Ologies with Alie Ward - Oceanology (OCEANS) with Ayana Johnson

Episode Date: September 4, 2018

Are plastic straws really that bad? What's the oldest message in a bottle? Any scuba vs. snorkel strategies? Does sunscreen kill coral? Can we reverse ocean warming in our lifetime? In a conversation with ocean and policy expert Dr. Ayana Johnson, Alie struggles with finding a balance between the wonders and the bummers. For the first 15-20 minutes, learn weird ocean trivia, why we love the sea, and facts about the ocean's depths and beauty. Then, we get to the sad stuff: ocean health, climate change, acidification, pollution, policy and what we can all do.If you've been feeling helpless, this episode gives you all the tools you need to understand and help our friend, the World Ocean.Also: some great information about whale pee.Dr. Johnson's OceanCollectiv.coDr. Johnson's  website, Twitter and InstagramMore episode sources and links Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Steven Ray MorrisTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh hey, it's your ol' pop here. So mowin' the lawn in those shorts your mother wishes I'd throw away. Alleyward, back with another episode of Ologies. Um, now in this episode, let's just belly up to the coast, let's gaze out over a craggy cliff and stare into the glimmering sea. What wonders, what mystery, what possibility, what a shit show we've made it. But is there hope? I don't know. I'm not an oceanologist, but that's okay, because other people are.

And you're gonna get the real-time scoop on whether or not we have missed the boat on saving the sea and what we're doing to make it better. So hang tight, because before we sail, a few things you can do to help keep this podcast afloat. So thank you to the patrons who pledge a buck or more a month to the show. You have kept it running almost a full year now. Can you even? It's almost our anniversary. Your questions are great, your hearts are greater. If you want to support Ologies via items, OlogiesMerch.com has you covered.

Literally, the link is in the show notes. And if you spend all your money on a very tiny baseball jersey for your hamster, I get it. And you can support Ologies with just your words and your thumbs, by telling friends and tweeting and gramming and making sure that you're subscribed. So reviews and ratings are free to do. You can just do them. And kind of like a rodent in clothes, I'm just a little creepy. And I read every single review, because it's really nice that you leave them.

And it makes me remember that there are real human beings in the void listening to this. So this week, I just want to say thank you to Jenny Farn, who says, every day I commute an hour each way to my job. Oh, God bless you. Teaching elementary school art. And this podcast is like a billion mini hot tubs for my overworked brain cells. We'll also give them you cool stuff to talk to the kids about, like shark vomit. And why the darn sky is blue, but not on Mars.

Also, I've stolen Burbye as my favorite way to exit conversations with hyper six year olds. And online conversations that have taken a bad turn. Thanks for everything. You're very welcome, Jen. Okay, oceanology. Are you saying oceanography wrong? No, no, my tender bitches. I am not.

So oceanology is a thing. It's defined as the branch of technology and economics dealing with human use of the sea. So heck yes, this person is very much an oceanologist. Now, warning, is this the cheeriest of episodes? Is it full of warm fuzzies? No, no, it's not. But is it important? Yes.

Yes, it is. I did my best to balance the gloom with some wonder. And I promise you it is important enough to stick with the entire episode. There's so much good information. Also, a special thank you to one of my favorite science and politics and internet heroes, Baratunde Thurston, for hooking me up with thisologist who I nervously emailed the all caps question. How screwed are these oceans? Keep listening to hear her answer.

So she's based on the East Coast, so I had her on my wish list and one day in August, I got myself to her native Brooklyn and I tried to pretend I was cool enough to be there. And we met up at an audio studio at Pioneer Works, which is this beautiful art and cultural center and event space where I would love to live as a stowaway if they would never find me out. Now, as a marine biologist and a policy strategist, she does TED talks. She's worked with the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She's an adjunct professor at NYU.

She's also an environmental advocate. She travels the world working with politicians and communities to make their relationship to the oceans healthier. I am just like in gentle awe of her. Now, she had just gotten back from an occupational adventure the night before. And I just had the tape rolling as I waited for her arrival in the studio. Way too eager. Didn't want to miss a second.

So we talked about her favorite aspects of the ocean, when she fell in love with it, coral reefs, parrotfish, their butts, disgusting whale trivia, even more disgusting plastic trivia. The amount of doomed we are, what fish you shouldn't eat and whether or not plastic straws really deserve their evil reputation. So it's not all sunny, but she is an expert who will real talk us all into action. So please get ready to listen to the crashing waves of wisdom from oceanologist Dr. Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson. So do you need a minute?

Do you need anything else? I'm good. Or do you just want me to start lobbing questions about oceans at you? I just got back from the ocean. So you just got back in the ocean like five minutes ago, pretty much. How much of your work is in the field in the ocean and how much is like traveling around making policy? Because I know that you do both.

I don't have an active research program right now. So when I'm in the ocean, I'm just kind of like checking it out or hanging out, keeping in touch with the ecosystems and what's going on down there. So most of my work is more so than policy, specifically just strategy work. How do all these different organizations make their campaigns better, their communications better, policy work more strategic? So Ocean Collective, the company I founded is a consulting group that supports other organizations trying to amp up the impact of their conservation efforts.

It's 13 incredible experts from professional surfers, marine biologists, underwater robot makers, filmmakers, policy experts. And we're all just coming together as this team to try to see what we can do to help. And can we talk about your background a little bit about your Totally. love of the ocean. That was so melodic. I thought you were going to like ask me questions about my former acapella career or something.

Do you have a former acapella career? I maybe did. Yeah, I was a jazz singer for most of my youth. Really? Side note, I'm sorry I sang at you. And also I asked if she had any music of hers that I could put in here. And she said, no, no jazz clips to share. Sorry about that.

So I did try. Okay. All right. Back to the sea. When, when did you get into oceans and marine biology? When did you decide to take that path? When I was five, I learned to swim in the Florida Keys on a family vacation. My parents would be down there specifically to teach me to swim.

And I went on a gloss bottom boat and I saw a curlry for the first time. And I blew my damn mind. It was so incredible. I mean, just, it's like a window to another world, right? You look down and there's just fish and coral and all these colorful things that you could never have imagined. So that for me was the moment that I just wanted to know everything about the ocean. So Ayanna went on to get a bachelor's degree from just this little startup college called Harm University in the field of environmental science and public policy.

She also obtained a PhD from Scripps Institute of Oceanography and Marine Biology, studying coral reef sustainability. Now, during all of that, did she ever think like, maybe I should switch my major to bagpiping? Like just take a turn into something totally non-oceanic. I decided pretty early on not to take any turns. So my PhD is technically in marine biology, but it was done through an interdisciplinary program at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography

that was partnering with the economics department to make sure that ocean conservation was integrating all these different things. Because it's really a puzzle, right? There's the science and there's the policy. There's the communications. There's the law and economics. And so I wanted to make sure that I had at least a reasonable handle on all these different pieces of the puzzles that I could go out into the world

and help to try to solve it in a broader sense. There's obviously a strong need for people to go really deeply into each of those. Like for example, I'm really glad there are people out there who just study octopuses and tell us everything they learned because they're amazing. But the way my mind works and what I'm passionate about is that bigger picture puzzle and how we can really shift human relationship with the ocean. Because the ocean is obviously like it's doing everything right. It's humans that are causing all these challenges.

So that's the piece that I focus on. So here's how I thought I would split up the episode. I mean, everyone's like, how can we make the ocean less fucked? Like we've really messed up. That's the question. So I thought we would start with let's talk about the good things about the ocean. Sure, there's lots. And so I'm going to essentially play like good cop, bad cop.

I'm going to ask you all the good questions and I'm going to let the patrons ask all the what are we going to do plastic? Oh my God, we're all going to die. So I'm going to ask you the happy questions about the ocean before we get to, oh my God, what are we going to do? I would love to know, did you ever have, well, it sounds like when you were looking in that glass bottom boat, you had kind of an epiphany that there's this whole world under the sea that you never realized.

Have you had any other kind of epiphanies about the ocean or any other moments that you've had? So when I started my PhD research, I was thinking about fishing and how it can be really wasteful. You catch fish that you don't end up using. And in fact, a recent research project I've been doing for WWF, the World Wildlife Fund, I learned that half of the seafood we catch in the US and the EU is wasted somewhere along the supply chain. It's just insane.

No. But there's also like the unsustainable aspects of fishing. They're both problems. So I'm already dying to know enough. I swear I'm getting to the good stuff. So overfishing is a problem and unsustainable fishing. And then what we do with what we catch is a whole separate issue. But I was focused on how can we redesign fishing gear to make it more sustainable.

And so I worked with Fisherman and the fisheries department in Curacao in the Caribbean to redesign their fish traps to let baby stickley, the baby fish, and the ornamental, like the nemo-shaped skinny species out of the traps. And it turns out you can let out 80% of the bycatch, the fish you don't mean to catch, without hurting Fisherman's incomes because all the valuable fish stay inside. It's basically just inch-wide slot down the side of the trap that lets all the little guys out. And you can't do it with just making it a larger mesh size because then you have like a big, a big hole that any fish could get out, including the valuable ones.

So do Google her paper entitled, quote, reducing bycatch in coral reef trap fisheries. Escape gaps as a step towards sustainability. For more on this, I did. And then reading the abstract, I did a little, yay, way to go, squeal about it. Now there are also diagrams online. And the regular fish traps that snag all of those other little fishies can just be retrofitted with side panels that have little narrow slits

for little fishies to sneak out and say, later days, dude, I've got more growing to do, or you don't even eat my species. It's essentially the equivalent of an Irish goodbye for coral reef fish. So that was really exciting to me because it was a moment where I saw that you don't actually need super high technology. In all these cases, you just need to think practically about solutions. And if you work with the fishing community and with the government, these things can actually become law.

And so in Curacao, that type of trap design is now required and in a few other places as well in Barbuda. And I think they're using it in Kenya. So that was super exciting to me because you can just idea of low tech solutions, I think, is underappreciated. So that was a really eye-opening moment, which led to the next one, which was it's not actually about fish. Wait, it's not about the fish?

Did I hear that right? It's not actually about fish. This reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies, adaptation, which bears the iconic line from a former aquarium enthusiast. I once fell deeply profoundly in love with tropical fish. Until he grows bored. In one day, I say, hey, fuck fish. I renounce fish about never to set foot in that ocean again.

That's how much fuck fish. Now, two things. That clip from adaptation is so beloved that someone has built a website at fuck dot fish. That's only that clip from the movie. You just press play and enjoy. Secondly, that wasn't Ayanna's deal at all. When she says it's not actually about fish,

she means that she loves fish so much, she had to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. I had done all this work like counting fish and surveying fish populations on coral reefs. And then I was like, actually, it's about fishermen. It's about coastal communities. It was about the tourism sector and how people are impacting the ocean. So that's when my research shifted to doing hundreds of these socioeconomic

interviews with people across the Caribbean from this mindset that I had to understand people, how people were using the ocean, what problems they saw, what solutions they would support, ask them if they could write the laws to manage the ocean, what would they be, and then see what I could learn from all these experts who spent more hours than I ever have in and on the ocean. So in order to save species in the ocean, we have to look at the humans on land and what they're even doing.

Yeah. Human behavior and what makes us tick in our incentives and motivations and culture. That makes so much sense because the fish are like, don't look at me, dude. Like, I'm not the one rooting there. Exactly. Like I'm just swimming around trying to find a snack, make some babies, not get munched by a shark or whatever.

But you're like, hey humans, let's put the microscope on you guys for a minute. Time out. Let's think through this. So oceans, it's not you, it's us. It really, really, really, really, really is us. But anyway, okay, sorry. This portion is the positive portion of the episode. Let's try to stick to the light fun stuff before the conversation gets a little bleak.

Can you give some like an anatomy lesson of the ocean, some zones, what's an ocean versus what's a sea? Like just basic dumb questions. So the way that we talk about the ocean has changed a lot in the past decade. And now we say the ocean. It's really one ocean. It's all connected. And there's these different sort of parts that we name,

season to have different ocean titles. But there's currents that run through and connect everything. So I guess the easy answer is it's just the ocean. Oh. Yeah. So there's the Caribbean Sea and the Mediterranean Sea and there's the Atlantic Pacific and Indian and all these oceans. But really it's all one big thing. And then as the zones that are more important, when I think about the ocean,

I think about sort of the depths of the ocean, the shallower waters where there's more sunlight have a very different thing going on than super deep parts of the ocean. And so it's a lot of it is about temperature and sunlight that creates these different zones. OK. Quick, quick rundown of ocean zones. We covered this in the Ichthyology Fish episode,

but who doesn't love a refresher course? So let's break it down. Now Epipelagic is at the top. This zone from the surface to about 200 meters or 600 feet down gets some sunshine. So plants grow. The bulk of ocean life hangs out there. Below that are the Mesopelagic, Bathipelagic, Abyssal Pelagic, and finally the very bottom, the Hadal zones.

Now the average depth of the ocean is about 3700 meters and its deepest known point is almost 7 miles below the surface in a trench near Guam. I'm just thirsty for stats. Here's another good one. That 97% of the water on earth is in the ocean. So when we think about fresh water and drinking water, that's a good like reality check on how important it is to be careful with our water. I'm sure that like children ask of us, but the ocean, why is it salty?

I'm just gonna ask. I'm gonna ask. The ocean was formed by like all this stuff that comes off of land, right? So all the rocks that are sort of eroding over time into the sea have different things in them that make the ocean salty. And I think over time things change, right? As evaporation happens and things like that. So salinity can fluctuate a bit.

And that's actually part of what creates these large ocean currents is how salinity has an effect on things. Because if you've ever had the chance to go in the ocean after it rains, you'll realize that it's in the Caribbean anyway. So this just happened to me. I jumped in the Caribbean Sea after a rainstorm and there's a layer of fresh water on top that's cold like cool rain. And then the ocean underneath it is salty and warm

because salt water is heavier. It's more dense and so it sinks. And colder water is also more dense and it sinks. And so that sets up can set up either like layers or currents that are moved just by like these gradients in salinity and temperature. So imagine dense cold water and dense salt water doing a very fluid kind of sensual tango. Now I'm still trying to keep this half of the episode light and sunny. So okay, let's see questions about the oceans that are not depressing.

Okay, all right. Was she always into like messages in a bottle? Like the world's oldest one was found earlier this year in Western Australia bearing a note from a German naval vessel from 1886. Maybe that's fun. I was super into picking up like shells and pieces of sea glass and things like that. I was always enamored by the things that you would find on the beach, but not messages per se.

Right. Do you still have any of your seashells? Oh, totally. You do? Yeah. I started a shell collection when I was five in Key West, Florida. And I usually find one shell from every beach I go to. I mean, you couldn't, I don't want to like take all the pretty things, but and sometimes I take just like a little tiny fleck of something to just put in my, I have a fishbowl full of one tiny thing for me to beach I've ever been to.

Really? Do you have a name for that fishbowl or is this a fishbowl? No. Have you been to all of the what would have been considered oceans? And I've spent a lot of time in the Caribbean, a little bit of time in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, but very little time in the Pacific, just the whole world of Pacific islands I haven't been to yet. Now, is it true that the Pacific Island, that the Pacific Ocean was named because they thought it was calmer?

I think that's right. Is it? Turns out not to be the case. A little backstory. So Portuguese explorer Magellan had hit some shitty conditions through what's now known as the Straits of Magellan near the southern tip of Chile. This was in the 1500s and rounding the corner into the Pacific basin. He was like, oh, so much better.

It's so calm here. It's so Pacific. Hence the name. But not all of it is calm, however, but in the equatorial region of the sea, that part tends to have kind of a more chill vibe, less wind activity. And it's technically called the doldrums. That is the maritime term for it. So the next time you're having kind of like a ho-hum period of your life,

I guess just take comfort that life isn't tossing you around and making you barf into its violent currents. See, this is the optimistic part of the episode. Do you listen to any ocean apps on your phone to chill out? Like ocean sounds? Yeah. No. I put earplugs in and just like zone all the way out.

I wasn't sure if someone who studies the ocean and has dedicated their life to essentially saving the ocean would be like, I don't want to hear an app because it's just a bad simulation or something. Yeah. I'm a pretty light sleeper. OK. So I like complete silence. And I think, yeah, as someone who is like 95% vegan and who never eats fake meat,

it's maybe the same thing, right? Like, I'm not going to go have like a soy hot dog and I'm not going to listen to like fake ocean sounds. Do you do a lot of like diving? Did you have to do a lot of diving? I used to, yeah. For my PhD research, I did 300 or 400 dives. Do you like being underwater?

I know some people are like, it's so beautiful. It's like I'm flying and other people are like, it's so big. It's terrifying. It's pretty cool. Yeah. I mean, some people think that if you don't scuba dive, you can experience the ocean fully. And I totally disagree with that. I think scuba diving is nice because I can't hold my breath for an hour.

Yeah, neither can I. I only learned to dive when I realized that I needed to as a tool for my scientific research. And it's pretty neat. I mean, to be able to, you know, be underwater long enough to really watch the behavior of an octopus or a parrotfish or whatever it is is an amazing opportunity. But I think snorkeling is underrated. Yeah, I think more people should get like super into snorkeling because you can see so much just by, you know, diving down and taking a look and being in shallow water.

So I hate the thought that people think if you're not scuba diving, then like why bother? Because there's so much you can learn about the sea and just enjoy like the spectacular creatures from the surface or from like a little shallow dive down with your mask on. You just got to learn that trick where you blow that water out when you surface, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Is that hard to master?

No, you can totally do it. Anyone can do it. Okay. Or sometimes when I like don't have enough air left in my lungs when I come up to the surface for whatever reason, I just take the mouthpiece out and just breathe air normally. You could do that too. There are definitely ways that anyone can figure this out. But as long as we're banding about some facts, why is the sea such a pretty blue?

Well, same reason the sky is. The water absorbs the redder part of the visible spectrum and then the shorter bluer wavelengths bounce back at our faces. Most scientists, especially oceanologists, agree that this is very pretty. The one thing it reminds me of is how the color of blue in shallow water changes based on the color of the sand. So if you have really white sand, you have really bright turquoise in the shallow water. And then as the sand gets different colors, you get kind of different colors of blue.

So it matters what the bottom is. So if you have like a dark rocky bottom or like volcanic, it's different. And I didn't realize that a lot of white sand is coral sand, right? Yeah. And a lot of it came out of a parrotfish's butt. What? Yeah. So parrotfish are my favorite fish.

They have a beak like a parrot and they come in all these like teal, yellow, green, red, magenta, like amazing colors. And they have a beak like a parrotfish and they scrape algae off the reef. Basically they are the lawnmowers of the reef. A very important job. And as they're doing that scraping, they get bits of dead coral or rocks. And then they digest that and they poop sand. So if you're on a reef with a lot of parrotfish, and this is where it's actually very cool to

be diving and you look out at the landscape of the reef and you see all these fish swimming over it and a lot of them are parrotfish and they're just like leaving trails of sand in the water behind them. And it looks like these like con trails of parrotfish poop as if the sea was the sky and they were airplanes. I had no idea. It's pretty amazing. So some beaches are like 90 something percent like parrotfish poop sand.

I mean, it is coral and rocks and stuff, but it's like that's how it's been pulverized. You're like, thanks, dudes. Thank you so much. And so there's a push right now to protect these fish because they're doing such important work of taking the algae off the reef because algae grows so much faster than coral. Coral only grows a centimeter or so a year. Whereas algae like plants just go gangbusters and as we're putting in more nutrients are running off into the ocean from different kinds of human pollution agriculture in particular,

you're seeing that the algae is basically being fertilized. So it's growing even faster and there's more of it. So we need these parrotfish, these lawn mowers more than ever. And so there's a bunch of people working on campaigns around the world to protect parrotfish. Protect sand buts. Protect the sand poopers. What's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen in the ocean? That's such a good question.

Oddly, because we were just talking about the colors of blue, the thing that comes to mind for me is just really, really clear water and being able to see like 100 feet. And that's pretty amazing. That just that clarity of being underwater and being and really being able to see. Here we veered off into a whole discussion about the horrors of shrimp, but I'm just going to stick with this format of a happy first half of the episode, more on shrimp in just a few minutes, just a few more wistful positive things. And then we're going to get to Patreon questions and ocean sadness.

I'm just trying to stick with this vision. It's hard. Do you have a favorite movie or book set in set in or about the ocean? Do you have like an escapist movie where you're like, ah, love that ocean. The Life Aquatic is pretty good. Really? Yeah.

I've never seen it. That cracks me up, especially because it captures like the ridiculousness of light, fun boats and like, yeah, trying to capture rare creatures and get along in tight living quarters with a bunch of weird scientists. And yeah, that's a good one. And I'm writing a children's book about the ocean. What's it about? Oh, it's about a little black girl from Brooklyn who goes to the Caribbean,

falls in love with the ocean and decides to try to save it. What on earth did you get that idea? I don't know. It just like came to me to dream. Do you have a title for it yet? Can you say? No, not yet. I'm just like starting to finish up the very first draft.

So I don't have an agent or anything for it yet, but stay tuned. Oh my God. Heads up. If you are a literary agent listening to this and you're not the one to reach out to Dr. Johnson to get this idea made, I feel bad for you because this book is going to be so good. Also, as she was grabbing something out of her purse at this moment, she told me a very wonderful story. And I think it was a book I would have loved to have.

That's so great. I do have a swimsuit in my purse. Never leave the house that way. Yeah, I have a friend who does a lot of theater work. I had, I met up with her when I was just coming back from a trip out to Long Island and I was telling her about it. And she introduced me to another person as a marine biologist. And then I was like, yeah, but I didn't even like use my snorkel this weekend

and like pull it out of my purse. And she was like, I would never even use that in like a play. It's just so over the top that you carry this in your bag. And I don't always, but sometimes I pull snorkels out of my handbag. OK, this is where we're going to take a turn. All right, I'm ready. We're going to ask some questions from Patreons. Now this is, we've talked all about how wonderful the ocean is.

It's time to get into maybe the darker stuff that we're like. This is where like the sad music would be cute. And like you've really fallen in love with the character in a movie. And then you find out that like, you know, whatever, they have horrible disease. So OK, let's do it. Let's get into the sad stuff via questions from the oligies, Patreon patrons. Let's dive in. But before we take questions from you, our beloved listeners,

we're going to take a quick break for sponsors of the show. Sponsors, why sponsors? You know what they do? They help us give money to different charities every week. So if you want to know where oligies gives our money, you can go to alleyword.com and look for the tab, oligies gives back. There's like 150 different charities that we've given to already with more every single week.

So if you need a place to go donate a little bit of money, but you're not sure where to go, those are all picked by oligists who work in those fields. And this ad break allows us to give a ton of money to them. So thanks for listening and thanks sponsors. OK, your questions. So Becca asks, how bad, just point blank, how bad have we fucked up the oceans? Is it salvageable or are we just playing a sad waiting game?

So she says it makes me really emotional to think about the disgusting and terrifying things down there who are going to die because people are assholes. And then Mama Awesome said, this is also my question. So this is like, this is the big question. How bad, really bad is the answer. It's really bad. Oh man. This is like the scene where a corseted heroin coughs blood into a white kerchief.

Here we go. I mean, we have done an amazing job of messing up the ocean on a planetary scale. We've completely changed the chemistry of seawater through polluting the air with carbon dioxide. The ocean is absorbing 30% of that. And so it's acidifying the oceans, which makes it hard for things with shells to grow their shells, makes it hard for fish to smell their homes and navigate and makes them a little bit delusional and not run away from predators. There's all these different things that we're just learning about that changing

the very chemistry of the ocean is doing. So that's pretty bad. And just the warming of it, all these creatures have been adapted to specific temperature ranges, and now those ranges are changing. And so they're trying to migrate so that they don't melt. Their metabolisms can't necessarily handle all this. So between the acidification and the warming that are associated with climate change and then overfishing is a big one.

We've taken out about 90% of the big fish in the ocean since 1950. Right now, 90% of fish populations around the world are either fished to capacity or overfished. So there's 10% that are not fully exploited. The other 90% are fully exploited or over exploited. So there's not a lot of room left to take more. And we've also been fishing further from shore into deeper waters using more and more high-tech tools, although radar and sonar and helicopters and these things that were developed to fight wars are being used to find the last fish.

So we have these really high-tech boats and high-tech equipment that we have to use because the fish have become so rare. And then with coastal development, we're destroying the habitats along the coast, whether that's mangroves or wetlands or whatever that is. And those are the nursery habitats for the sea. And those are the natural filtration systems from land to sea. As long as we're in the sad half, let's get some straight talk about shrimp. One of my favorite foods, which I also always assumed was relatively sustainable because they are like the ocean's cockroaches.

They're small, they're gross, they're plentiful, right? 99% of shrimp is horrifically unsustainable. Really? Yeah, it's either caught with like a net the size of a football field in industrial fishing that's like dragged along the seafloor, taking up everything. A large portion of what's caught, like up to half or so, of what's caught might be thrown back dead and wasted as a body catch. So that's no good.

And that proportion can actually be even worse. And bulldoze is the habitat while that's happening as well. Oh, that's terrible. What about farmed fish? Is there such, I mean, shrimp? Yeah, so farmed shrimp is often farmed by bulldozing mangroves along the coast to make these ponds for them. And the mangroves are the nursery habitat for all the fish on the reef. They filter pollution running off from shore and they protect places from storms.

Like in the tsunami in Indonesia, was it 10 years ago now? More? Yeah, 13. The places that had intact mangroves fared a lot better because that buffers the waves. And so when we bulldoze that ecosystem, that's the protection, it's the nursery habitat, it's all these functions that we're losing. And then we just pollute it with shrimp growing in high density and feed them all this stuff. And antibiotics, because we're growing them in such close quarters that they're all getting sick.

So it's not really a great way to do it either. And then there's been some exposés in the last few years that a lot of shrimp grown in Southeast Asia is probably peeled by slaves. Oh my God. So whether you care about like the human rights angle or the sustainability angle, I would stay away from shrimp. So ask your fish sellers where the shrimp comes from. Ayanna says there are domestic shrimp farms in Florida and Oregon.

They're doing a really good job bringing less guilt laden shrimp to market. But it'll cost a little more for obvious reasons. But if you're not paying like $20 a pound for shrimp, it's not good for the planet or for people. And it's all like laden with these antibiotics and chemicals from the processing. So it's not healthy for you either. Oh my God, I ate shrimp yesterday. So the fact that it's the most popular seafood in America. I ate it yesterday.

People don't know their stuff. It's still probably in my colon still. I'm a monster. You're not a monster. Yeah, well, that's the thing. Like people don't know about it. I thought they were like, you'd figure like other lower, maybe on the food chain and they're kind of buggy.

They're a little bit insect like maybe it's fine. Oh my God, I have no idea. I think the challenge is that, and this is another one of those moments when I realized had a realization about ocean conservation is that traditions don't necessarily scale. Like the things that humans could eat and the ways we could fish and use the ocean when there were you know, one billion people on the planet or less is just very different from what we can get away with as we're approaching eight. We just can't do things in the same way.

And that's a really hard conversation to have with communities that have these strong traditions tied to the sea, but whose populations are growing and are being impacted by what's happening in other places because the ocean is all connected. So, so yeah, we're at this moment where we just need to rethink our relationship with the ocean. And that doesn't mean we can't still enjoy it. And there is such thing as sustainable seafood. But we just need to be more careful and change our expectations for what, how we're going to be able to use it and be ready to make some adaptations.

I'm just thinking about cruise ship shrimp a phase. What a horror show. It's a house of horrors. Listen, I warned you that this episode would be more on the tragic side. So let's just dive deeper. So between coastal development and overfishing and climate impacts and then just like straight up pollution, everybody knows at this point about plastic pollution in the ocean. But there's also a lot of pollution that comes from the runoff of all the pesticides and herbicides

we put on to our farms when it rains, runs into rivers and that runs into the sea. So even if you're inland, there's still that connection. So, so yeah, we've done a really good job of thoroughly screwing up the ocean. But there are a lot of reasons to not give up because I'm also extremely good at sitting on my couch eating popcorn and watching trashy television. And so I would like hone that craft if I thought that the ocean were just not worth it anymore. And so instead, I'm like seasons behind on everything and really focused on this because I feel like we have an incredible opportunity to really make a difference.

We've seen so many examples of things that work that when you change the way that fishing happens, when you establish a protected area, when you work with hotels and companies to change the way they manage their waste, when you work with farmers to explain how things connect to the sea and they change their practices, there are just more and more and more stories about things that are working. And so it's about replicating what's working and scaling that work. So definitely don't give up. But obviously, I'm not sugarcoating it either. It is bad. The ocean is different than it was when we were born and we're not even that old. So the ocean that I saw in 1985 when I first saw the ocean is different now and perhaps

permanently so. The way that I deal with this sort of like existential crisis of like, oh my god, the planet is dying. What do I do? Should I just like drink a bottle of whiskey and forget about it? The answer is like, no, I can't be hung over because there's all this great work to do. And it's a matter, it's not a matter of like zero, like a totally dead ocean or like 100% healthy ocean. It's where we're going to fall in between because with 8 billion people on the planet, we can't go back to like a perfectly pristine ocean, but we can aim for 80% or 60% or even 30% is much better than zero. And our livelihoods, our food security, our health hangs in the balance. So depending on the day, I'm either fighting for like 20% or 80%, but like

any of it is better than zero. And now, okay, ocean cleanup, Kerry, Stuart and Rob Smith both had the same question. Does supporting a group like for ocean really help clean up the ocean of plastics? Like are any of those methods of getting things out of the ocean? Are those really going to work? Are those like, do we want to believe that they work? We definitely want to believe that they work. Oh my gosh, do we want to believe that they work? And a lot of people have been sort of fooled into thinking that that problem is solved. Like there's this technology that will just like clean it up and we don't have to worry about it anymore. But that technology is far from being proven, very far from being proven. And if we think about the challenges of cleaning up

something as big as the ocean, which is, you know, 72% of the planet, that's a tall order. And not to say we shouldn't try, but I think the question is, where are we going to devote our resources and energy? And so one, when I think about it, I think about, well, how do we stop the flow of plastic into the ocean? This is a good point. And gird your hearts for another horrifying statistic. Because the cleanups don't matter if we're still dumping one ton of plastic into the ocean every four seconds. What? I worked with the group Lonely Whale. I've been working with them on making these calculations. How much are we actually putting in? Where is it coming from? What types of sources is it? And that's the number that we came up with one ton of plastic

is entering the ocean every four seconds globally. And so when we think about that, I've been my time thinking about how to prevent every second of plastic entering the ocean. So quick history, how long has plastic been around? So technically since 1856, but it wasn't until World War II that mass production started. Now around 1954, DuPont and Dow Chemical invented and licensed expanded polystyrene, which is used in packaging and bottles, although there's a bunch of different types of plastic. So yeah, in the 1960s, we saw an explosion of plastics in commercial uses. Now, 1967's classic film, The Graduate, was sadly on point about one piece of career advice. I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Yes, sir. Are you listening? Yes, sir.

Plastics. So what can we do? Not. And I think beach cleanups are great. They raise awareness, they build community. We obviously should pick up what we can. I think the focus should be more on coastal cleanups, as opposed to way out in the ocean. Because once you get to way out in the ocean, you're dealing with a lot of like interesting physics and oceanography challenges, but also the fact that if you're just scooping everything up, you're scooping up the marine life as well. So there's a lot of opportunity to just clean up along the coast, but then to really force corporations and governments to do their part. This shouldn't be about you and me going up and picking up straws and bottles from the coast. It should be about us refusing to use them,

but it should should really be like corporations changing the way they are manufacturing things and government improving their, you know, recycling capacity and demanding that companies produce only recyclable things. So much of the plastic that's produced is not even recyclable. Oh, I didn't know that. Just checked out a Nat Geo article from last year that said 91% of the world's plastic isn't recycled. And I audibly whimpered in a public coffee shop. So you know how plastics usually have a triangle with a number in the middle on the bottom? Not all of those will be reincarnated into other objects. One and two usually can. Four and five maybe. And three, six and seven are usually not accepted by recycling programs. So read up on

the hot goss between the numbers because some types of plastics even contain fun chemicals like BPAs that have shown to contribute to infertility. Did I warn you that this podcast would be a bummer because I know I did? Welcome to hell. Now luckily people like Ayanna are out there working on better public policy. She's like the Amal Clooney of the sea. Also some folks in the other room while we were recording this were having kind of a spirited discussion. So if you hear their chatter, just pretend we're having a fun time at a cocktail party chatting about preventing environmental doom. There's a lot of room for improvement there, but we're seeing I think we're actually seeing some really positive signs in that direction. The UN has

been organizing something called the Clean Seas Initiative and they have gotten I think three dozen countries to sign on and make commitments to reducing ocean plastic pollution. So we're starting to see commitments at not just at the individual level. I will give up bags and straws and carry my own water bottle and these are all great things to do. I do them, but what really inspires me is Kenya and Rwanda banning plastic bags. Costa Rica pledging to go completely without single use plastics by 2020. The EU is starting to make some big policies and so all around the world we're starting to see these shifts. I think Chile just banned plastic bags as well. So yeah, there's a lot of good stuff happening there. We're starting to see a lot of momentum there and I

think that's great because it's also an opening to talk about ocean problems more generally. Great. Now that you care about, you know, a straw and a turtle's nose, like let's talk about let's talk about what else is happening to those turtles. Let's talk about overfishing and poaching in the state of the habitats that they are trying to live in. Right. So what you're saying is the tide is changing. The tide is turning. I, of course, I got this question and I'll just touch on it just in case there's anything that we didn't just answer in that, but Maria Kumrow, Jen Borlick and Sarah Millington all wanted to know how much positive impact on marine plastic debris will the plastic straw ban really have? They all kind of want to know like what's your

thought on like plastic straws or the problem? Is it like they are, but essentially the plastic straws are a really big problem because they cannot be recycled. They're like too small for municipal recycling to deal with. Okay. So that's one of the reasons they're a particular problem. There's obviously a lot of other problems. We're using a million plastic bottles every minute. So that's not good. Just personal shout out to companies like LK and Hosley Taylor for making these public water bottle filling stations so we could stop buying plastic bottles when we're parched and in public. They're so great. Look for the little bottle silhouette near a water fountain. You can roll up with your thermos and just fill her up, boss, for zero dollars. It's great. And

they have these little counters that took off the number of plastic bottles they've prevented from being on earth. And so when your bottle is done filling, the number goes up one more. It's very fulfilling. And bags, I think the average plastic bag is used for 12 minutes before it's thrown out. So there's a lot of other issues, but straws are problematic because they can't be recycled and they also are one of the top items that you find in beach cleanups. So they're small, right? So they kind of like escape garbage cans and they end up on the beach a lot. And so that means they end up in the ocean a lot. So yeah, they're one of the top five items that the Ocean Conservancy has been consistently finding when they organize these global

international ocean cleanups and they collect data on what is really out there? What are the top 10 and plastic straws are always in the top five? And number one, can you guess what number one is? Oh no, I would say bottles, but I don't know. It's cigarette butts. What? The number one beach pollution by the number of items not by the mass of them is cigarette butts. And it's those plastic filters at the end. And of course, that's like all the chemicals from the cigarette is like a lot of them are trapped in that filter. So they're pretty toxic too. So don't just throw your cigarette butts in the sand. Oh my God, they're like plastic cancer tampons. That's the worst. It's pretty bad. I mean, it is funny that culturally it's like, oh, I'd never drop a wrapper on the ground,

but people are like, I just flick a cigarette butt. Where do they think that goes? Like raccoons are eating them? No, nobody wants those. That's really illuminating. I had no idea. And I wasn't sure if like plastic straws were like being a scapegoat for or if they were, but that's good to know. I mean, I think they also are not necessarily a scapegoat, but symbolic, right? Because for most people, they're completely unnecessary. Like reapply your lipstick if that's your issue or like whatever it is. I think there's a really important exception that needs to be made for the disability community. There are people who need to use straws. And that's fine because that would be a scapegoat if we're saying like, there are a few people who really need them

because that's how they drink. That's fine. But I think so there's no need. Absolutely, we should avoid making these blanket statements that that are problematic for for folks who need them. But most of us really, really, really don't need them. And the way that that drinks are made, they just like come with straws. So I think even just the flip from straws automatically to straws only on request would make a really big difference. What about those lids that are like, don't worry, you don't need a straw, but they're more plastic. I think that's ridiculous. Okay, that's what I thought. This is probably like an uncouth opinion, but I thought that Starbucks like really punted on that one. I mean, it's already like, you know, adult sippy cups is like

their whole thing. And I just just like doubled down on it. I saw that I saw someone drinking out of that. And I was like, what is that? I'm like, oh, so strong. And then I read something later that day that was like, he's plastic. I was like, God, silly. Although the alternative, which I do when I have like an urgent need for an iced coffee, and they try always order it in a paper cup. Oh, without a lid. Good to know. So that's my hack for that. Because obviously, like, iced coffee is delicious and I sometimes don't get enough sleep. So I get it. I just, you know, there are ways to work around this. Or I think a really big other opportunity for that anyone can do and that it shouldn't be just about individual responsibility, but like restaurants and cafes

should do is ask you, do you want it for here or to go? Because if you go into a cafe and you look around, everyone's using like to go containers and they're all sitting there and it drives me bonkers. And I think it's like, no one wants to wash the dishes or they haven't actually built these cafes with enough dishwashers or whatever. So I think there's a shift that needs to happen there. And just ask me, do you want it for here to go? Yeah, I drank a cup of tea in a cafe before this that was given to me in a paper cup. No lid, thank God. But still, and I got it and I had it in my hand and I was like, Oh, no. Yeah. Oh, I don't need this jerk. Okay, question about the garbage patch. Let's talk about the garbage patch. Blair Nelson and Eva both

ask like, what's going on with the Great Pacific garbage patch, which honestly sounds like, it sounds like not even a real thing. I mean, I know it's very real, but it's just like, so fancifully horribly named. And then what should we do about it? And like, what are we and what's happening with like microbeads and tiny, tiny particulate plastic? So for the Great Pacific garbage patch, that's a thing. There's actually, so the reason that it exists is because of ocean currents that swirl around in these gyres and then collect things. So a gyre is like a spiral or a whirl. It's kind of like a cowlick of the ocean. And so since there's plastic that gets concentrated into this patch, most of the plastic in that patch is really small. So it's like the size of your

pinky fingernail. It's not like a bunch of bottles floating on the surface. It's not actually like an island you could walk across. And so I think the initial reporting on that was great because it got people to care about it, but it also created sort of a false image in our heads of what it looks like. It's just, it's a higher concentration of plastic in that part of the ocean. So it's actually like a little bit, it's hard, which makes it a lot harder to clean up, right? Because it is quite diffuse. I watched some videos and the plastics hauled from the oceans range from like mountains of soggy fishing nets to tiny, tiny flecks of broken down bottles and toys. And the Great Pacific garbage patch is estimated to be between the size of Texas to the size of Russia,

somewhere in between there. Now, it may be the largest on the planet, but it's not alone. It has other garbage patch friends. And there's one of these garbage patches in, in every ocean gyre. So there are five major ocean gyres and there's a garbage concentration or garbage patch in every single one. So what we can do about it is lobby for changes in corporate and government practices regarding plastic to prevent this one ton of plastic entering the ocean every four seconds. We can obviously change our individual behavior and we can support conservation groups that are doing really practical things to turn that around. So one of the, there, there's a few groups that I think are really exciting. There's a lonely whale is doing really good work on the corporate level,

gathering together partners for that to push there and working with the UN. The Ocean Conservancy started something called the Trash Free Seas Alliance that's also working with corporations and governments to, to shift policy and the status quo surfrider, which is an organization that's focused on the surfing community and activating people who love the ocean to help protect it. They have been really active in campaigns against single use plastic. I think that's the term that we need to think about is like single use plastic. There are certainly some like medical uses of plastic that I'm happy to have for, you know, for safety and sanitary reasons. But I think just like the disposability of everything all the time in our daily lives is

problematic and actually creates this mindset of like, oh, I'll just get a new one or I'll just whatever. And it's like feeding this just really unsustainable consumerist disposable mindset that I think is not super great. There's a lot of things we can do about it. So support groups like that. And there's also a lot of, there's like cool low tech solutions that are out there. And my favorite one is called Mr. Trash Wheel, which is basically like, you know, those old fashioned like steamboats that had like a big water wheel at the back. It's basically like this huge water wheel and then behind it is a dumpster. Oh, so I just checked out a video of Mr. Trash Wheel. And it's the happiest I've been during the entire making of this episode. I was not prepared for how cute

this garbage gobbling machine is. So picture a water wheel on one side and then a domed canopy that looks kind of like a covered wagon, but with one end, a big mouth fed by a conveyor belt of trash atop this whole structure, two huge googly eyes giving this giant trash apparatus the look of this hungry, floating earth saving cartoon. I want to hug it even though it's the size of like a motorhome and also probably very smelly and would eat me and throw me in a dump start, but with good intentions. And so you put this water wheel in a harbor or a river and as pollution runs down the river, it gets sort of funneled towards this water wheel. And then as this wheel spins, it picks up bottles or tires or whatever's floating down and just like deposits

it as it turns in the dumpster behind it. And then you take away the dumpster and like dispose of it properly in the dump. And so you're preventing all this stuff from ever even getting to the sea. So this is in Baltimore. There's Mr. Trashwheel and then there's Professor Trashwheel. So there's two and they did like a big social media review where they like revealed that Professor Trashwheel was a woman, which I was obviously amused by. So stuff like that I think is really promising. And so instead of thinking about like cleaning up the middle of the ocean, there's so much that we can be doing closer to land and should be doing. It's amazing that you're like, oh wait, we didn't have something to prevent that from going out there this whole time. Yeah, exactly. What are we

doing? Yeah. Oh my god, Iolante wants to know, how can we save the Great Barrier Reef? We could stop climate change. That would be like the thing. Cool. Yeah. What about sunscreens? I hear that's a factor. It is a factor and Hawaii just banned these sunscreens with these chemicals that are harmful to corals. I can't remember the name of like oxy. Oxybenzones. They also screw up your hormones. Yeah. That's fun. So it's worth it to do a little more reading on chemicals like oxybenzone, which can lower testosterone in adolescent boys. It can leach into mother's breast milk and cause endocrine disruption among humans. So even if you have a personal beef against coral reefs and you don't care if they die, you might want to switch to mineral sunscreens

just for the sake of your own gonads. Basically, we should only be using mineral sunscreens, like with zinc and like that make you look weird and pasty. That's the one you want. Or just what I do is like I just wear long sleeves or sit in the shade when I've had too much sun. Also super effective. The mineral ones are great for summer goths. This is a great way to do that. 100%. Yeah. So I think it's great that Hawaii is leading the way on that. So that makes a difference. I mean, fishermen that I've talked to in the Caribbean said when then cruise ships come in and all the tourists like slather on all this sunscreen and then jump in the ocean to go snorkeling. It looks like this oil slick of like shiny iridescent stuff

on the surface and they're like, obviously this is bad for the fish and the corals. So it's a problem in places where there are high densities of people more so, but there's tons of great options of mineral sunscreen. So just look for things with zinc in them. Okay. And my question here, what's going to bone the ocean more? Is it going to be the acidification, the plastics, or the rising temperatures? I can kind of cheat and just say climate change because the acidification and the rising temperatures are both effects of climate change as a sea level rise, which is doing some crazy stuff to coastal ecosystems too. So not to mention to our homes and our infrastructure. So yeah, I think climate change is the number one. Plastic is pretty insidious

and the rate at which we're just like taking things out of the ocean through overfishing is pretty wild, but the ocean can is incredibly resilient. So it will be fine without us. Like if we really screw this up and kill the ocean, which means we're killing the planet, which means we're killing ourselves, when humans go extinct, the ocean will be fine. It'll be different, but it'll be fine. So it's really like our survival that we should be worried about. And so for those who need a more self-centered motivation for ocean conservation, there you go. Save the ocean to save yourself. Paula Herrera asked, were the boys in my middle school right? How much of the ocean is actually whale sperm? I don't think that's quantifiable, correct? That is not a number that I

have heard. And then although they do have enormous penises. Hey mom, dad, fast forward like 30 seconds, okay? Okay, so writing this in a coffee shop, I made sure to angle my screen before hesitantly typing into Google, how big are whale dicks? And in huge font, the answer popped up 12 inches. I was like, oh, okay. Then I realized that was the diameter. The length is 10 feet. Also whales can pee up to 250 gallons a day, sometimes floating on their backs and just becoming tinkling geysers. Ayanna delightfully topped that fact with this. But barnacles, barnacles have the largest penis to body size ratio of anything, because they have to have sex without moving. They're like stuck on rocks. And they literally have to like, penis comes out of one

particle, like finds another barnacle, like knocks on the door. They like open their shell, like let this penis in. Can you even imagine? Oh my God, you're in like a long distance relationship. Yeah. The only way to get a touch is like, send your dick over. It's like a dickagram. Hi. Basically. 50,000 babies. Krista Avampato, Jenny Caloda, and Anne Sophie Caron all pretty much asked about your job. Like, where would someone begin becoming a marine biologist? Or someone who works on like science policy? Like, how do people become you? Don't advise becoming me exactly. But I would love for more people to join Team Ocean because there's really exciting work to do. And it's a wonderful community of folks. I don't know if

that my personal story is super instructive. I think there's a lot of different paths to get to this type of work. I took the science path towards policy because at the time it seemed like there were a lot of lawyers going towards ocean policy, but not a lot of scientists sort of meeting them halfway. And so that's the direction I took. But you can go straight into law and policy. You can do communications. We obviously have a lot we can do to better tell the story and engage people. There's a lot of really amazing art happening around community engagement for oceans and this organization that I mentioned TBA 21 and their academies supporting a lot of really amazing ocean art places like Pioneer Works where we are now that are integrating the science studio with

the arts exhibitions here are really important to changing the cultural narrative. So I guess I would say it depends like what are you passionate about? What are you good at? If you want to end then how can you do that in service of the ocean? So whether that's art or science or law or communications writing, I think there is an opportunity to rewrite our relationship with the ocean. I've done more I'm doing more and more writing now because I feel like there's just not enough literature out there about our changing planet and how we relate to it. Not in like a depressing way but just in a like what does it mean to be a human in this day and age? That was probably not super helpful but there's lots of different like fellowships and internships and positions in all

these organizations. So an organization like the Ocean Conservancy needs you know it's it's a big NGO or Oceana or World Wildlife Fund or Wildlife Conservation Society. They all have the major conservancy Conservation International. They have global ocean conservation efforts and to run an organization like that you need you need secretaries and janitors too who are committed to like keeping that going. You need accountants, you need lawyers, you need policy nerds, you need science experts, you need people running social media so it's it's all those things. You need caterers I mean and boy do we need better sustainability in in events so I think there's there's a million ways to get involved and to do it either full time or to start like an adjacent

business or join something that's related to it so hop on in. Yeah like that's great find what you're good at and then approach it that way. Yeah that's instead of trying to shoehorn yourself because not everyone wants to be a marine biologist and some people think scuba diving is scary and that doesn't mean you can't be helpful. I would be the worst lawyer like when you I see pictures of you like doing policy and you're in a boardroom with like a bunch of people in suits and you all have folders and that to me is scarier than like being under the ocean in a vast like so funny it's like that to me I'm like oh god there's so many terms that you have to know like the fact that you have a lot of different languages to be learned. So yeah you know and

I think you touched on this before but in a nutshell Mariner Cosplay, Neil Williams, Sarah Meredith, Smear Tactics all kind of want to know like in a nutshell what can the average person do in their life to just help. I mean I know limiting single-use plastic do not dump a bunch of garbage into the ocean. That's a great place to start. I've got a list actually on the Ocean Collective website there's a resources page where you can learn more about all this stuff. There's a page on protected areas and on fishing and on climate and on pollution and there's lots of articles in fact you can read about all that but there's also a list of like 10 things you can do. So this full list is up at oceancollective.co and there's no E on collective.

But number one is to vote. And because politicians are off the hook on a lot of environmental stuff because their constituents aren't making demands of them and believe me I know there's a lot of other issues people are dealing with in the political sphere right now but if we don't hold our politicians accountable for the state of the environment because they have a lot of ability to change the rules of the game and give the earth a better fighting chance. So I think I think that's the number one thing is to be politically engaged when there are bills that come up on you know funding ocean cleanups or research into ocean acidification or funding protection of marine parks like we should be chiming in and saying yes this matters yes we

want to end over fishing there's a possibility this there's a bill that could change the way that fishing is managed and people need to be weighing in and saying excuse me you want to roll this back and allow people to over fish by law that doesn't seem to make much sense to me. And so it seems counterintuitive but political engagement is the number one and then obviously we can all you know be more careful about choosing sustainable seafood and bringing it up at the establishments that we care about and asking for it reducing our single use plastic reducing our carbon footprint because climate changes having such a big impact on the ocean. We can choose resorts when we go on vacation that are more ocean friendly or sustainable in general

there's no reason to leave your values at home when you go on vacation. This goes against literally everything Las Vegas was built on which is why it's great advice. Yeah and so the list kind of goes on from there I think I maybe got five or six. So I cross-checked this with the take action section of the ocean collective site and the remaining items were get informed you're listening to this great job choose other sustainable foods and farms not just seafood you can clean up the coast you can donate to an ocean cause and she has some recommendations on the resources page and to help spread the word so tell people about this episode if you feel like it. Okay now what do you do if you're crying into a bowl of

fish chowder right now and when it comes to sustainable seafood is that kind of something that is said to make us feel better or is there really no that's real and I think with aquaculture that kind industry kind of got a rough start but they are figuring out sustainable practices there's a lot of the most exciting work in that space for me is around integrated farming or vertical ocean farming or what's called 3d ocean farming and it's about growing oysters and mussels and clams and all these different kinds of algae together in a simplified ecosystem that kind of creates habitat for other things to swim through as well algae is super super healthy and underrated sea vegetables as they're now sometimes like called in hip spots

so eat more algae farm shellfish you can eat with impunity as much as you want those oysters mussels clams because they actually just filter the water so we don't have to catch wild fish to feed the farmed fish which is a problem with some other species although they're also innovating feeds from like plant proteins and insect proteins to feed fish now so that industry is coming along well so what I personally eat is those things I eat seaweed I eat farmed shellfish and I eat sardines and anchovies because those tiny fish that reproduce quickly there's lots of them those tend to be more sustainable than like tunas and swordfish and sharks and those things that like take a long time to reproduce they don't make a ton of babies and they tend to be really heavily

targeted by fishing so from the the big picture I'd say that but then again like if you're working if you're in a local community if you know you're fishermen if you're part of community supported fishery like the vegetable boxes csa's community supported agriculture they're now doing that for local fisheries which is cool you can get like whatever the fisherman caught you can get a share of the catch this by the way is also a great excuse to just casually use the word fishmonger in conversation fish mongers fish monger fish monger and there's also an app that's helpful which is from the monitoring bay aquarium seafood watch program that you can download so that's not I wasn't sure if that was just focus focus and like no that's real there are things that we can

feel comfortable eating but I think the question is also like how many meals a month or a day should we expect to be wild animals because we would never expect to be eating like lions and tigers and you know antelopes as our primary source of protein on land but that's what we're expecting from the ocean I mean tuna are so high up the food chain and swordfish and all these things and so I think we just need to change the mindset that we can live sustainably awful wild animals from the ocean that are at the top of the food chain yeah I guess we see the word seafood buffet together too much oh god I mean it really does yeah it's a wrong yeah wrong impression of what's out there and I think that's part of the problem is that the price of seafood hasn't skyrocketed in tandem with

the with overfishing you'd think that when something gets more rare it gets more expensive yeah but we haven't seen that as much with seafood because it's often really heavily subsidized by governments are helping to pay for fuel or boats or whatever to send more people out fishing and so you can still get a can of tuna for like what one or two bucks and so if you if that's the case why would you think that it's a problem it's so cheap there must be a lot of it and so I think until the price of things reflects their value and their rarity then it's going to be really hard to can to have these conversations that sink in because um because that price is such a strong signal right yeah can you imagine if a can of tuna was like 17 dollars yeah I can't stop picturing

mariah carry instagraming herself eating tuna from a can with like a golden fork and other people seeing it just like man I will never know that kind of life so aspirational so now I always ask these questions at the very end what about your job sucks the most what is the worst email really what is the same thing that sucks about many jobs I spend way too much time answering email yeah just an endless but it's I mean that's also the way that I'm able to have colleagues all over the world and avoid video chats which I really hate yeah so so yeah but so it's a blessing and a curse and what do you love the most about your job or the ocean I love jumping into the ocean and I love the look on people's faces when they understand

something about it and it's not like I think the joy and happiness the ocean brings us is amazing and I appreciate that too but when like a teenager comes up to me and explains to me that parrotfish are important because they eat algae and poop sand and they have this like intense look on their face like I'm explaining to you how this ecosystem works and like we all need to be on board with this like that's what brings me the deepest joy is like the confidence and the engage like the engagement in solutions that people have when they learn something about it so that's something that really inspires me right it's great when you can see that shift from an ownership of the ocean like it's ours to exploit versus like a responsibility to the ocean

do you know what I mean like absolutely you know like a familiarity and an investment in it you know yeah but um and now where can we find you and your company like give us give us some links so we can gently stalk yeah I'm very easy to stop I think if you put like Ayanna and marine biologist and you'll find me and that ocean collective is the name of the company and there's no E at the end of collective because that is a heavy metal band in Australia and obviously we needed all the social handles to be consistent so it's oceancollective.co is our website and we're at ocean collective on twitter and and instagram and then personally and you can find me at Ayanna Eliza on twitter and ayanna.elizabeth on instagram I think the online ocean community is actually a really cool

aspect of the job as well because nerdy ocean jokes are amazing there's so many puns to be made so many but I actually haven't ever know a file full of ocean puns do you really this is a thing I have do you have do you have to highlight one and just pop it in the end of an email no I actually try to avoid them I like I'm amused by the list of them and how many there are that you wouldn't know until you're writing an email about the ocean and then you'd be like all right let's dive into this people and like figure it out like don't be afraid to get your feet wet like let's just like figure out how we're gonna and I'm just like I don't know you can't do that because it's confusing if you're actually talking about the ocean does anyone ever write back I see what you did there

not yet not yet well I'm excited for your book to come out to thank you so much for the work that I'm sure the ocean thanks for your great questions and all of your patreon's questions there's so many questions I mean I had to consolidate into categories because so many people were like yeah so thank you for doing this my pleasure anytime awesome okay so we have come to the final credits of this sad romantic saga but with a glimmer of hope for maybe a happier sequel so find Dr. Anna Johnson all over the internet watch her amazing TED talk her public speaking check out Ocean Collective and just tell the world about the episode so we can stop losing sleep of the ocean and just start making better choices

now go talk to your fishmonger you can sign up for a beach or a river cleanup you can donate five bucks to an ocean charity or start reading up on plastic use you got this you got you're so well armed now you got this now to support the podcast you can sign up to be a patron if you want at patreon.com slash oligies merch is available at oligiesmerch.com and there's a grip of back to school stuff up as of today so collegiate crested shirts and things to put you in kind of an autumn frame of mind thank you Bonnie dutch for all your new designs and Shannon Feltis for helping run the site and for putting on the sold out camp oligies event in portland in a few weeks in september thank you erin talbert and hannah lipo for being admins to the facebook oligies

podcast group and thank you as always to podcast monger steven remorris for editing and helping produce this the music was written and performed by nick thorburn who also did serials podcast theme he makes other great music in the band islands and in solo efforts now if you stay to the end of the episode you know that i tell you a secret thank you so much for all of your support in terms of last week's secret about how i'd never seen any of the harry potter movies and this you know what i'm gonna give you another harry potter secret because you guys seem to be passionate about it i was really afraid of taking the test to find out what house i would be in because i was like what if i come up slitherin what if i find out i'm like kind of lightly evil just through a harry

potter quiz i took the quiz and i guess it turns out i'm griffin door i don't know what that means but i think it's okay okay we're all in this thing together good job bye bye do when life gets you down you know what you gotta do i don't want to know what you gotta do just keep swimming just keep swimming just keep swimming swimming swimming