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In the spirit of Jacques Cousteau, who said,

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"People protect what they love,"

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I want to share with you today what I love most in the ocean,

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and that's the incredible number and variety

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of animals in it that make light.

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My addiction began with this strange looking diving suit called Wasp;

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that's not an acronym -- just somebody thought it looked like the insect.

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It was actually developed for use by the offshore oil industry

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for diving on oil rigs down to a depth of 2,000 feet.

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Right after I completed my Ph.D.,

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I was lucky enough to be included with a group of scientists

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that was using it for the first time

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as a tool for ocean exploration.

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We trained in a tank in Port Hueneme,

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and then my first open ocean dive

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was in Santa Barbara Channel.

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It was an evening dive.

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I went down to a depth of 880 feet

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and turned out the lights.

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And the reason I turned out the lights is because I knew I would see

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this phenomenon of animals making light

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called bioluminescence.

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But I was totally unprepared

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for how much there was

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and how spectacular it was.

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I saw chains of jellyfish called siphonophores

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that were longer than this room,

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pumping out so much light

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that I could read the dials and gauges

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inside the suit without a flashlight;

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and puffs and billows

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of what looked like luminous blue smoke;

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and explosions of sparks

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that would swirl up out of the thrusters --

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just like when you throw a log on a campfire and the embers swirl up off the campfire,

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but these were icy, blue embers.

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It was breathtaking.

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Now, usually if people are familiar with bioluminescence at all,

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it's these guys; it's fireflies.

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And there are a few other land-dwellers that can make light --

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some insects, earthworms, fungi --

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but in general, on land, it's really rare.

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In the ocean, it's the rule

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rather than the exception.

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If I go out in the open ocean environment,

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virtually anywhere in the world,

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and I drag a net from 3,000 feet to the surface,

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most of the animals --

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in fact, in many places, 80 to 90 percent

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of the animals that I bring up in that net --

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make light.

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This makes for some pretty spectacular light shows.

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Now I want to share with you a little video

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that I shot from a submersible.

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I first developed this technique working from a little

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single-person submersible called Deep Rover

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and then adapted it for use on the Johnson Sea-Link,

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which you see here.

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So, mounted in front of the observation sphere,

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there's a a three-foot diameter hoop

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with a screen stretched across it.

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And inside the sphere with me is an intensified camera

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that's about as sensitive as a fully dark-adapted human eye,

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albeit a little fuzzy.

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So you turn on the camera, turn out the lights.

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That sparkle you're seeing is not luminescence,

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that's just electronic noise

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on these super intensified cameras.

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You don't see luminescence until the submersible

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begins to move forward through the water,

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but as it does, animals bumping into the screen

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are stimulated to bioluminesce.

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Now, when I was first doing this,

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all I was trying to do was count the numbers of sources.

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I knew my forward speed, I knew the area,

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and so I could figure out how many hundreds of sources

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there were per cubic meter.

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But I started to realize that I could actually identify animals

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by the type of flashes they produced.

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And so, here, in the Gulf of Maine

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at 740 feet,

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I can name pretty much everything you're seeing there to the species level.

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Like those big explosions, sparks,

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are from a little comb jelly,

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and there's krill and other kinds of crustaceans,

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and jellyfish.

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There was another one of those comb jellies.

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And so I've worked with computer image analysis engineers

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to develop automatic recognition systems

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that can identify these animals

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and then extract the XYZ coordinate of the initial impact point.

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And we can then do the kinds of things that ecologists do on land,

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and do nearest neighbor distances.

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But you don't always have to go down to the depths of the ocean

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to see a light show like this.

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You can actually see it in surface waters.

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This is some shot, by Dr. Mike Latz at Scripps Institution,

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of a dolphin swimming through bioluminescent plankton.

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And this isn't someplace exotic

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like one of the bioluminescent bays in Puerto Rico,

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this was actually shot in San Diego Harbor.

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And sometimes you can see it even closer than that,

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because the heads on ships --

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that's toilets, for any land lovers that are listening --

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are flushed with unfiltered seawater

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that often has bioluminescent plankton in it.

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So, if you stagger into the head late at night

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and you're so toilet-hugging sick

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that you forget to turn on the light,

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you may think that you're having a religious experience. (Laughter)

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So, how does a living creature make light?

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Well, that was the question that 19th century

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French physiologist Raphael Dubois,

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asked about this bioluminescent clam.

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He ground it up and he managed to get out a couple of chemicals;

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one, the enzyme, he called luciferase;

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the substrate, he called luciferin

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after Lucifer the Lightbearer.

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That terminology has stuck, but it doesn't actually refer to specific chemicals

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because these chemicals come in a lot of different shapes and forms.

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In fact, most of the people

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studying bioluminescence today

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are focused on the chemistry, because these chemicals

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have proved so incredibly valuable

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for developing antibacterial agents,

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cancer fighting drugs,

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testing for the presence of life on Mars,

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detecting pollutants in our waters --

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which is how we use it at ORCA.

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In 2008,

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the Nobel Prize in Chemistry

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was awarded for work done

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on a molecule called green fluorescent protein

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that was isolated from the bioluminescent chemistry

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of a jellyfish,

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and it's been equated to the invention of the microscope,

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in terms of the impact that it has had

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on cell biology and genetic engineering.

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Another thing all these molecules are telling us

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that, apparently, bioluminescence has evolved

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at least 40 times, maybe as many as 50 separate times

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in evolutionary history,

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which is a clear indication

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of how spectacularly important

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this trait is for survival.

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So, what is it about bioluminescence

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that's so important to so many animals?

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Well, for animals that are trying to avoid predators

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by staying in the darkness,

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light can still be very useful

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for the three basic things that animals have to do to survive:

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and that's find food,

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attract a mate and avoid being eaten.

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So, for example, this fish

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has a built-in headlight behind its eye

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that it can use for finding food

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or attracting a mate.

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And then when it's not using it, it actually can roll it down into its head

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just like the headlights on your Lamborghini.

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This fish actually has high beams.

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And this fish, which is one of my favorites,

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has three headlights on each side of its head.

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Now, this one is blue,

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and that's the color of most bioluminescence in the ocean

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because evolution has selected

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for the color that travels farthest through seawater

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in order to optimize communication.

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So, most animals make blue light,

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and most animals can only see blue light,

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but this fish is a really fascinating exception

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because it has two red light organs.

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And I have no idea why there's two,

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and that's something I want to solve some day --

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but not only can it see blue light,

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but it can see red light.

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So it uses its red bioluminescence like a sniper's scope

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to be able to sneak up on animals

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that are blind to red light

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and be able to see them without being seen.

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It's also got a little chin barbel here

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with a blue luminescent lure on it

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that it can use to attract prey from a long way off.

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And a lot of animals will use their bioluminescence as a lure.

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This is another one of my favorite fish.

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This is a viperfish, and it's got a lure

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on the end of a long fishing rod

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that it arches in front of the toothy jaw

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that gives the viperfish its name.

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The teeth on this fish are so long

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that if they closed inside the mouth of the fish,

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it would actually impale its own brain.

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So instead, it slides in grooves

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on the outside of the head.

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This is a Christmas tree of a fish;

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everything on this fish lights up,

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it's not just that lure.

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It's got a built-in flashlight.

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It's got these jewel-like light organs on its belly

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that it uses for a type of camouflage

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that obliterates its shadow,

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so when it's swimming around and there's a predator looking up from below,

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it makes itself disappear.

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It's got light organs in the mouth,

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it's got light organs in every single scale, in the fins,

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in a mucus layer on the back and the belly,

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all used for different things --

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some of which we know about, some of which we don't.

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And we know a little bit more about bioluminescence thanks to Pixar,

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and I'm very grateful to Pixar for sharing

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my favorite topic with so many people.

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I do wish, with their budget,

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that they might have spent just a tiny bit more money

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to pay a consulting fee to some poor, starving graduate student,

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who could have told them that those are the eyes

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of a fish that's been preserved in formalin.

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These are the eyes of a living anglerfish.

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So, she's got a lure that she sticks out

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in front of this living mousetrap

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of needle-sharp teeth

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in order to attract in some unsuspecting prey.

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And this one has a lure

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with all kinds of little interesting threads coming off it.

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Now we used to think that the different shape of the lure

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was to attract different types of prey,

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but then stomach content analyses on these fish

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done by scientists, or more likely their graduate students,

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have revealed that

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they all eat pretty much the same thing.

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So, now we believe that the different shape of the lure

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is how the male recognizes the female

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in the anglerfish world,

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because many of these males

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are what are known as dwarf males.

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This little guy

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has no visible means of self-support.

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He has no lure for attracting food

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and no teeth for eating it when it gets there.

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His only hope for existence on this planet

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is as a gigolo. (Laughter)

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He's got to find himself a babe

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and then he's got to latch on for life.

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So this little guy

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has found himself this babe,

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and you will note that he's had the good sense

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to attach himself in a way that he doesn't actually have to look at her.

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(Laughter)

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But he still knows a good thing when he sees it,

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and so he seals the relationship with an eternal kiss.

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His flesh fuses with her flesh,

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her bloodstream grows into his body,

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and he becomes nothing more than a little sperm sac.

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(Laughter)

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Well, this is a deep-sea version of Women's Lib.

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She always knows where he is,

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and she doesn't have to be monogamous,

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because some of these females

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come up with multiple males attached.

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So they can use it for finding food, for attracting mates.

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They use it a lot for defense, many different ways.

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A lot of them can release their luciferin or luferase in the water

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just the way a squid or an octopus will release an ink cloud.

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This shrimp is actually

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spewing light out of its mouth

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like a fire breathing dragon

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in order to blind or distract this viperfish

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so that the shrimp can swim away into the darkness.

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And there are a lot of different animals that can do this:

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There's jellyfish, there's squid,

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there's a whole lot of different crustaceans,

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there's even fish that can do this.

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This fish is called the shining tubeshoulder

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because it actually has a tube on its shoulder

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that can squirt out light.

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And I was luck enough to capture one of these

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when we were on a trawling expedition

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off the northwest coast of Africa for "Blue Planet,"

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for the deep portion of "Blue Planet."

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And we were using a special trawling net

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that we were able to bring these animals up alive.

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So we captured one of these, and I brought it into the lab.

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So I'm holding it,

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and I'm about to touch that tube on its shoulder,

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00:10:52,000 --> 00:10:55,000
and when I do, you'll see bioluminescence coming out.

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But to me, what's shocking

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00:10:58,000 --> 00:11:00,000
is not just the amount of light,

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00:11:00,000 --> 00:11:02,000
but the fact that it's not just luciferin and luciferase.

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For this fish, it's actually whole cells

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with nuclei and membranes.

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It's energetically very costly for this fish to do this,

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and we have no idea why it does it --

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another one of these great mysteries that needs to be solved.

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Now, another form of defense

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is something called a burglar alarm --

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same reason you have a burglar alarm on your car;

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the honking horn and flashing lights

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are meant to attract the attention of, hopefully,

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the police that will come and take the burglar away --

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when an animal's caught in the clutches of a predator,

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its only hope for escape may be

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to attract the attention of something bigger and nastier

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that will attack their attacker,

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00:11:36,000 --> 00:11:39,000
thereby affording them a chance for escape.

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00:11:39,000 --> 00:11:41,000
This jellyfish, for example, has

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a spectacular bioluminescent display.

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This is us chasing it in the submersible.

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00:11:45,000 --> 00:11:48,000
That's not luminescence, that's reflected light from the gonads.

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00:11:48,000 --> 00:11:51,000
We capture it in a very special device on the front of the submersible

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00:11:51,000 --> 00:11:54,000
that allows us to bring it up in really pristine condition,

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00:11:54,000 --> 00:11:56,000
bring it into the lab on the ship.

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And then to generate the display you're about to see,

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all I did was touch it once per second

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00:12:00,000 --> 00:12:02,000
on its nerve ring with a sharp pick

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that's sort of like the sharp tooth of a fish.

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And once this display gets going, I'm not touching it anymore.

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This is an unbelievable light show.

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It's this pinwheel of light,

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00:12:12,000 --> 00:12:14,000
and I've done calculations that show that this could be seen

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from as much as 300 feet away by a predator.

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00:12:17,000 --> 00:12:19,000
And I thought, "You know,

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that might actually make a pretty good lure."

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Because one of the things that's frustrated me

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as a deep-sea explorer

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is how many animals there probably are in the ocean that we know nothing about

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because of the way we explore the ocean.

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The primary way that we know about what lives in the ocean

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is we go out and drag nets behind ships.

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And I defy you to name any other branch of science

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that still depends on hundreds of year-old technology.

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The other primary way is we go down

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with submersibles and remote-operated vehicles.

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I've made hundreds of dives in submersibles.

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When I'm sitting in a submersible though,

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I know that I'm not unobtrusive at all --

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I've got bright lights and noisy thrusters --

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any animal with any sense is going to be long gone.

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So, I've wanted for a long time

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00:13:03,000 --> 00:13:05,000
to figure out a different way to explore.

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00:13:05,000 --> 00:13:08,000
And so, sometime ago, I got this idea for a camera system.

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00:13:08,000 --> 00:13:11,000
It's not exactly rocket science. We call this thing Eye-in-the-Sea.

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And scientists have done this on land for years;

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we just use a color that the animals can't see

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and then a camera that can see that color.

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00:13:18,000 --> 00:13:20,000
You can't use infrared in the sea.

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00:13:20,000 --> 00:13:22,000
We use far-red light, but even that's a problem

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because it gets absorbed so quickly.

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00:13:24,000 --> 00:13:26,000
Made an intensified camera,

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00:13:26,000 --> 00:13:28,000
wanted to make this electronic jellyfish.

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00:13:28,000 --> 00:13:31,000
Thing is, in science,

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00:13:31,000 --> 00:13:34,000
you basically have to tell the funding agencies what you're going to discover

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00:13:34,000 --> 00:13:36,000
before they'll give you the money.

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00:13:36,000 --> 00:13:38,000
And I didn't know what I was going to discover,

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00:13:38,000 --> 00:13:40,000
so I couldn't get the funding for this.

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00:13:40,000 --> 00:13:43,000
So I kluged this together, I got the Harvey Mudd Engineering Clinic

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00:13:43,000 --> 00:13:46,000
to actually do it as an undergraduate student project initially,

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00:13:46,000 --> 00:13:49,000
and then I kluged funding from a whole bunch of different sources.

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00:13:49,000 --> 00:13:51,000
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute

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00:13:51,000 --> 00:13:54,000
gave me time with their ROV

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00:13:54,000 --> 00:13:56,000
so that I could test it and we could figure out,

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00:13:56,000 --> 00:13:59,000
you know, for example, which colors of red light we had to use

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00:13:59,000 --> 00:14:02,000
so that we could see the animals, but they couldn't see us --

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00:14:02,000 --> 00:14:05,000
get the electronic jellyfish working.

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00:14:05,000 --> 00:14:08,000
And you can see just what a shoestring operation this really was,

363
00:14:08,000 --> 00:14:11,000
because we cast these 16 blue LEDs in epoxy

364
00:14:11,000 --> 00:14:13,000
and you can see in the epoxy mold that we used,

365
00:14:13,000 --> 00:14:16,000
the word Ziploc is still visible.

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00:14:16,000 --> 00:14:19,000
Needless to say, when it's kluged together like this,

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00:14:19,000 --> 00:14:22,000
there were a lot of trials and tribulations getting this working.

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00:14:22,000 --> 00:14:24,000
But there came a moment when it all came together,

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00:14:24,000 --> 00:14:26,000
and everything worked.

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00:14:26,000 --> 00:14:28,000
And, remarkably, that moment got caught on film

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00:14:28,000 --> 00:14:30,000
by photographer Mark Richards,

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00:14:30,000 --> 00:14:32,000
who happened to be there at the precise moment

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00:14:32,000 --> 00:14:35,000
that we discovered that it all came together.

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00:14:35,000 --> 00:14:37,000
That's me on the left,

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00:14:37,000 --> 00:14:39,000
my graduate student at the time, Erika Raymond,

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00:14:39,000 --> 00:14:42,000
and Lee Fry, who was the engineer on the project.

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00:14:42,000 --> 00:14:45,000
And we have this photograph posted in our lab in a place of honor

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00:14:45,000 --> 00:14:48,000
with the caption: "Engineer satisfying two women at once." (Laughter)

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00:14:49,000 --> 00:14:51,000
And we were very, very happy.

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00:14:51,000 --> 00:14:53,000
So now we had a system

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00:14:53,000 --> 00:14:55,000
that we could actually take to some place

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00:14:55,000 --> 00:14:57,000
that was kind of like an oasis on the bottom of the ocean

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00:14:57,000 --> 00:15:00,000
that might be patrolled by large predators.

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00:15:01,000 --> 00:15:03,000
And so, the place that we took it to

385
00:15:03,000 --> 00:15:05,000
was this place called a Brine Pool,

386
00:15:05,000 --> 00:15:07,000
which is in the northern part of the Gulf of Mexico.

387
00:15:07,000 --> 00:15:09,000
It's a magical place.

388
00:15:09,000 --> 00:15:11,000
And I know this footage isn't going to look like anything to you --

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00:15:11,000 --> 00:15:13,000
we had a crummy camera at the time --

390
00:15:13,000 --> 00:15:15,000
but I was ecstatic.

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00:15:15,000 --> 00:15:17,000
We're at the edge of the Brine Pool,

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00:15:17,000 --> 00:15:20,000
there's a fish that's swimming towards the camera.

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00:15:20,000 --> 00:15:22,000
It's clearly undisturbed by us.

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00:15:22,000 --> 00:15:25,000
And I had my window into the deep sea.

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00:15:25,000 --> 00:15:28,000
I, for the first time, could see what animals were doing down there

396
00:15:28,000 --> 00:15:31,000
when we weren't down there disturbing them in some way.

397
00:15:32,000 --> 00:15:34,000
Four hours into the deployment,

398
00:15:34,000 --> 00:15:36,000
we had programmed the electronic jellyfish

399
00:15:36,000 --> 00:15:38,000
to come on for the first time.

400
00:15:38,000 --> 00:15:40,000
Eighty-six seconds after

401
00:15:40,000 --> 00:15:42,000
it went into its pinwheel display,

402
00:15:42,000 --> 00:15:44,000
we recorded this:

403
00:15:45,000 --> 00:15:47,000
This is a squid, over six feet long,

404
00:15:47,000 --> 00:15:49,000
that is so new to science,

405
00:15:49,000 --> 00:15:52,000
it cannot be placed in any known scientific family.

406
00:15:53,000 --> 00:15:56,000
I could not have asked for a better proof of concept.

407
00:15:56,000 --> 00:15:58,000
And based on this, I went back to the National Science Foundation

408
00:15:58,000 --> 00:16:01,000
and said, "This is what we will discover."

409
00:16:01,000 --> 00:16:03,000
And they gave me enough money to do it right,

410
00:16:03,000 --> 00:16:06,000
which has involved developing the world's first deep-sea webcam --

411
00:16:06,000 --> 00:16:08,000
which has been installed in

412
00:16:08,000 --> 00:16:10,000
the Monterey Canyon for the past year --

413
00:16:10,000 --> 00:16:12,000
and now, more recently,

414
00:16:12,000 --> 00:16:14,000
a modular form of this system,

415
00:16:14,000 --> 00:16:16,000
a much more mobile form

416
00:16:16,000 --> 00:16:18,000
that's a lot easier to launch and recover,

417
00:16:18,000 --> 00:16:21,000
that I hope can be used on Sylvia's "hope spots"

418
00:16:21,000 --> 00:16:23,000
to help explore

419
00:16:23,000 --> 00:16:25,000
and protect these areas,

420
00:16:25,000 --> 00:16:27,000
and, for me, learn more about

421
00:16:27,000 --> 00:16:30,000
the bioluminescence in these "hope spots."

422
00:16:30,000 --> 00:16:33,000
So one of these take-home messages here

423
00:16:33,000 --> 00:16:36,000
is, there is still a lot to explore in the oceans.

424
00:16:36,000 --> 00:16:38,000
And Sylvia has said

425
00:16:38,000 --> 00:16:41,000
that we are destroying the oceans before we even know what's in them,

426
00:16:41,000 --> 00:16:43,000
and she's right.

427
00:16:43,000 --> 00:16:45,000
So if you ever, ever get an opportunity

428
00:16:45,000 --> 00:16:47,000
to take a dive in a submersible,

429
00:16:47,000 --> 00:16:50,000
say yes -- a thousand times, yes --

430
00:16:50,000 --> 00:16:52,000
and please turn out the lights.

431
00:16:52,000 --> 00:16:54,000
I promise, you'll love it.

432
00:16:54,000 --> 00:16:56,000
Thank you.

433
00:16:56,000 --> 00:16:58,000
(Applause)