker 1: This Pet Life Radio. Let's talk pets. Welcome to aquarium Mania.
Speaker 2: I'm your host, doctor Royanad speaking to you from the
University of Florida iphis Probable Aquaculture Laboratory.
Speaker 3: Thanks for joining us. Jacques Cousto introduced many of us
to a place both alien and beautiful, the underwater world.
Decades later, our oceans and marine ecosystems have gone through
significant changes.
Speaker 1: So what's happening down there?
Speaker 3: My guest today, Doctor Robbie Lamb, Faculty at the University
of Florida's School of Forest, Fisheries and Geomatic Sciences and
the Nature Coast Biological Station, is determined to answer that question.
Robbie's work in the Caribbean, South America and the US
helps explain how marine communities respond to this changing world.
Robbie's and his colleagues research has been highlighted by National
Geographic and.
Speaker 4: Most recently PBSS.
Speaker 3: OH and he used to be a professional basketball player
in Ecuador. Join us as Robbie shares his journey and insights.
Speaker 4: We'll be right back after these messages.
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Speaker 6: Let's talk pets on Petlife Radio dot com.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to aquarium Mania on pet Life Radio. My
guest today is doctor Robbie Lamb, marine ecologists and research
scientists based at the University of Florida's School of Forest,
Fisheries and Geomatic Sciences and the Nature Coast Biological Station.
Oh and he's also on nat gio and Pbstar, but
we'll talk about that later.
Speaker 4: Thanks for your time, Robbie. Thanks for having me, Roy
it's a pleasure.
Speaker 2: So with a lot of my guests, I like to
kind of get a little personal early on, get a
little feel for what kind of drove them into doing
what they do and who were some of your childhood
influences that got you interested in nature and marine life,
And I have to ask, of course, did you.
Speaker 4: Ever have an aquarium.
Speaker 7: I absolutely had an aquarium. We had in a freshwater
aquarium as I was growing up. I remember, I don't
remember exactly what kinds of fish we had, but we
had a couple different fish and some freshwater salamanders as well,
as I recall, So that was definitely something that I
spent long, long hours looking at when I was real small.
But I guess my first inspiration for being a biologist
came from my mother, who was an avid birdwatcher, and
that was something that she picked up from her grandfather,
her from her father, my grandfather, so this was really
kind of a family tradition at that point. And so
she would get me up at four thirty five in
the morning and I would be rubbing sleep out of
my eyes, but also pulling on these binoculars and getting
really excited about seeing a red tailed hawk or a
bald eagle. And so that kind of honed my observation
of wild life and nature and got me interest in
just seeing the diversity of life that is out there
in the world, and that kind of combined with watching
Jacques Cousteau documentaries as a child, and David Attenborough and
Crocodile Hunter shows and things like that about the wild
places that had still so much left to be explored
and discovered. In that sense of being able to observe wildlife,
observe nature, and be able to do scientific discovery was
really kind of what drew me into this field.
Speaker 2: So were there any high school experiences that were pretty
impactful for you, both either life wise or career wise.
Speaker 4: Absolutely.
Speaker 7: I have to say that for all those parents out there,
they're thinking about their kids and what they want their
kids to be able to do and experience in life.
I think that when you're in high school, you're in
this very sensitive, fragile time when there's a lot of
opportunity to grow and expand your horizons. And my mother,
again keep coming back to her, but she was fundamental
in exposing me to some new opportunities that I hadn't
even crossed my mind as possibilities at the time, but
she came across them and kind of fed them my
way and opened my.
Speaker 4: Eyes to a lot of possibilities.
Speaker 7: So one of them was there was a scuba diving
training and sort of marine science field course in the
Caribbean in the US Virgin Islands that you had to
pay quite a bit for At the time, I think
it was like twenty five hundred dollars.
Speaker 4: It was a lot of money.
Speaker 7: It was more than I could, you know, make myself
as a as a high school student working and so
my mother was able to get a scholarship or help
me get a scholarship for this course, and I went
down for four weeks of learning how to scuba dive
and learning how to be sort of a core reef
not biologist yet, but certainly someone who appreciates it and
is able to you know, identify species of Cora reef
fish and start thinking about how these ecosystems are put together.
And so that was really my first experience of working underwater,
seeing things with my own eyes. You know, when you
see the surface of the water, it's easy to think
that there's not a lot of life out there because
it's just this blank canvas. But once you put on
a mask and you dip your head into the surface
and you see what's truly out there, it's just this
rich world of colors and shapes and swirling particles of
water and fish and algae, and it's just the most
beautiful tapestry of life. So the second that I did that,
I was hooked forever. Like at that point, I knew
I was going to become a marine biologist. The other
thing that I'd like to thank my mother for is
that she sent me, didn't send me, but she encouraged
me to go on exchange as a high school student.
So I went to the Ecuador for a year in
my junior year of high school as a rotary exchange student.
I lived with two different host families. Over the course
of that year, became very integrated into those families. I
learned Spanish, I did a lot of volunteer work in
the town that I lived in, which was Porto of Vieho,
a very not that small but kind of isolated town,
doesn't have a lot of tourist visiting or anything like that.
So it was a real immersive experience and just a
very rewarding life changing experience that again my mother really
encouraged me to do, and that really kind of opened
my mind to some of the international context of the
world that we live in, this global society that we
live in. I think that the exchange programs like the
Rotary one are really fundamental for generating world peace because
they show you how somebody else lives and kind of
open your mind to other possibilities. And once we open
our mind to those different possibilities, we become that much
less biased and closed minded to other cultures and other
ways of seeing the world. So those two experiences really
kind of shaped who I became afterwards, which is I
guess an international marine biologist.
Speaker 2: Yeah, those both sounded incredible. Would have definitely would I
love to do that. So let's talk a little bit
fast forward a bit and talk a little bit about
college and experiences after What did you end up studying
college and did you have any experiences during your undergrad
that most influenced you.
Speaker 4: So I was a biology major.
Speaker 7: I went to Oregon State University, Go Beavers, one of
the fiercest mascots in the country.
Speaker 4: But it was a fantastic school.
Speaker 7: It was a state school, you know, state university, and
much like the University of Florida where I am now,
it's a land grant university. It's actually one of the
I think there's only one other university. It's both a
land grant a sea grant and a space grant, so
they do a lot of really high level research across
the board. And I got involved very early on with
the lab of doctor Mark Hickson, who's a pretty well
known core ref ecologist. He's now at the University of Hawaii,
but at the time he was at Oregon State and
as a freshman, we had a seminar series where they
would bring in biologists of different fields, you know, people
that had gone through biology as an undergrad and then
gone into different fields of science or industry, medicine. We had,
you know, a doctor come, we had a nurse come
and give a talk. And so each week somebody would
come from different fields of biology and give a talk
about what it's like to be in their career path
and how they got there from being an undergraduate biology major.
So one of those talks was by doctor Hickson, and
he was a professor at Oregon State. Like I said,
So he gave his talk and I went up to
him at the end of the talk and I said, hello,
my name is Robbie.
Speaker 4: I want to do what you do.
Speaker 7: Maybe you'd have some opportunities for me working in your
lab or something like that. So that I can kind
of learn how this path might unfold, and he was
really gracious and opened, you know, space in his lab
for me to come work. What I started doing was
they had this really interesting experiment that they were working
with these territorial damselfish. So damselfish lay eggs on the
seafloor and they guard those eggs really viciously from potential
egg predators, but they also guard the territories where those
eggs are laid, and those territories are sort of an
indicator to potential mates of the strength of territoriality of
the fish. You know, if I'm able to protect this
garden really well from potential herbivores or other things that
would want to eat what's there, I'm also really going
to be good at protecting your eggs. So they took
advantage of the fact that these guys like to lay
eggs on sheltered surfaces. They would put these PVC tubes
out underwater and line them with an acetate sheet like
an old projector slide kind of sheet. Then when the
fish lay the eggs on the inside of the tube,
they could pull that acetate sheet out and lay it
out into a two dimensional egg patch, which are. You know,
eggs are laid in sort of one layer, and so
by calculating the air the area of that egg patch,
we could then figure out what the fecundity or reproductive
output of those fish was. So I first started off
in this lab reading these digital images and calculating area
and then dividing that by the area the circumference of
a single egg, and you would get the total number
of eggs a reproductive output. And that's really fundamental information
for studying things like fisheries biology and population genetics. So
he opened up a space in his lab doing this
sort of not menial work but certainly it's not out
scuba diving on a core reef, but still it was
working in this field and opening up a chance to
see what that research was really like. And that's actually
a model that I've kind of taken on as a
as a professor at University of Floor to myself, is
that you give students the opportunity to kind of show
their worth and their interest level with one of these
sort of data processing type of jobs. Once I was
kind of doing well in that and showing my motivation
and dedication to that work, doctor Hickson allowed me to
start looking into ways of funding my own way to
go to the Bahamas, which is where he was doing
his field work each summer, and so I obtained a
couple of undergraduate research fellowships. And for those of you
who are undergraduates currently or who have kids that are
undergraduate students and universities, look out for these research fellowships
because they often open a lot of doors in terms
of field opportunities for research with professors that otherwise don't
have the funds to bring you with them. And so
that's how I kind of paid my way to the
Bahamas and was able to do my own undergraduate research
with doctor Hickson and so out in the Bahamas. You know,
this is basically working for three months straight, every single
day under the water for four to eight hours. It
was a dream. It was like I finally felt like
this is what life is all about. It was so
great and obviously challenging work as well. You know, you're wet,
you're tired, you're cold throughout most of the day, but
really rewarding work because I got to be, you know,
a part of these core reef ecosystems and see them
from the bottom up. I was able to publish an
undergraduate thesis project as a result of that work, and
learned sort of the basics of what it takes to
do underwater research, which is a whole field into itself.
Speaker 2: Well, that definitely prepped you for what you're doing. Now
we have to do a really minor break and talk
about some Robbie Lamb trivia. So can you, very briefly
kind of tell us how you became a basketball star
in Ecuador.
Speaker 7: So basketball is not the most popular sport in Ecuador,
not by a long shot. But when I moved down
down there in two thousand and four, after or two
thousand and eight, I'm sorry, when I finished college, I
had been playing basketball at Oregon State as part of
the practice squad that would practice practice against the main team,
you know, the varsity team, and give them sort of
a sparring partner, so to speak. So I was a
decent basketball player, but like I didn't even make my
own high school varsity basketball team.
Speaker 4: I wasn't good enough. But when I moved down.
Speaker 7: To Ecuador, suddenly I was like the tallest guy on
the court and I could handle the ball a little bit,
so very quickly I got roped into this professional basketball
league in Ecuador, and so we would travel by bus
to different cities each weekend and play in these tournaments
and sign autographs and all this stuff. I never made
any money out of it, you know, it was pretty
much enough to pay your bus fare, but it was
still a lot of fun. And yeah, a little side
note away from marine biology.
Speaker 4: That's awesome. So let's talk graduate studies. Now.
Speaker 2: What made you decide to go to graduate school.
Speaker 4: And where did you go?
Speaker 7: So I didn't have probably the most typical progression from
undergraduate to graduate school, but I always had a graduate
school on my horizon. I always knew that that was
something that I wanted to pursue, because from the get go,
I was attracted to a lifetime of study and learning
about the ocean. It really was more than a job
for me. It was a passion. It was something that
I knew that I was always going to want to pursue.
And so following a graduate program of research and marine
science allows you to design a job around that pursuit.
And I always knew that was going to be the
thing for me.
Speaker 4: But when I.
Speaker 7: Graduated college, I actually started off with a Fulbright fellowship
to go back to Ecuador, where I had worked and
lived before, and I started working in fisheries, sustainability and
the development of rural fisheries and coastal Ecuador. So a
Fulbright grant, this is another fellowship opportunity for those of
you out there interested, take a good look at this one.
They're available not just for recent postgraduates from college, but
for professionals of all ages. So these Fullbright grants are
very similar to a year long exchange program in that
you go to another country and you really immerse yourself
in that country's culture, You learn the local language. You
usually work with a local partner to develop some kind
of research project. Right after college, I received one of
these grants to go to Ecuador and work with a
series of small fishing villages along the coast of the
northern province of Esmeraldas in Ecuador to develop sustainable fishing
practices and to try to get these fisheries certified under
international sustainable fisheries paradigms, which would allow them to export
their fish at a higher value per fish and also
improve the sustainability of the fishery. And so I would
go out with these guys sword fishing. We would go
out for three or four days at a time in
a fifteen foot open fiberglass boat up to one hundred
miles offshore. It was really harsh, harsh conditions exposed to
this tropical sunlight, the wind, the waves twenty four to
seven in at night. We would sleep in the basin
of the boat, the bottom of the boat with fish
guts and squid kind of slotching around around us. So
it was really quite something to see how these people
live and how they make a living off of the seed.
Really eye opening experience. For another reason, which was that
after a year of heavily investing in these communities, we
did make a lot of progress. But at the same time,
there were outside influences that were undermining our ability to
make progress. Merchants that saw our efforts which would divert
the production of these fisheries into an international export, they
started to undermine our relationship with the community by spreading
lies about embeztment and things like this, and so our
connections with those communities were really aligned.
Speaker 4: By that type of.
Speaker 7: Lies basically, And the problem with these types of issues
is that when you try to generate a new economic model,
if you leave people out of it, they are going
to find ways to undermine that new economic model, and
we hadn't taken into account the local merchants that were
going to be losing their livelihoods essentially because of this
new product export idea that we had, So that really
kind of shifted my focus back towards biology. I got
the sense that working with humans was too challenging for me.
These are fickle, fickle beings that will say one thing
today and say something completely different than next. And so
really my pursuit and my attraction to biology is that
there's a natural world out there that operates under relatively
fixed rules, and it's up to us to kind of
learn and understand what those rules are. But they are
reliable over time, whereas with humans there's just this whole
other dimension that comes into it. So I really enjoy
sort of the hard and fast nature of biology. I
suppose as a result.
Speaker 2: Of that, deciding to go and where you ended up
going for grad school, Yes, sorry, got sidetracked a bit,
So that experience of going on a full bright year
kind of set my course back towards empirical science. So
I decided that I wanted to get a graduate degree
in marine ecology, and first I did that as through
a master's program. So I got a master's degree at
the Universilad San Francisco Atquito, which is a university in Quito, Ecuador.
I was looking at biogeography of inner title communities along
the coastline of Ecuador, because Ecuador is at the confluence
of warm water coming down from the north from sort
of the around the coast of Panama and Columbia and
colder water coming up from the from the south along
the coast of Chile Improved. So those two warm and
cold water currents mix around the coastline of Ecuador, and
so I was really interested in seeing how intertidal ecological
communities varied with proximity to these cold and warm water currents.
Speaker 7: While I was doing my master's degree, I sort of
just by happenstance met the person who would end up
being my PhD advisor, who is John Whitman. John was
a university professor at Brown University where he still is currently,
and at the time he was doing research in the
Glopagos at the same time that I just happened to
be there, and so I got to meet John and
go diving with him a couple of days and saw
what his field operation looked like, and I was just
immediately hooked.
Speaker 4: I thought, this is for me.
Speaker 7: The Glopagos Islands are obviously this incredible place full of
marine diversity, one of the most productive marine ecosystems in
the planet, and here was this really well renowned professor
that was doing high level work there. It seemed like
the perfect marriage of my passions, which was Ecuador.
Speaker 4: And marine ecology.
Speaker 7: So I wrote to John and said, hey, I'm looking
for a graduate program. He said, I'm looking for a
graduate student, and it just kind of worked out that way.
Speaker 4: That's awesome.
Speaker 2: So actually I had one more quick question before we
take a break. We're going to talk more about some
of your work with John, But were there any real
valuable lessons or what would you consider some of the
most valuable lessons you.
Speaker 7: Got from John oh Man. John Whitman is a class act.
Let me tell you, he is one of the most positive, hardworking,
and personable scientists that you will ever.
Speaker 4: Meet in your life.
Speaker 7: From the day that I met him, John has always
had a smile on his face. And this doesn't matter
if it's raining or shining outside. One of the first
and strongest lessons that I learned from John was about
keeping a positive attitude and seeking out an answer in
a way of solving things even in the face of
calamitous circumstances. So the very first summer that I spent
in the Glopagos with John, I was helping out on
an experiment that they had running where they were filming
interactions between fish, urchins, and algae over the full daylight
and night time period, so twenty four hours a day.
And so they were filming this using time lapse camera systems,
and then at night, those time lapse camera systems had
an external flash that would light up the scene. And
so these experiments were intended to test a trophic cascade,
which is the idea that if you change the abundance
of top predators, that change in top predator abundance will
change the abundance of herbivores, and that change in herbivore
abundance will change the abundance of plants. And this is
a well known paradigm in ecological theory, but it's been
rarely tested underwater. So they had this great experimental setup
looking at predators of urchins, so fish that would eat urchins.
Urchins would eat algae and all lit up with this
custom made like two hundred thousand dollars video system for
underwater filming. And the very first night that we set
this all up, you know, it was probably six hours
of consecutive dives trying to get this all set up
perfectly on tripods, filming the whole scene, making sure the
flashes were working, and we pressed record and saw the
little red light blinking away, and we went back up
to the surface and had dinner and a good night's sleep,
thinking that we had this great experiment rolling. The next day,
we dove back down, pulled up the system, opened up
the canister to download the video files, and it was
full of water. The whole thing had flooded overnight. And
the problem was that we had a canister that was
housing the battery and the memory cards for the video,
and that had these hoses that were connected to the
lights and the cameras, and in each of those hose
to compartment connections there were weak points, and with the
waves and the motion in the ocean, all of that
caused it to leak. So this was you know, years
of and the hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment
up to this point. And what did John do. Well,
he looked in there, he said one f word expletive,
and then he said, well, we're just gonna get go
pros out and we'll film it during the day and
we'll continue forward with the experiment and we'll just not
worry about the night time stuff. And he did it,
and he got an ecology paper out of it, which
is a really high level journal in our field. So
that lesson to you know, keep your head up and
not take no for an answer when life is going
to give you lemons, you got to figure out a
way to make lemonade. And in science, and particular in
field science, you often have these issues arise. You know,
things don't work the way they're supposed to. Natural elements
break things all the time. And just keeping focus on
your goal, which is answering that scientific question and not
allowing those types of setbacks to really change your focus,
you can come up with a really good solution at
the end. And that was a really fundamental lesson I
got from John.
Speaker 4: Awesome.
Speaker 2: Awesome, And yeah, for our listeners, I did have an
opportunity to work with Robbie and I see where a
lot of his coolness in the face of our our adversities,
Kim came from now So I appreciate that, Robbie. So
let's take a short break and we'll continue our discussion
with University of Florida Marina collegist and flop expert Robbie.
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Speaker 2: We're back in continuing our conversation with my guests, doctor
Robbie Lamb, Marini collogist and research scientists at the University
of Florida.
Speaker 4: So, Robie, we talked a little.
Speaker 2: Bit about your background and how you got can do
positive attitude that I was able to witness often. Let's
talk a little bit about your research and your current
research and maybe some of the past. Can you explain
in general, I guess what questions you are trying to answer.
I know, there's many different questions, but maybe kind of
as like a whole what sort of things are you,
you know, trying to look at And we'll talk more
specifics later.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So I think.
Speaker 7: Pretty much all of my research can be summed up
as trying to understand how environmental change is affecting marine
life on our planet. And so I look at a
variety of types of environmental change, but for the most part,
we're looking at temperature change, which is really the largest,
most fundamental change that humans are exacting upon our planet,
which is climate change via the increase in carbon dioxide
concentrations in the atmosphere, and so the warming of the
Earth's atmosphere and by virtue of that, the warming of
the Earth's oceans is expected to have all kinds of ramifications.
And I've been trying to test some of those predictions
of how things might change, using either natural variation in
temperature that exists in geographic or temporal change of temperature
over time, and also doing experiments both in the laboratory
and underwater that try to test the mechanisms that explain
why things change when temperature or other types of environmental
change occur. So a couple of examples of this are
we're looking right now at how food webs are affected
by temperature change in the Glopagos Islands. So temperature increases
in the ocean tend to stratify the surface waters. And
what I mean by stratification is you get a lens
of really warm water that sits on the surface of
the ocean, and that warm water lens usually has very
little nutrients and life in it, especially in the tropics.
So we all know that plants need nutrients to grow, right.
If there isn't a lot of mixing of the surface waters,
that means that the plants that are living up in
the very shallowest band of the ocean utilize the nutrients
that are there. Then they either get eaten or they die.
And when they leave the ecosystem because they've been consumed
or they sink, there's very little nutrients to replenish what
they've consumed. So temperature increases in the ocean are expected
to increase that stratification of the surface waters and reduce
the amount of nutrients availability available for photosynthesis. So in
the Glopagos Islands, there is a natural spatial gradient and
temperature of about three degrees centigrade, and three degrees might
not sound like a whole lot, but the ocean is
an incredible buffer of temperature change. It takes a lot
of energy to change water even one degree centigrade, and
the oceans are enormous, so it takes a lot of
heat to change the oceans by one degree centigrade. And also,
most of the organisms that live in the oceans are ectothermic.
That means that their body temperature mirrors the temperature of
the waters in which they find themselves. And so unlike
a human which can go from the Arctic all the
way to the Equator and not feel too terribly put
out by that fact, you know, you might have to
take off a few jackets. But humans are able to
modulate our temperatures regardless of the external temperature. A fish
doing that same migration would suffer a huge physiological change
because the rate of metabolic processes is directly scaled to temperature.
Speaker 5: And so.
Speaker 7: If this warming continues to progress as we as we've
seen it progress already, there is this expectation that the
surface oceans will become impoverished of nutrients, and that will
reduce the amount of primary production and energy available to
flow through food webs and generate biomass at higher levels
for things like seabirds and sharks and so on. So
we're using this natural spatial grading and temperature and also
temporal change in temperature, because there are years when the
waters are really warm in the Glopagos. Those tend to
be Alninia years, and there are warm years where the
waters tend to be very cold, which are the Latinia years.
And so we have this temporal change in temperature and
a spatial gradient in temperature, and we're using both of
those to examine how food webs change when the oceans
warm up.
Speaker 2: So, I guess talking a little bit more about the Globigos,
you had some kind of interesting findings when you were there,
I guess twenty sixteen or twenty seventeen. You want to
talk a little bit about maybe some of the things
that you see that appear to be temperature related.
Speaker 7: Alnina related, absolutely, So I mentioned this al Nino effect.
So al Nino occurs when the trade winds, which are
normally blowing constantly from east to west, those slow down
during al Nino years, and the fact of those winds
slowing down causes the surface currents that those winds are
constantly blowing westward to also slow down. When that happens,
the upwelling of cold, nutrient rich water to the surface stops.
It's like a conveyor belt that's driven by these trade winds,
and so when the trade winds stop, that conveyor belt
also stops. And the Glopagos are located at the epicenter
of al Nino phenomenon in the ocean, which is this
eastern tropical Pacific area right off the coast of Ecuador
and where the Glopagos are located in al nino event
signifies substantial warming of the surface waters of the ocean
anywhere from one and a half to three and a
half degrees centigrade and that can last for about six
to twelve months. So I mentioned that most organisms in
the ocean are ecothermic means means that their body temperature
changes with the temperature around them. So there's two things
that happen during temperature increases in the ocean. One is
that the metabolic rates of micro organisms, things like bacteria
and viruses, speeds up a lot. Their metabolism is also
link to temperature, and so those microorganisms suddenly are able
to reproduce a lot faster and they become more pathogenic.
That means that they incite and cause disease at a
much faster rate than in colder, normal temperatures. The other
thing that happens, as I mentioned, is that the fish
and other organisms that are consuming that are out there
trying to forage and feed in the water. They are
also speeding up their metabolic rates because of warmer temperatures,
so they need more food. All of this is happening
at the same time as the waters are stratifying, so
the nutrient availability in the photic zone, which is where
light is available for photosynthesis in the surface of the ocean,
also decreases. So suddenly fish have high metabolic rates. They
need a lot of food. There isn't much food, and
the microorganisms that might cause disease are just going like gangbusters.
So this is a perfect storm of conditions where you
have basically starving fish that are immunocompromised because of the
lack of food, that are being infected at higher rates
by these microorganisms that are more pathogenic than normal because
of warmer water temperatures. So in twenty fifteen twenty sixteen,
in the Glopagos, we had one of the strongest al
Nino events in recorded history. That event sparked what we
know now to be this alterative skin disease that affected
at least sixteen different species of fish in the Glopagos.
And what I mean by alterative skin disease is these
small patches of skin that start off looking almost like
a patch of mold that starts to grow in a
spherical shape, and then the scales start to fall off,
and you get X. You get this exposure of the
subcutaneous tissue. It's red, it's kind of leeching blood out
into the water. It's really ugly, and those lesions grow
and they combine, and eventually you can get most of
the body of the fish has lost its scales and
it's looking really bad, and they can lose the ability
to swim if it affects their fins. So it's a
really ugly disease that fortunately disappeared as soon as that on.
The new events subsided and the water is resumed back
to their normal, cooler temperatures. But certainly it's an issue
that is becoming more common with warmer oceans that we're
seeing more of these wildlife disease outbreaks, and you know,
a lot of ultertive skin diseases are common in conditions
where you get high densities of fish and a sort
of stagnant water conditions, So places like aquaculture pens, even
aquaria that aren't properly cleaned, you get these kinds of
ulcerative skin diseases quite commonly. But in contrast, the Galopagos
Islands are this oceanic island group that's a thousand kilometers
off the coast of mainland South America, really really far
from any sources of coastal contamination or pollution, really well
mixed water with a lot of wave action and currents,
So certainly not the conditions that you would expect would
generate this type of an alterative skin disease outbreak. But
in this twenty fifteen to sixteen event, this al Nino,
such an outbreak occurred and in some species and in
some places, the prevalence rates reached over fifty percent, I mean,
the over half of all of the fish in some
islands showed these ulstertive skin lesions. So certainly it's something
that we know is linked to these warm water events
caused by allino, but the exact mechanism of that disease
pathogenesis we still haven't figured out yet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's definitely definitely a challenge doing anything kind of
with wild fisheries. So since you mentioned that obviously and
started talking about the Galapagos, maybe can you describe a
little bit about what makes the Galapagos kind of so unique,
you know, biologically, so.
Speaker 7: Tropical waters normally have this really strong thermicline, which means
that the surface waters are very warm, and there aren't
many nutrients available in those warm surface waters for photosynthesis
to occur. The Glopagos are located right on the equator,
so that means that they have tropical solar radiation year round.
They have all the light that you could possibly want,
and in contrast to most other tropical seas, they don't
have as much nutrient limitation. And the reason for this
is that there's a couple of cold water currents that
hit the Galopagos Islands, and it just happens to be
that that archipelago is located at the confluence of two
of these cold water currents. One of them is called
the Humboldt Current, which comes from Antarctica up the coast
of Chile and Peru and then starts to diverge westward
and hits the Glopagos Islands. There's also the Cromwell or
Equatorial undercurrent, which is a subsurface current that's traveling at
about three hundred feet depth across the Pacific from west
to east. Now, when that current hits the Glopagos platform,
it's pushed up to the surface and again brings cold,
nutrient rich water up to the surface where photosynthesis can occur.
So you have the combination of tropical sunlight and really
high levels of nutrients being delivered to the surface, and
that fuels a unique, highly productive marine ecosystem, one of,
if not the most productive ecosystems in all of the
world's oceans. Another reason why the Glopgos are unique is
that they have not really been inhabited for that long.
There's only been permanent human habitation of the islands for
about one hundred years, and for most of that time,
there weren't many people moving to the Glopagos because there
weren't many services, there wasn't much water, it's a really
difficult place to make a living. And then in the fifties,
Ecuador declared the entire archipelago as a national park. And
this was a really forward thinking move by the Ecuadorian
government because as a result, the Glopagos Islands are incredibly
well preserved. Ninety seven percent of the land area of
the Glopagos are off limits national park. You can't move there,
you can't cut down forest, you can't have agriculture there,
and so only three percent of the land area is
available for cities to grow, for agriculture to take place,
for industry to have its home, and that's really limited.
The growth of the population in the Glopagos, all that
has translated into minimal effects of humans on the marine environment.
So it's still a place that you can go and see,
you know, large sharks, large group or large snapper. If
you go for a snorkel or a scuba dive anywhere
in the Globgos, you will see all of these things.
And in contrast, much of the rest of the world's
oceans and coastal reefs are fished of many of these
large predators because they are the most attractive for recreational
and commercial fisheries. So we have a really intact marine
ecosystem that's fueled by one of the most productive combinations
of nutrients and solar radiation in the entire world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely a beautiful place. I appreciated your having me
work with you there. Let's shift a little bit back
to the US and North America. You had a chance
to do some work in the Gulf of Maine, and
we had the opportunity to watch you and John and
some of your other colleagues on the relatively recent PBS
series see Change Parallel the Gulf of Maine when we
were over in the Galapagos. So how did you get
involved in that work in the first place, and what
was kind of the goal of the research there. Yeah.
Speaker 7: So Cassius Ledge is a seamount right in the middle
of the Gulf of Maine. It's about eighty miles east
of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and much of the Gulf of
Maine is a sediment bed, and it's really it's the
outflow of the Appalachian Mountains as they've been eroded over
millennia by glaciers and rainfall. All of that rock and
mud has been piling up in the Gulf of Maine,
and so it's this really productive but sedimented that means
like a soft bottom area that's relatively shallow at about
two hundred and fifty feet deep. Now, Cassius Ledge is
a rocky seamount that sticks up from this surrounding soft
bottom habitat. And there's a major difference between hard and
soft habitats in the ocean. Hard structures, things like rock
or coral, are places where both plants and animals can
attach themselves and grow, and there's a lot of organisms
things like kelp, things like corals, things like barnacles that
require a hard substrate to attach to in order to grow.
Other things require sediment. Then they burrow down into sediment
and live in sediment habitats. But the fact that Cassius
Ledge exists in the middle of this sediment at habitat
means that there's suddenly this rocky, hard substrate for things
to attach to. It also comes up to about forty
feet deep below the surface, so it doesn't actually break
the surface. That's why it's a sea mount and not
an island. But it comes to pretty close to the surface,
which means that things like algae and kelp can grow
on this rocky platform and take advantage of light coming
down from the sun. So Cassius Ledge as a result
supports one of the largest and most productive kelp forests
in the entire Gulf of Maine. These beautiful lamonaryan Lamonary
digitata and lemon area laun cruris. These kelps reach up
to fifteen feet in length and they do form a canopy,
so you can be hunkered down at the base of
these celp fronds and look up and see them swaying
back and forth over your head. Kasha's Sledge also supports
one of the last healthy cod populations remaining in the
Gulf of Maine, and the fact that it supports these
healthy cod populations suggests that Kasha's Ledge could be a
refuge for cod and that those individuals living at cashus
Ledge could actually seed other places in the Gulf of
Maine that have been overfished and fished completely out of cod.
So my PhD advisor, John Whitman at Brown University, has
been working at cashus Ledge and in the Gulf of
Maine since the seventies. I was brought into working there
by him in twenty fourteen when we embarked on an
effort to describe why cashius Ledge scientifically from a scientific perspective,
how is it ecologically important, what is unique about it,
how does it compare to the rest of the Gulf
of Maine, And should we be considering protecting Casha's Sledge
as some form of marine reserve in order to protect
these unique kelp forest and cod populations that we know.
Speaker 4: That it supports.
Speaker 7: So we started doing these surveys in twenty fourteen comparing
Casha Sledge to other parts of the Gulf of Maine,
and we've continued that work today to look at not
only how does Casha Sledge compare to other parts in
the same region, but how has it changed, How has
it changed since the seventies and eighties when John Whitman
was first working there until now, and also how has
it changed since twenty fourteen until now because this last
decade has seen some of the rapid warming that we
know that climate change is responsible for, and the Gulf
of Maine is one of the fastest warming bodies of
water in the entire world's oceans. So this effort is
scientific at its heart. We are trying to describe this
unique place, what makes it unique, some of the processes
that help sustain it, And we're also working on the
legislative side, so we're working with a variety of lawmakers,
nonprofit organizations, and local stakeholders to actually gain protections for
Cash Sledge as this sanctuary as one of these last
holdouts of a healthy ecosystem in the Gulf of Maine.
Speaker 2: It was great and you had a really colorful cap
I have to mention for the folks that haven't seen
it yet, but definitely encourage our listeners to watch it.
Speaker 4: So, yeah, I was working with the PBS crew. Well,
it was kind of funny.
Speaker 7: I gotta say. We didn't really know what to expect
when we hit it out there. There were great people,
really friendly, really curious and genuinely interested in the work
that we were doing.
Speaker 4: But it was also kind of silly.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 7: You'd go through twenty thirty minutes of getting all your
Scooba gear on and checking and double checking everything, and
then getting your gear and you're about to jump in
the water, and then a cameraman.
Speaker 4: Comes up and says, hey, hey, that was really great.
Can you do all that again?
Speaker 7: But let me film it, And so then you'd have
to take off all your setup and your you know,
forty pounds of scuba gear. But in the end it
was it was obviously worth it. They got a great
product out of it. I highly recommend that you guys
check out the documentary. It's free, it's on PBS. It's
also on YouTube. Just look up a parallel the Gulf
of Maine or Sea Change Gulf of Maine, and again
it's on PBS and Nova. But it was also quite
something to work with the underwater filmographers. These are, you know,
professional videographers that do work for documentaries and things, and
they have these ultra high speed cameras. They also use
rebreather systems, which means that you don't exhale bubbles and
it recirculates the air back into your system and that
allows them to get really close up shots of fish
and other organisms that might otherwise be scared off by bubbles.
So the footage in this documentary is really spectacular, and
I think it really conveys the magic of what it
feels like to be down there on cash a sledge
on this culp forest.
Speaker 2: Thanks and yeah, although See Change was the title of
the series, I think that's kind of appropriate for what's
happening all over the place. Can you maybe give us
a brief perspective on how you think things are going overall,
and maybe what you think can be done or is
being done to try to maybe mitigate or stabilize some
of these systems.
Speaker 7: Yeah, we know that we're changing things at an ever
faster rate and in so many different ways. You know,
I just talked about temperature change, but there's all these
other things that humans are doing, things like overfishing, pollution,
We're changing the pH of the oceans and making them
more acidic, and all these things. While they have happened
in the past over longer time scales and due to
natural reasons, we're making all of these changes go a
lot lot faster, and they're so fast that they're faster
than the capacity of organisms to evolve to adapt to
these new conditions. So I think we're really facing some
catastrophic change in the very near future, and we've already
seen some catastrophic change. But at the same time, we've
seen all kinds of new adaptations by humans to try
to make things better for us and for the wildlife
that we rely on. So, for instance, aquaculture the production
of fish food for humans as opposed to extractive fisheries
that are simply going out there and catching wild animals
aquaculture productions surpassed wildcought fisheries in twenty fourteen, and that
trend will never reverse again. So from now on, aquaculture
will produce more food for humans than wildcot fisheries forever.
And that's actually a good thing. That means that we're
actually starting to take more responsibility for the production of
seafood as opposed to simply going out there and taking
what's there.
Speaker 4: Also, I see a.
Speaker 7: Lot of hope in places like the Glopagos, places where
I see school children that are, you know, five ten
years old walking to school with backpacks where they've made
a little drying of a hammerhead shark or a manta ray,
and you see murals decorating the walls all along the
road saying, you know, let's take care of our oceans,
let's take care of our resources. So there are places
in the world where people are actively working to make
solutions and generate a different mentality with regard to our
natural resources, one of stewardship, not one of extraction. So
I do see a lot of hope for the future,
especially in our youth, and these new movements to place
more value on intact ecosystems. Also from a scientific perspective.
We're starting to understand a lot more about what makes
ecosystems tick, what's required for a healthy ecosystem. How can
we utilize things like living shorelines, so the use of
organic materials like mangroves that are growing along shorelines as
opposed to simply putting a concrete barrier there to protect
things from storms. Starting to learn ways to work with
nature as opposed to against nature, to address issues that
are affecting all of us, things like coastal erosion.
Speaker 4: And storm impacts.
Speaker 7: So I do see a lot of hope for the
future in these new initiatives as well.
Speaker 4: It's good to hear.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately we're out of time, but I definitely want to
thank our guest doctor Robbie Lamb and our producer Mark
Winner for making the show possible. So Robbie, any final
words of wisdom for anyone interested in studying marine life
and or who wants to help push things in the right.
Speaker 4: Direction, well please stick with it. We need you.
Speaker 7: We need good people working on solutions. We need good
scientists trying to better our understanding of how the world works.
We need advocates for our oceans. We need storytellers and communicators.
We need people out there doing positive stories, not just
negative stories. But where are we finding victories, where are
we seeing change in the right way. We really need
to highlight those stories, because you can only get so
far with these stories of doom and gloom. So I
always like to end things on a positive note and
just say that I see a lot of a lot
of potential for improving the way that we interact with
our oceans and with our natural resources. And I really
thank you as well, Roy for having me on your
show and for having this podcast in the first place,
which I think has really reached a large audience of
folks that are that much better informed about marine issues
and aquarium issues. So thank you and thank you again
for having.
Speaker 2: Me No problem of pleasure. Please be sure to check
out Robbie's weblinks, which will be found on as a
Quarumina episode page. If you have any questions, comments, or
ideas for a show, email me at doctor Roy at
petlife Radio dot com. That's Dr ro o Y at
petlife radio dot com. Until next time, please visit your
local quam stores and keep your tanks clean and your
fish healthy, and do your part to help restore and
foster our marine ecosystems, diversity and beauty for both the
health of our planet and for future generations.
Speaker 6: Let's Talk pets every week on demand only on petlive
radio dot com.