Deep Dives

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to another episode of for the Wild Ones, brought to you by the International Wildlife Coexistence Network. I'm your host, Josh Adler. Today we have an incredible guest who will take us on a deep dive into her ocean explorations. Meranke Harris is a deep sea explorer and scientist working with the Ocean Exploration Trust. In her work, she's mapping regions of the seafloor and documenting bacteria life to uncover the hidden secrets of life in our oceans. [00:00:58] Speaker B: It's been such a pleasure immersing myself in what you're doing and how you're exploring this place we call the ocean that is almost 90% unexplored. [00:01:10] Speaker C: Well, I love my job, so I've been having a great time with it. [00:01:13] Speaker B: For people who aren't in the ocean, exploratory community, or even necessarily paying attention to what's going on in our oceans, what's it like going to work? [00:01:27] Speaker C: I worked on a deep sea exploration vessel. So we're at sea on a vessel about 69 meters long, and it's like a flooding village. There are sheriffs and there are people who keep the ship running, and there's the science crew and the debt crew, and nothing would get done if we weren't all there playing our part in working together. There are also side communicators that make sure that what the science that we're doing actually gets out to the general public, which is really important because we need people to know what we're doing and also feel connected to the spaces that we're studying so that they use the power that they have, which is their voting power, and protect these spaces as well. But for me, it's amazing. I learn so much every time I go out from everybody, because everybody comes in with such different backgrounds and experiences and knowledge. So there's a lot that I pick up and absorb from being in those environments. [00:02:26] Speaker B: The connection you're making between the work that you're doing in this underwater village that you live in and the need to communicate that to the people above on land who have the voting power. Do you feel like you're raising more awareness? [00:02:40] Speaker C: Definitely. Definitely. Especially with the company. I work with, Ocean exploration trusts. They were one of the first deep sea exploration companies to actually broadcast their expeditions live and have it available on the Internet for anyone to join in 24/7 when we're diving with the submersibles. So I feel, yeah, there's quite a. [00:02:59] Speaker B: Bit of comedy on those. Yeah, on those streams. It's pretty fun. The crew has a sense of humor. [00:03:06] Speaker C: It's nice yeah, I mean, we're scientists, and we're all like nerds in our own way, but we're also just the same type of people you would find on land. And being together at sea in an enclosed area, not seeing land for almost a month, really brings people close. So. So the jokes start flying, especially when it's 02:00 a.m. and we're just flying through blue water trying to recover the submersible. But we have a lot of time to talk about anything. Yeah, I feel like with companies like Ocean Exploration Trust, we garner a lot of reach, especially internationally. So we're really able to connect the global population to the work that we're doing and why it's important and where we are, because we're always exploring different areas of the ocean as well. And the environments and ecosystems are so different depending on where you are in the world. [00:03:56] Speaker B: Your most recent expedition was off the coast of British Columbia, Canada, on the Pacific coast, and I want to get to that soon. I also want to get to your upcoming TEDx Victoria talk, which isn't quite out yet. Excited to see it when it's available. But maybe you can talk about your research overall with hydrothermal vents, bacteria and biopharmaceuticals. How do those three things go together with the ocean? [00:04:22] Speaker C: They all exist within the ocean, and they're all supplied by hydrothermal vents. So a hydrothermal vent is a superheated seafloor geyser. It's the most simple way of describing it. It's like what you would find in Yellowstone National park, but in a more chimney format and on the sea floor. And it is a chemosynthetic ecosystem. It's a chimney that spews out water that reaches up to 400 degrees celsius, is super metal and mineral rich, and it exists in areas where there's absolutely no sunlight. So the entire ecosystem runs off of chemosynthesis. Instead of photosynthesis, the chemicals that are usually toxic to other forms of life coming out of those chimneys sustains bacteria at the bottom of the food web, and the bacteria sustain all over life around there. So you get spider crabs and different fish and giant tube worms. But I specifically study the bacteria. So what can't be seen by the naked eye when they grow in large clusters, you get white filamentous maps of them that kind of make the chimneys look hairy. But I specifically study their genetics because I am looking for these things called biosynthetic gene clusters. And that is the first step in bioprospecting. So when you're looking within nature for biopharmaceuticals, if you're looking in the genetic code of a community and you find those clusters, then you know that there's promise for using it for pharmaceuticals. And the reason why we're focusing on that resource as a way of helping society is because the main resource that companies are looking at concerning hydrogen wolf vents right now is deep sea mining. And on the flip side, it's another resource that could help our societies. But deep sea mining, you have to completely dredge the entire event and kill the entire ecosystem. Whereas with biopharmaceuticals from the microbes, you can take those microbes and culture them on land and not have to keep coming back to the same ecosystem and destroying it. It's a way of finding a balance between the conservationists and the hard capitalists, because you're still allowing us to make money off of this ecosystem, but you're still allowing the ecosystem to thrive. So it finds that balance going one way or the other. Because I find conservationists and hard capitalists, often there's a disconnect in communication, and if there's money to be made, then the capitalists are going to go down there and destroy the ecosystem anyway. [00:06:52] Speaker B: It does seem like the results are in on that outcome. Yes, and I do want to talk about the discovery in the ocean explorer world of dark oxygen, which is creating quite a conundrum, and some interesting developments around deep sea mining topics as well. But I love this sustainable vision that you're putting forward in your work around biopharmaceuticals and being able to develop that for businesses. As an alternative. Let's kind of bracket there and tell me a little bit about your most recent expedition. Set it up for me. [00:07:29] Speaker C: My most recent expedition was this June. It was with Ocean Networks Canada and the Ocean Exploration Trust, who I work for. And we were basically doing an annual maintenance cruise servicing the Neptune underwater Observatory network. So Ocean Networks Canada owns two cabled observatories that stretch far out into the Pacific Ocean. The Neptune one is 800 km long and stretches 300 km into the Pacific Ocean off the west coast of Vancouver island. And the other one is more inland, so I don't really work on that one since it's not very deep sea. But basically this cable network hooks up a bunch of different technologies on the seafloor, like seismometers and temperature profilers, and basically provides us with real time data. Twenty four seven of the ocean, and it's hooked up to many different nodes. And those nodes are placed at different ecosystems, so the most famous one is the endeavor hydrothermal vents. We also have Cascadia Basin and Clayquote slope, where you find cold seeps and chunks of solid methane on the seafloor that look like icebergs. There's a lot going on there, but. [00:08:38] Speaker B: Wow, there's a whole kind of Tolkien esque illustrated map of this unfolding in my mind as you're talking. [00:08:46] Speaker C: So we go through all of those nodes and change out different instruments, put in new instruments. We hooked up a new extension of the cable as well in Middle Valley, which is an area that hasn't really been explored, so we're also expanding the network. But the star of the show for me is always the hydrothermal vents, and for most people, so being at the endeavor node was a really great experience, especially because that's where my mentor first started working on hydrothermal vents, and it just felt like a full circle moment for me to be also able to study those vents clear. [00:09:22] Speaker B: It's not all humor and joke making down there. While you're looking at the hydrothermal vents, take us through a day hanging out there and researching these hydrothermal vents. [00:09:33] Speaker C: It's a 24/7 operation, so it could be any time of day. It depends on your shift. My shift is usually the four to eight shifts. So. 04:00 a.m. to 08:00 a.m. and 04:00 p.m. to 08:00 p.m. every day, I'm sitting in the control van, helping with the data logging and sample taking processes. After we descend and get to the sea floor, then we have our dive plans in front of us. We have the science team sitting in the back row of the control van. Basically, it's a dark room filled with lit up buttons and switches and screens displaying the robot submersibles, vitals, and multiple views of it. [00:10:10] Speaker B: It's kind of a situation room. [00:10:12] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. [00:10:15] Speaker B: Films and tv, we've seen these situation rooms with people looking into the screens, scouring the metrics things, all the graphs that are moving. But you also have live camera feeds, and you have all this data coming in from the submersibles that are deployed. So you're extending your measurement and your sense making capacities through these submersibles, which are remotely controlled. And you're then gathering and evaluating and mobilizing the mission from this kind of control room or situation room. [00:10:47] Speaker C: Exactly, yes. And we have dive plans. Sometimes they're finalized the day before, sometimes they're finalized a week in advance. But we always have objectives, and we go down as a team, knowing exactly what samples were trying to take, where were trying to explore, and. Yeah, and the dive can last anywhere from 4 hours to over 24 hours. This last expedition, we had one dive that was like a 36 hours dive, and we just consistently switch out pilots and science crew and take turns with our shift work. [00:11:18] Speaker B: What was the need for the 36 hours? Why was it such a long dive? [00:11:22] Speaker C: That was when we were extending the Neptune network. It was a dual ship operation. It was the only other ship we saw or that came that close during the entire month. But this ship, called the cable innovator, came down from Alaska, and that's a cable laying ship. So we were working with our submersible, guiding the cable where it needed to go underwater, while the cable laying ship was right beside us, spooling out that giant amount of cable. And we were also connecting it to the electronic nodes, hooking it up. It's like plugging in your laptop, but it's like hundreds of kilometers involved. [00:12:01] Speaker B: I'm trying to imagine what the role of your team was within that process. [00:12:05] Speaker C: The science team, we basically work with ocean networks Canada to ensure that everything is going well, so we don't really manage the technology itself. So on that specific dive, the science team didn't have much to do because we mainly manage the geological samples, chemical samples, or biological samples. But in that case, there's always data logging happening when we're diving. So we still do have to take care that we're following the dive plan, that we're making observations about everything that's happening so that later on, people can go back into the footage and review exactly all the processes. [00:12:43] Speaker B: What were some of the discoveries that were made? [00:12:47] Speaker C: Yeah, this specific expedition, it was more so revisiting known sites other than the hydrothermal vents. One area that is always a big hit with everybody is the whale fall at Clayquote slope. But whale falls are hard to find because we usually just stumble upon them with our submersibles. But what we were doing there was, we were taking photogrammetric surveys of the whale skeleton itself just to see, over the years, how it changes, how it decomposes the different phases of life it sustains as it's being decomposed by scavengers. [00:13:25] Speaker B: A whale fall. For people who aren't familiar with that term. It's a whale graveyard. Yes. On the ocean floor? [00:13:30] Speaker C: Yes. Yeah. This specific one was just one whale skeleton. We think it was a humpback whale that was pretty large, pretty sizable, and in terms of what we're looking for, this one has been around for a long time, so most of the meat is already off the boat. But you get octopus down there using it and hiding within its rib cages with their eggs. You get different types of worms that have been eating through the bone itself, all sorts of things. [00:14:01] Speaker B: It's interesting to think of that octopus who are known ecosystem engineers, as they like to decorate and construct their habitats from what's around them. That utilization of the whale skeleton must be pretty unique to come across, to see them hiding in there or nesting. [00:14:17] Speaker C: Yeah, it is. And this expedition was very different from an expedition that I was on last year, which was definitely more exploration based. It was also in canadian waters, but it was further north. It happened in June of 2023. And still pretty recent. Yeah, still pretty recent. We went to the southern Explorer ridge and the Magic Mountain hydrothermal vent field, which is a vent field that had only been explored twice before when it was discovered in 1984 by Watson, by NOAA. I think NOAA discovered so american. [00:15:00] Speaker B: I'm really trying to keep myself from diving too far into NOah's naming techniques of these sites. Yeah, it's just a leg taste. [00:15:08] Speaker C: And then it was visited again by Noah in 2001, and people hadn't visited it for over 20 years. So we went down expecting it to be very inactive, because with my work specifically, I was actually collecting samples for my graduate school work on this expedition. And I look at how the microbial community changes along the life cycle of vents. So from super effluent spewing, black smoke, characteristic hydrothermal vents to eroded mounds, after that flow has stopped and it's been slowly chipped away at by the ambient seawater. And then. So I look at that, and then also how the biopharmaceutical potential changes along that life cycle stage. But we were expecting this area to be very inactive. And when we got down there, every one of the points I had chosen to explore was extremely active. So there were a ton of new vents found down there and ended up becoming a study of how dynamic these vent fields are and how much they can change within just 20 years, depending on where the heat source is coming from and how far the vents have spread away from the ridge, because they're found mainly along mid ocean ridges where new sea floor is created. But over time, they slowly move away from the center of that ridge and become inactive. That was something that was really cool for me because everything had changed. All the observations that we were using to guide us from 2001 2002 were complete. [00:16:39] Speaker B: So these geothermal events on the ocean floor are unlocking new views in the trends of the development of life on earth. Who is living in these places that are filled with toxic biochemicals and how are they making their living there? [00:16:57] Speaker C: You'd be surprised how much life is down there. It's everything from microbes to, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, giant tube rooms that are over 6ft long and tower over submersibles that you get. Everything down there, get different types of fish that are going in between the vents. Outside of tuber is also pompeii worms that kind of just look like palm trees because of the fronds coming out of the front of them. And they survive in the hottest areas of the vent. So they love the heat, but all of these creatures are just adapted for really high pressures, adapted for extremely intense temperatures, and adapted to the toxic chemicals, the same way that we are adapted for life on earth. In the sunlight with lots of oxygen and what we call clean air, they wouldnt survive up here. So theyve just evolved for a completely different, completely opposite set of circumstances. [00:17:54] Speaker B: Its a bit mystifying though, that what can be toxic for one species is sustenance for another species. How does life adapt that dynamically? I guess, is what im asking. Its this incredible feat, this phenomenon. [00:18:10] Speaker C: We understand that not really life always finds a way. What we're trying to use it for in the deep sea community in general, is understanding the origins of life on earth. So because hydrothermal vents are such a volatile, high pressure, high heat, dark areas, we feel that how life is surviving and thriving and being sustained down there can give us clues for finding life on other planets, and how life originated when our own planet was forming. That's the field of astrobiology. But that's a question that we're trying to answer. Why do these things thrive so well in such harsh environments? And how can we use that to determine where we might find life in other harsh environments? [00:18:55] Speaker B: Or be able to sustain our own life off world in harsh environments adaptively? There's a lot of people who are very interested in these questions. Some of them are the hard capitalists that are the same ones. Considering deep sea mining between Hawaii and Mexico, where the dark oxygen discovery was just made, I feel like there must be a lot of urgency to what you're doing as well, in terms of the need to prove alternative resourcefulness of our oceans, even though many people are also motivated to protect them, just out of their intrinsic value as life sustaining, life supporting systems that our planet cannot survive without. Who do you feel you're trying to reach? Most urgently is where this question is leading. You're doing all this amazing work and these are huge operations that are not easy to pull off. There's a lot of risk to the people involved living down under the ocean. That's a big insurance policy for an expedition. So who are you trying to reach with this work? What do you feel like they need from you? [00:20:01] Speaker C: I feel that we're communicating with the general population. I think it's a numbers game, just trying to get the importance of our work and the ecosystems that we study in front of as many eyes and ears as possible. Because on top of the general population holding voting power, you also don't know who's listening. There are a lot of different people with different levels of influence within that general population and people will protect what they don't know or what they don't feel drawn to. If you look at terrestrial conservation, there's always an issue with trying to get people to support conservation of animals that may not be as cute or they may not feel as connected to. So that ties into people not protecting what they don't know or what feels too far away. In the ocean world, people are more inclined to protect tropical coral reefs because they're pretty and they may have personal experience of snorkeling on them when they go on vacation. But with the deep sea, people don't normally have personal experience with that because it's so far away and takes so much time and money risk to get to. So we try to bring the deep sea to others to foster that personal connection so that they care about it and do what they can in their own way to promote protection of it. Working from the bottom up basically is a numbers game and hoping that 4000. [00:21:26] Speaker B: Meters down and then going up. [00:21:31] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. But there's also a lot of work professionally between scientists and policymakers, especially in the deep sea mining world. It's my personal opinion that a lot of that collaboration happens a bit too late because policymakers study law and we study science. And then when there's a problem to be solved, we come together and we're trying to put years of science and years of law experience together to make proper policies to protect oceans and different ecosystems. But a lot of the time we're not speaking each other's language, so things get lost in translation. So I think it's most important for scientists and policymakers to be working together along the way from the start. Instead of being in our own vein to solve an issue. We should always be intertwined and keeping each other informed of what's going on, at least at a basic level, so that there's not that much catching up to be done when we're actually trying to fix something. [00:22:27] Speaker B: There's so much messy alignment in the policymaking and conservation conversation right now, even just in trying to prioritize projects for conservation, for protections for restoration. There are so many marginal zones. It also depends how you draw your map and borders. There's a lot that can get lost with so many species that we don't even know exist. We don't know what we're measuring, we don't know what we're looking for a lot of times, or we don't know what we're going to miss, what we're yet going to discover. So it feels like those edges don't always fit together nice and neatly the way we would like to. Between policy and ecology, I know at. [00:23:13] Speaker C: Least in deep sea science, the objectives aren't changing, the objectives are very stable, but the knowledge is being incorporated so quickly because there's so much we don't know about the deep sea because 99% of waters below 200 meters are completely unexplored. So we have no idea what that there. So almost every time we go out there, we find a new species of some sort, or a new ecosystem area, or a skate egg nursery like we found in our June 2023 expedition. It is only one of two that are known throughout the world. So every single time we go out, there's something that is different, that adds to the knowledge base. And papers are being published in deep sea science at an astonishing rate because of how much we're finding. And policymakers aren't going to read through all those papers when they're making their policies. So there's knowledge that gets lost within science if we're not good at communicating it ourselves. There's so much brilliant science that happens that's just locked away in journals because most papers are only read by the authors, reviewers and the journal editors themselves. So there's a lot of brilliant science that's just locked up behind the scenes, behind paywalls in these journals and doesn't contribute to actually changing our policies. One thing I think could help with that on a very small scale is incorporating policymakers into our expedition. If they can't join, then maybe they can watch. And there is an issue with birth space on ships, so it's not like we could bring a whole troop of them. But when we're exploring indigenous areas, we bring indigenous marine planners or people from the actual community in the waters we're exploring onto the ships to incorporate their communities within deep sea exploration, have it be more of an interdisciplinary collaboration that benefits everybody. Instead of the way science has normally been, where it's just parachute, we go in, we take what we need, and leave baby steps towards incorporating those two worlds more involves a lot of work. [00:25:22] Speaker B: It's all so much work. Grand endeavor. It's incredible to me that it's happening and to speak to you, who are such an integral part of it, and all that you have to carry into this context of work and all you have to balance in terms of conducting your research and then communicating what you're doing and why. It's important to policymakers who are notoriously competitive for attention, which is why we lobbying industries. So bringing them along is not the easiest or cheapest endeavor in itself. [00:25:55] Speaker C: And to my knowledge, it hasn't been done just yet. But maybe somebody out there is bringing policymakers along on expedition. [00:26:03] Speaker B: Well, but doing the live streams from geothermal events is a way that they or anybody else can join in. [00:26:10] Speaker C: Yes. [00:26:11] Speaker B: And so it is a way of broadening the storytelling and the awareness around the work that's happening in this far off place that people don't consider that they have a relationship with yet. In fact, not only coexist with and are threatening that coexistence by their habits every day, but also depend upon our oceans and the ocean systems of life that stem from bacterias and go all the way up the food webs to the whales that then recycle the life systems there. It's clear to see, though, that people are starting to have this bigger relationship with the natural world. Theyre starting to understand that you cant just section off habitable zones into little parks, because the parks are nested within bigger zones of connectivity that allow for migrations and global systems, which all depend on each other, which all work together or degrade and eventually desist. Is there something you can speak to in terms of your understanding of that coexistence? That even though most people will never visit themselves deep thermal vents, some people will go check out the amazing live streams of the expeditions that you're doing. And I certainly encourage that because it's really cool. But why should they feel, how can they feel their relationship with the deep ocean? [00:27:36] Speaker C: Well, the deep ocean, the first thing that pops into my head is, from a scientific perspective, where we believe life on earth originated. If you think of yourself in an evolutionary tree leading all the way back to the beginning, the deep ocean is at the source of everything that we are. And the ocean itself provides us with everything that we have. It provides 50% of the oxygen that fills our lungs every time we take a breath. It provides us with the food that sustains our communities along the vein of coexistence. I think for a long time we took from the ocean more than we gave, and we still take from the ocean more than we give. But I think we're getting better at, as he said, recognizing that we can't only take and take and take deep sea mining, ocean trawling, pollution, all of those major issues that our ocean is dealing with right now starts with the individuals in human society realizing that we need to do better, demanding better from our governments, our corporations, our lawmakers. It all starts with us feeling connected enough to the ocean, and that starts with recognizing what it provides us with and how we cannot survive without it. We're not separate entities, just like we're not separate from anything going on terrestrially. We're a part of the global biosphere, and it doesn't work for us. We're one puzzle piece within that cycle itself. O great ocean. O gratinous to the sea. [00:29:37] Speaker A: Keep on the lookout for Maranke Harris and her new TEDx, Victoria talk, which will be out later this month. Well, my friends, it's been an honor and a pleasure to explore our living world together through this podcast. [00:29:56] Speaker B: If this is your first episode, I. [00:29:58] Speaker A: Encourage you to check out episode one and start our journey from the beginning. If you've been with us from the start, I hope you've learned as much as I have about how we can work with nature instead of against her. My thanks to our guests, our team at the International Wildlife Coexistence Network, and to our listeners for making this journey possible. I'm Josh Adler, and this is for the wild ones.