Ologies with Alie Ward - Oceanology (THE OCEAN) with Ayana Johnson: Encore Presentation

Episode Date: August 18, 2020

With some fresh updates, ocean and policy expert Dr. Ayana Johnson guests in an encore presentation of a fan favorite episode. Hear updates from her, learn about her new podcast “How to Save a Planet,” and what she’s been up to since this episode originally aired in 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? Alie struggles with finding a balance between the wonders and the bummers, and in the first 20 or so minutes, we’ll 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. A donation went to UrbanOceanLab.org Buy her book, out on September 22: https://www.allwecansave.earth Her podcast: “How to Save a Planet” https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet Dr. Johnson's OceanCollectiv.co Dr. Johnson on Twitter @ayanaeliza and Instagram @ayanaeliza Dr. Johnson's website: ayanaelizabeth.com Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologies OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes! Follow @Ologies on Twitter or Instagram Follow @AlieWard on Twitter or Instagram More links at www.alieward.com Sound editing by Steven Ray Morris Theme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh, hello, oligites. Okay, so this is an encore presentation of an episode, but with a few new bells and whistles, I just added because you loved this oligist so much when this first aired in 2018. And she has a brand new podcast of her own. It just launched. It's called How to Save a Planet. And it's co-hosted by Alex Blumberg. The latest episode of her new podcast addresses the most common Patreon question we got for her. So you're definitely going to want to go check out our new podcast. Also, at the break, you're going to hear an update from the oligist herself that she sent in specifically for oligies listeners. Trust me, you want to hear what she has been up to the last two years. It's amazing. Just trust me. Also, I think I swore like your

grandpa at poker night in this episode. So sorry. Also, there's a new secret at the end. Okay, here we go. Oh, hey, it's your ol' pop here. So moan the lawn in those shorts your mother wishes I throw away. Allie Ward, back with another episode of oligies. 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 going to 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 oligies via items, oligiesmerch.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 oligies 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 will also give me 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 board. 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 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. Yeah. 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 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 corollary 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 bag piping? 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 like 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 like 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 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 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, 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 what 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 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 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. I swear I'm getting to the good stuff. So so fishing can 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 fishermen 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 fishermen'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 a let's 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 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. Right. So that was a really eye-opening moment and 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 you know profoundly in love with tropical fish until he grows bored. Then one day I say fuck fish. I renounce fish. I vow never to set foot in that ocean again. That's how much fucked 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 it was like actually it's about fishermen it's about coastal communities it's 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 like what they're even doing. Yeah human behavior and like 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 them. Exactly I'm just swimming around trying to like find a snack make some babies like not get munched by a shark or whatever but you're like hey humans let's let's 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 seas and 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 all these oceans but really it's all one big thing and then 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 then super deep parts of the ocean and so it's a lot of it is about temperature and sunlight that creates these different zones. Okay quick quick rundown of ocean zones we covered this in the ickleology 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 seven 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 this but the ocean why is it salty? I'm just gonna ask I'm 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 um okay let's questions about the oceans that are not depressing um 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 and oh totally you do yeah I started a shell collection when I was five in Key West Florida and I usually uh 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 beat to I've ever been to really do you have a name for that fishbowl or is this a fishbowl 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

the pacific ocean was named because they thought it was calmer I think that's right is it 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 like 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 I don't want to hear an app because it's uh just a bad simulation or yeah I'm a pretty light sleeper okay so um I like complete silence and I think yeah as someone who is like 95% vegan mm-hmm I and who never eats fake meat it's maybe the same thing right like I'm not gonna go have like a soy hot dog and I'm not gonna 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 three or four hundred 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 like it's so big it's terrifying it's pretty cool mm-hmm yeah I mean some people think that if you don't scuba dive you can't 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 um the behavior of an octopus or a parrot fish 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 yeah 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 if you have like a dark rocky bottom or like a volcanic it's

different and I didn't realize that a lot of white sand is coral sand right yeah yeah and a lot of it came out of a parrotfish's butt 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 bite they scrape algae off the reef basically they are the lawn mowers 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 and the water behind them but 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's 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 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 um are running off into the ocean from different kinds of human

pollution agriculture in particular um you're seeing that the algae is being 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 butts protect their the sand poopers what's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen in the ocean oh 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 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 i love that ocean the life aquatic is pretty good really yeah i 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 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 i don't know just like came to me to dream do you have a title for it yet can you say no not yet i'm just um like starting to finish up the very first draft so i don't have an agent or anything for it yet but um 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 that it was a book i would have loved to have that's so great

i do have a swimming in my purse never leave the house without you yeah i'm a friend who um does a lot of theater work i had i met up with her when i was just coming back from the 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 okay this is where we're gonna take a turn all right i'm ready we're gonna 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 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 yeah you know whatever they have but horrible disease so okay let's do it let's get into the sad stuff via questions from the oligies patreon patrons but okay before we do because this is an encore presentation we have the power to time travel two years into the future almost to the day that this interview was recorded so we checked back in with dr annan johnson about what she's been up to okay you're gonna want to hear this hello oligies crew this is dr iana elizabeth johnson i am so glad to be back with you i am coming to you live from my closet in my apartment

in brooklyn where lots of podcasts i think are getting made these days in various closets around the country and i thought i would give you a little update to let you know what's happened since 2018 when it comes to my work and the ocean so i started a think tank called urban ocean lab for the future of coastal cities so i get to nerd out about ocean and climate and urban policy and design which is a total blast and maybe the most exciting thing actually is that on this very podcast when ali was interviewing me i talked about wanting a book agent and anthony matero from cia actually heard this interview while he was on a treadmill and apparently almost fell off and found my email address and got in touch with me and we now have signed two book deals with penguin

random house and the first one is coming out in just a few weeks in september on the 22nd and it's called all we can save truth courage and solutions for the climate crisis it's an anthology of essays and poems and quotes and illustrations by women climate leaders that i've co-edited with dr catherine wilkinson and it's really beautiful so if you want to learn more about who the contributors are and other details you can find us at all we can save dot earth but one of the reasons i'm here back with you today is because i have just started my own podcast with spotify and gimlet co-created with alex bloomberg and he and i are co-hosting it as well it's called how to save a planet and it's all about climate solutions and what we can all do to effect change on at the level

that really matters so i hope you will find us and tune in on spotify or wherever else you get your podcasts yeah because we've got some work to do when it comes to the climate so the last thing i'll say is um we're coming up on election season and i hope you will all think about the climate and the ocean when you're deciding who to vote for because that really matters and we are running at a time to get it right when it comes to the environment so please vote and the last last thing i'll say is that when i came on the show two years ago i got the loveliest warmest welcome from the whole alex community my comments were just overflowing with sweet things so thank you all for being um so darn wonderful and keep it up okay and side note back in 2018 we didn't have sponsors of the

show just wonderful patrons who helped with all the expenses but now since we have sponsors we can donate a portion of the proceeds to a cause relevant to theologist so i'm choosing to donate it to urban ocean lab urban ocean lab harnesses collective wisdom to envision and design targeted solutions for the future of coastal cities and that drives development of policy frameworks and that drives development of policy frameworks to catalyze legislative change so urban ocean lab is a 501c3 non-profit founded by dr johnson herself and you can learn more at urbanoceanlab.org and so that donation was made possible by sponsors who you will hear about now okay on to your ocean questions they are salient ones let's dive in

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 yeah the answer it's really bad oh man this is like the scene where a corseted heroine 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 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 like 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 like not fully exploited the other 90% are fully exploited or over exploited so there's not like a lot of room left to take more and we've also been fishing further from shore into deeper waters using like more and more high-tech tools all the like 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 like really high-tech boats and high-tech equipment that we have to use because the fish have become so rare and so 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 percent 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 by catch so that's no good and that proportion

can actually be even worse and it you know bulldozes the habitat while that's happening as well oh that's terrible what about farmed fish is there such I mean so 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 they and they protect places from storms like in the tsunami in indonesia um was it 10 years ago now more yeah um the 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 um and then we just pollute it with shrimp growing in

high density and feed them all this stuff and antibiotics as we're growing them in such close quarters that they're all getting sick um so it's 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 um 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 iana 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 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 like people don't know their stuff it's all these like buffets it's probably in my colon i'm a monster i have no idea yeah well that's the thing like people don't know about it i thought they were like i 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 they're maybe it's fine yeah oh my god i had 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 it's just very different 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 we're how we're going to be able to use it and be ready to to make some adaptations oh i'm just thinking about cruise ship shrimp aface 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 yeah 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 got to the ocean or 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 that work so definitely don't give up okay but i obviously i'm not sugarcoating it either like it is bad um the ocean is different than it was when we were born and we're not even that old well um 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 a hundred percent healthy ocean it's where we're gonna fall in between because with eight billion people on the planet we can't go back to like a perfectly pristine ocean but we can aim for 80 percent or 60 percent or even 30 percent is much better than zero and our our livelihoods our food security our health hangs in the balance so depending on the day i'm either fighting for like 20 percent or 80 percent but like any of it is better than zero and now okay ocean cleanup uh kary stewart and rob smith both had the same question um 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 gonna work are those like do we want to believe that

they work we definitely want to believe that they work yeah 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 two 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 just so you 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 or 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 bpa's that have shown to contribute to infertility did i warn you that this podcast be a bummer because i know i did welcome to hell now luckily people like ayaana are out there working on better public policy she's like the amal cloney of the sea also some folks in the other room while we were

recording this we're 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 uh 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 you know 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 banding 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 astra and a turtles nose like let's talk about let's talk about what else is happening to those turtles let's talk about overfishing and poaching and 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 um i of course i

got this question um and i'll just touch on it just in case there's anything that we you didn't just answer in that but um maria kumro jen borlick and sarah millington all wanted to know how much positive impact on marine plastic debris will the plastic straw band 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

hozzley taylor for making these public water bottle filling stations so we could stop buying plastic bottles when we're parched and in public it's 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 we 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

are they so they're like they're they're small right so they kind of like escape garbage cans and like people they just 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 do these organize these global um international ocean cleanups and they collect data on you know what are what is really out there like what are the top 10 and plastic straws are always in the top five and number one yeah 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 like by the number of items not by like the 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 like i just flick a cigarette butt like yeah where does it yeah 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 me i think they also are not necessarily

a scapegoat scapegoat but symbolic right because for most people they're completely unnecessary like reapply your lipstick yeah 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 uh 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 yeah 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 wear you don't need a straw but they're more plastic i think that's ridiculous okay that's what i thought i think 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 hosting a straw and then i read something later that day that was like he was plastic i was like god damn silly although the alternative which i do when i have like an urgent need for an iced coffee

and they try i 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 i know 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 or 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 i had it in my hand i was like oh no yeah oh i don't need this i'm such a jerk okay question about the garbage patch let's talk about the garbage patch um blare nelson and eva both uh 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 um so the reason that it exists is because of ocean currents that um sort of 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 uh 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 it's which makes it a lot harder to clean up right because it's 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 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 lonely well is doing really good work on the corporate level gathering together partners for that to push there and 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 surf rider 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's 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 not good 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 trash wheel and then there's professor trash wheel so there's two and they did like a big social media review where they like revealed that professor trash wheel 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 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 name but like oxy oxy benzone they also screw up your hormones yeah that's fun so it's worth it to

do a little more reading on chemicals like oxy benzone 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 uh that make you look weird and pasty like that's the one you want or just what what i do is like i just wear long sleeves or sit in the shade when i've had too much fun also super effective the mineral um ones are great for summer goths this real great way to do that 100 yeah so i think it's great that uh hawaii is leading the way on

that um 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 the 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 sunscreens 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 um i can kind of cheat and just say climate change because the acidification and the more

rising temperatures are both um 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 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 um it's really like our survival that we should be worried about right and and so

for those who need a more self-centered motivation for ocean conservation there you go save the ocean to save yourself palaharera 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 uh that is not a number that i have heard um 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 iana 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 barnacle 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 in touch is like send your dick over it's like a dickagram basically 50 000 babies um christa avampado jenny calota and uh ann sophie caron all pretty much asked about your job um like where would someone begin becoming a marine biologist um

or someone who works on like science policy like how do people become you i 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 um 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 academy is 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 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 no 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 a world wildlife fund or wildlife conservation society they all have the nature 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 and 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 instead of trying to shoehorn yourself into 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 board

room with like a bunch of people in suits and ever you all have folders and that to me is scarier than like being under the ocean in a vast like nothing 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 an attitude for it languages i'm like learned oh so yeah you know and i think you touched on this before but in a nutshell mariner cosplay neil williams sarah meredith um 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 um do not dump a bunch of garbage into the ocean that's a great place to start water 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 oh and because 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 where 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 uh 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 fishermen 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 off of 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 feel 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 reflect 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 um 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 um so that's something that really inspires me 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 stalk i think if you put like iana 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 consistent so it's ocean

collective dot co is our website and we're at ocean collective on twitter and and instagram cool and then personally and you can find me at iana elisa on twitter and iana dot elizabeth on instagram i think uh the online ocean community is actually a really cool aspect of the job as well because nerdy ocean dokes 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 the 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 always not yet tort not yet well i'm excited for your book to come out to thank you so much for the work that you do i'm sure the ocean thanks for your great questions and all of your patreons questions there's so many questions i mean i had to consolidate into categories 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 also check out her brand new podcast hello how to save a planet her nonprofit urban ocean lab org you can buy her anthology book all we can save which is due out september 22nd and there's going to be links to those wonderful things in the show notes and just tell the world about the episode so we can stop losing sleep over 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 oligies merch.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 feltas 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 ray morris 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 uh in the band islands and in solo efforts okay so if you

stick around to the end of the episode you know i tell you secrets and this week's secret is that the original secret was about how i'd never seen the harry potter movies but i took a quiz to see what house i was in and it said griffin door and i was like i don't really know what that means but okay but i decided to put a new secret up because jerry rowing is trying out to be a real turd and a transphobe which is just an epic bummer and i can't abide by that so the updated secret is that i still haven't seen a harry potter movie or read a book but i feel a lot less bad about that now also it's 5 15 in the morning i am about to leave for lax to board a flight and it's my first flight since covid started so i got a mask i got a face shield i got gloves okay but right

you