Blending art and science

September 3, 2012

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Editor’s note: This week, Aaron Hartmann is preparing for coral spawning in the Caribbean. He arranged for a guest post from Nayantara Jain, a masters student at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla.

When I was in high school, I thought science was all about memorizing the order of elements I would never see, figuring out the difference between direct and alternating currents and finding the boiling points of random liquids.

In a physics class once, I was asked to find the boiling point of one such highly-flammable liquid – toluene – and I nearly set my hand on fire. I ran out with a test tube ablaze in my hand. I doused the flame in the toilet outside and never fully entered a lab again.

More than ten years after that unfortunate incident I find myself in a masters program at Scripps.

I have always thought of myself as a humanities sort of person. I never even liked to be referred to as a “social sciences” student, because I thought philosophy – which was the focus of my bachelor’s degree – was about the mind and analytical thought rather than some method-based science involving hypothesis, lab experiments and disproving with a margin of statistical uncertainty.

This was my error, and I think many people share the same. So what changed?

Curiosity. It may have killed the cat, but it gave birth to a scientist. A series of events after my undergraduate degree led to me living and working as a scuba diving instructor in the Andaman Islands. Inspired by the beauty around me, my writing flourished.

I wrote about the different fish I’d see, about interesting dives, about amusing guests I encountered. I worked for a year assisting biologists collecting underwater data at an island ecology research base called the Andaman & Nicobar Environmental Team, and I began asking questions.

I wondered why nudibranches were so colourful. I wondered why the coral was dying in some places but thriving in others. I wondered why sometimes the ocean was murky, and why sometimes the currents were strong. I wondered why the surface was sometimes still as glass, and sometimes frothing and rough. I realized that the questions inspired art, and that the answers were found in science.

So I applied to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD, where scientists were answering questions like mine. I arrived in San Diego only the night before my program began. Compared to a remote island with no running water, scarce electricity and sporadic dial-up internet, San Diego was an enormous change.

And yet what scared me most was not any of the lifestyle changes, but the fact that I was about to be surrounded by, compared to and working with scientists. I had a picture of science in my head, I guess, and while I wanted to know what they did, I was still wary.

What did I find? I found that science was all about finding out more about what you loved. I met a surfer doing a doctoral work on waves. I met a long-haired professor who has the most intriguing coral facts and looks just like a fellow diving instructor (missing only a tan).

I met a guy who has the immensely envious job of flying a small aircraft low over the ocean to photograph whales. I met a professor who tells the most beautiful stories about how life diversified, and knows more about worms than I thought there was to know.

I went on research ships where I held fish that had been brought up from thousands of metres under the sea and saw mola-molas and dolphins and whales at the surface.

The first time I looked under a microscope I saw a teeny-tiny little crustacean, replete with all his arms and legs and organs and colours. When I picked him out of the petridish with tweezers he looked no different than a grain of sand. Yet here he was, from hundreds of meters below the surface, a fully functioning living being with stories of his own to tell.

Stories — one of the main reasons why I am here. I think for every question that is thought of while looking at something dramatic in nature, there is a story waiting to be told. And the best stories are fantastical ones, based on true life. So while I am not quite ready to trade in my pen and my creativity for a Bunsen burner and a data chart, science is helping me bridge the gap between fact and fantasy.

I am working on an educational app for children, where different reef fish will talk to them about their lives, their habits and their threats. I write a blog where I hope to share lessons about life from the deep. I intend to go back to teaching people to scuba dive – and to teach in a way that introduces not only the colourful sights of the sea, but also its deep mysteries.

Science is not about absent-minded, grey-haired, short-trousered professors looking at obscure particles and measuring them in units we’ve never heard of. Well, at least, it’s not all about them.

It is also about incredible creatures, adaptations to extreme conditions, winds, storms, oceans and the atmosphere in which we all live and must all protect. And this is what I hope most to share.

Hope for coral reefs

August 22, 2012

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Next week I’m returning to the island of Curaçao for the final field research season of my Ph.D. The trip will mark my fifth fall spent in the southern Caribbean, as well as my fifth time rearing baby corals to better understand what makes these unique animals tick.

The island has become a second home to me, and one that I’ve grown to appreciate deeply. Curaçao is perhaps more industrialized and built up than other Caribbean islands, but its pockets of great beauty make it the gem that it is. This perspective, though, may even better depict the state of the island’s coral reefs: patches of magnificence.

In early July I attended the 10th International Coral Reef Symposium in Cairns, Australia. This coming together of coral reef scientists happens once every four years and provides a venue to assess the health of the ecosystem on a global scale. Most of the news was dire: reefs are declining throughout the world and it’s largely the result of human activities like pollution and climate change.

Retired SIO professor Dr. Jeremy Jackson was awarded the Darwin Medal for lifetime achievement and during his acceptance speech he presented preliminary results from a compilation of all the available data for the number of live corals throughout the world.

His message was that all hope isn’t lost. Despite what Caribbean-wide averages suggest, vestiges of reefs abundant with corals still exist. And Curaçao, the data show, is one such place.

In addition to sheer numbers, Jeremy spoke of variability in coral abundance, imploring scientists to consider reef health at the scale of islands rather than ocean basins. By not considering islands on their own we miss the greatest conservation successes and the worst failures, he argued, going on to say that locales can be fundamentally different from one another for reasons that are natural in addition to human-induced. In other words, natural conditions as well as the human footprint make certain places good or bad for corals.

My colleagues and I are taking Jeremy’s advice one step farther. When we look among the many reefs of Curaçao we find that the number of live corals varies dramatically reef-to-reef—some are teeming with life while others are graveyards. The crown jewels are the reefs of Easpoint, a sixteen-mile stretch of untouched chaparral wrapping the eastern tip of the island. Offshore live more corals than anywhere else on the island and their abundance more than triples the Caribbean-wide average.

Eastpoint has become the focus of my dissertation work both because of its great health as well as the growing risk to that health. Land ownership may change hands there, allowing the area to be developed and likely bringing with it many of the human-caused ills that have led to the demise of other reefs.

Efforts to conserve Eastpoint are alive, though, and one of my contributions is to add to a growing body of knowledge explaining why this area is so stunning. My colleagues and I are finding that certain species of coral produce more babies at Eastpoint than at other reefs. This not only bolsters local communities but it likely reseeds ailing reefs at other sites.

The larval phase, when corals are babies, is the only period during which these animals can move, much like seeds of trees. But instead of being pushed by the wind, coral larvae are pushed by water currents, drifting with the sea until they find a place to settle down. As the fates would have it, currents consistently push water east to west along Curaçao, rendering every other reef on the island down current from Eastpoint’s seemingly abundant supply of offspring.

So in Curaçao we see a positive synergy of what Jackson described as the factors controlling coral vitality: nature and humanity. Eastpoint is vibrant and healthy in the absence of people and its physical location is of great fortune for the island as a whole, holding on as a shining example of the hope that still exists for Caribbean coral reefs.

Photo: © Paul Selvaggio

Exploring close to home

August 2, 2012

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Click here to read and comment on UT-San Diego or read on…

Marine scientists, myself included, often cite exotic travel as one of the many perks of our job. While it certainly is, there is much to be said for making discoveries in our own backyard. And that’s exactly what twenty of my Scripps peers did this past month.

A core group of graduate students planned and executed a research trip that became known as the San Diego Coastal Expedition. Their purpose was to venture into the Pacific in search of extraordinary ecosystems on the ocean floor called methane seeps, all the while tracking interesting marine life and ocean conditions off our very own coast. As they did, the team communicated what they discovered via the internet, making their findings readily accessible to everyone back home.

As Gary Robbins reported in the UT San Diego last Thursday, the San Diego Coastal Expedition was a success. The team found clear traces of methane in sediment cores, strong evidence for a previously unknown methane seep just twenty miles off of Del Mar.

At these seeps, the chemical methane can naturally flow upward through cracks, or faults, in the ocean floor. Being that it is rich in carbon, the backbone of all life on earth, methane serves as the basic unit of food in these extremely unique ecosystems.

The team’s discovery required interdisciplinary science: geologists examined the structure of the ocean bottom, biologists identified creatures common to seeps, and chemists detected chemical signatures in sediment cores.

While finding the seep was hard, getting the opportunity to be there in the first place may have been even harder. Traveling to exotic locales for research is expensive, and while this trip was local, the need for a ship changed the game. Research vessels, such as the 279-foot R/V Melville used by my peers, are expensive to operate, leaving few opportunities for student use even when exploring our local waters.

Fortunately the team was able to apply to UC Ship Funds, a program specifically set up to provide student time on ships. Through the experience, which was overseen by a faculty adviser at Scripps, the student group went through a very similar process to that of senior scientists: applying for funds with a plan and budget, and after receiving funding, organizing and completing their sea-going research goals.

The core organizers, led by chief scientist Christina Frieder, seized upon this rare opportunity. They recruited scientific colleagues, undergraduates and volunteers from a number of nations, conducted great science and got the word out about their work.

This final point—their desire to communicate their findings—was a powerful and somewhat unique endeavor. The San Diego Coastal Expedition team created a blog and a Facebook page, and coined a Twitter hashtag. Before, during and after the trip they posted pictures and blogged often in order to keep anyone with an interest informed about their discoveries.

Through the combination of research, outreach and rapid communication the team is actively advancing an important new trajectory in science, and one that is a priority of the National Science Foundation.

In recent years, additional impetus has been put on science communication. A majority of our research is funded with federal and state dollars, thus we owe it to everyone to provide glimpses into our work. What’s more, engaging the public is an important vehicle for gaining interest in science. With a science-educated public, we can all enjoy and understand the fascination and fragility of ecosystems in our own backyard.

In December the San Diego Coastal Expedition team will return to the newly discovered methane seep to further unravel its mysteries. Stay tuned for later posts about their ongoing discoveries.

 

Marine collector finds it all

April 30, 2012

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Phil Zerofski has two of the greatest jobs in the world.

Phil and his wife Amy own SEACAMP San Diego, a program that hosts students from all over the world at their facility on Mission Bay. Putting their hearts and souls into the program, they have built it into one of the country’s preeminent education centers for teaching hands-on marine science to elementary through high school students.

But even with SEACAMP’s success, Phil couldn’t pass up on a new opportunity: Marine collector at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, part of UC San Diego.

“It was my dream job,” Phil told me when I asked about his reaction to learning that the position was available. “But I would have been just as happy to stay at camp because I love it there, too.”

This past summer I huddled around a window at Scripps with a group of undergrads. Out on the ocean we saw whale spouts and “oohed” and “aahed” with each one. Phil happened to pass by and we pointed them out to him.

“I was just out collecting kelp with (a masters student) and we passed them in the boat on our way back,” he said, taking a moment to talk with the students. “They’re blues. Mothers and calves.”

The students’ mouths dropped, and their reactions reminded Phil of a time he passed blue whales surface feeding off the San Diego coast with a boat full of SEACAMP campers.

As marine collector, Phil is asked to collect everything from tiny plankton to sharks for science and teaching at SIO. He also oversees the experimental aquarium facility, where he helps grad students and faculty design and implement experiments that teach us more about the critters that live in our watery backyard. Phil sees many parallels with SEACAMP San Diego, where students learn about the ocean by interacting with animals in labs and observing them in the wild via snorkel or boat.

Phil’s own love for the ocean dates back to when, at age four, his mom gave him a book about being an ichthyologist (a.k.a. a fish scientist); after that he proudly proclaimed it as his future job to anyone who would listen.

In middle school, Phil took on a marine science internship at the Woods Hole Aquarium and in high school Phil earned his SCUBA diving certification. When it came time to attend college Phil chose Roger Williams in Rhode Island because they offered a degree in marine biology. He put himself through school thanks in part to working construction, where he learned the wide array of techniques that he put to use years later at SEACAMP and Scripps.

Phil’s love of the ocean took him to the Florida Keys, where he landed a job as a handyman at a marine science camp for kids. He spent the first summer living in a tent, battling mosquitoes and working as hard as he could at his new job.

His perseverance and array of skills led to a promotion to harbormaster for the camp. In his new position he began learning from the more experienced boatmen at the local marina who taught him how to build boats from scratch.

While the camp’s facility managers loved Phil’s construction abilities, the camp’s teachers quickly learned that he was a vast source of information about marine life, turning to him when they were stumped by students’ questions. Before long Phil started teaching at the camp and leading students on dives.

After meeting in the Keys, Phil and Amy moved to San Diego where, fourteen years ago, they purchased SEACAMP San Diego. With total control to provide a hands-on marine science education, the blending of Phil’s expertise and passions—the ocean and building things—was complete. The camp now welcomes over four thousand students a year, coming from all fifty states as well as dozens of countries.

Today Phil has more on his plate than ever—especially with his three-year-old daughter Delilah—but he says it’s easy to get up in the morning.

When I arrive at Scripps for work around 9 a.m., I often see Phil, already hours into his day, suited up to dive, fixing a plumbing leak, or transporting animals. He’s usually smiling, and I can only imagine that each day is a new adventure, each new task an exciting problem to solve

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