Sea Control - Sea Control 547 What the Wild Sea Can Be with Dr. Helen Scales

Episode Date: September 6, 2024

Links1. "What The Wild Sea Can Be – The Future of the World’s Ocean," by Helen Scales, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2024. 2. Sea Control 246 – Beyond Static Spatial Management with Dr. Guillermo Ortuño Crespo and Andrea Galassi, CIMSEC, May 2, 2021.

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Dr. Helen Scales, and we're going to be discussing her book, What the Wild Sea Can Be, The Future of the World's Ocean. So, Helen, welcome. Could you tell the audience a little bit more about yourself, please? Hi, thanks for that lovely welcome. It's great to be here. My name's Helen. I'm a British marine biologist and I've been writing books for about 10-15 years now about the ocean, about the living wonders of the ocean and the troubles too. i write books for uh for kids and adults as well obviously this one's for adults and yeah i live in cambridge but spent a bit of my time quite a bit of my time in the far west of france which is when i get my own dose of uh c or vitamin c as some people like to put it well thank you for coming

on as a reminder to the listeners all opinions today are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated so we'll start with a very easy question for listeners. What are trilobites? Am I pronouncing that correctly? And what do they have to tell us about oceans past and why it's important to look back at ancient oceans? So I say trilobite. I think that's the general way of doing it. So let's go with that. Not a problem. The trilobites were an incredible group of animals that existed beginning around 420 million years ago in the Cambrian. So way, way back when life had been going for quite some

time in the ocean but not doing anything especially exciting like most up you know for a really long time it was just microbes and small things when when the cambrian came along things suddenly got quite interesting and trilobites were a major part of that group they are kind of mostly remembered for being sort of beetle like creatures um on average they were kind of the size that would fit neatly in the palm of your hand and yeah on the surface you might you know glance at one and think they look look quite like beetles they're called trilobites because their bodies are in three parts trilobite trilobes so they have a head kind of middle body section and a tail end but what we know about these animals is incredible because they're fought they fossilize really well

they have these hard outer skeletons which um not only fossilize themselves but they also during their lifetime they cast off their their outer layers to grow new ones to grow bigger so they kind of multiplied themselves in the fossil record so we have a really good idea of what these creatures were and they were incredibly diverse there was something like 25 000 species at least and we're finding new ones all the time and they for that time for hundreds of millions of years they really dominated the ocean they ruled the ocean if you like they're incredibly diverse they did all sorts of things ecologically they scuttled across the seabed and lived in in what were the form what what were reefs basically back then we would recognize as a reef environment they swam

through the water there were great big ones the size of a shovel that were predators there were tiny tiny ones that were basically the equivalent of plankton today and they were everywhere they were all around the ocean and and they were doing similar things i think this is the one of the things your question was why do we look into the past and it's about learning lessons of how the ocean used to be that is an important thing we need to do before we look towards the future and the trilobites show us that even back then you know hundreds of millions of years ago life in the ocean was doing similar things to what we see today even though it's completely different groups of animals these invertebrates um creatures without backbones um that uh don't

exist today they went extinct around 250 million years ago and yet they were doing things that we see in modern ecosystems they were they were hunting they were they were scavenging they were filtering food from the water there's one species one group of them that seemed to have had like a a kind of vegetable colander like strainer for a head and they would shake them from side to side and filter out little bits of food and tiny bits of animal matter from the water so they fed that way so we see all these things in place so it gives us this sense that there has been this continuity in the ocean even though we've had these big changes of life shifting and extinctions and then we kind of regrowing in different different ways in different groups of animals

we often see similar things which i just find fascinating it's sort of this idea of there is something about the ocean that leads us to these um these kind of important groups of creatures that live there and i think the other message that the trilobites tell us is that being and this is a kind of a warning really which is being incredibly abundant and diverse is not uh enough of a a safety backup if you like to avoid ultimately dying out the there was a time when really the trilobites were just ruling the ocean but bit by bit they were their diversity was eroded um they weren't coping well with things like climate change and eventually they disappeared um so we can't be complacent i think that's the lesson is we must not be complacent even if there

are creatures in in the ocean and in nature generally today that seem to be you know doing just fine that can change um so we have to be aware of that and and anticipate that i think as well so lots to learn yeah how are humans shaping uh what you refer to as a quote the order of the oceans flora and fauna end quote and what effects is that having right so shifting to the modern what we're doing now to the ocean which is something that might i look at from various different perspectives in the book and trying to understand what might come next and one thing we're doing is we are moving species around the ocean i mean there's always been shifts and changes you know life in the ocean is always adapted to the conditions in different places

you know we've we've got tropical oceans deep oceans cold frozen oceans and there are groups of organisms that live in those places and become well adapted to it but because we're now changing the physical and the chemical nature of the ocean things are moving partly by themselves you know we're getting huge uh a great speed of shifting ranges of species in the ocean and that's for a couple of reasons it's happening faster than on land so something like 45 miles per decade is the average figure for how far species in the ocean are moving and they're either moving north or south or deeper uh to to try and maintain their preferred temperature as the ocean warms as climate change heats our ocean up and that's about an order of magnitude faster than on land

it's also a very average figure so it hides the details of some things are moving much further some not so much and what we and if you pull that figure apart what you see is that there's a great mixture of things happening um you know some species are really you know for instance the tropics there's really nowhere to go except away from that the hottest part of the ocean already by the equator and so we're seeing almost a kind of an abandonment of the tropics of species moving to the north and to the south to try and keep within their preferred temperature range and we're seeing a decrease in species diversity of certain groups of animals so fish and so on are really moving away from the tropics you know and some species can't move there are things that are

limiting that ability to shift their range perhaps there's something blocking their way some kind of physical barrier one example is there's a species of shark in south africa called the um the puff out a shy shark which is a really beautiful little species that is called that because when they're caught or when they're scared these sharks curl up in a donut shape and cover their eyes with their tail to sort of i don't know protect their most vulnerable part of their body but they seem to be high and they're moving further south as the temperatures rise but then because they're coastal and they live on the seabed they can't keep going they can't keep going on into the ocean beyond the tip of south africa so they're caught in this climate trap but on the whole

ocean species can move further and faster than on land um because they swim because they have larvae that float around and eggs and so on so it's a very fluid by its nature a fluid place to be but the other thing i find really interesting about this this movement of species is that it's it species in the ocean are much more vulnerable to raising temperatures because they can't hide from it they can't behave in such a way that they can avoid the hottest part of the day they don't have the option of you know coming out only at night or sitting in a shady spot when it's really hot or sweating and perspiring to reduce their body temperature they're just in that water that is always that temperature and so any small it only takes a really relatively small shift in

temperature for this not to be good news for species whereas on land we know we are humans we know that during you know certain parts of the world the temperature can swing hugely by tens of degrees from day to night and we can adapt to that and deal with it but in the ocean it's generally more stable so any small changes really have an impact and and what's happening with this big mixing up of climate migrants is it's quite unpredictable in a sense we know we've got this north-south movement and this deepening but the details within that are hard to pull out in terms of how ecosystems are changing because some species are moving some aren't predators are going but leaving behind their prey we really are seeing this rearrangement of ecosystems

and you know there are big big kind of predictions like you know there will be more fish ending up in the northern latitudes than in the tropics fisheries and tropical areas are going to suffer just because there will be fewer fewer species and less diversity um but within that you know we're still really trying to understand how these movements and these shifts are going to play out and that's what we're going to be seeing you know in the years ahead we can point to places where there's already really dramatic changes places like greenland up north um the east coast of Greenland, we're seeing this incredible shift because there's basically been a loss of the sea ice there. And there are species that are very dependent on that ice, things like narwhal and

various types of seals and various cetaceans. And they're basically moving north as the ice is retreating and new species are coming to replace them. These boreal southern species are coming up and shifting how those ecosystems work. And this is a kind of prediction of what could happen more because we're expecting the whole of the Arctic to become ice-free uh throughout the summers um at some point in the coming years and decades so we are we're seeing this big remixing of the fauna and the flora of the ocean because of temperature change and then we put on top of that some of the species that humans are moving by accident as well um things like the lionfish which were reintroduced which naturally live in the pacific ocean and the indian

ocean on coral reefs but were released from captivity into the caribbean and they're basically everywhere now and and they're moving themselves into the mediterranean that the mediterranean move is a mix of climate and humans well physical the physical changes of humanity by digging the suez canal and having that connection through from the red sea and those species are moving up into the mediterranean that can and many more are now because the meds warm enough that they can survive the winters so we're seeing this big shift in species for various different reasons some of them more dramatic at this point than others and there's definitely more on the way i would say this is this is what we can look towards the future even if we don't know exactly how the

mix is going to play out the ocean species abundance and diversity and ranges are going to keep on changing where did the ocean protection movement come from and what impact is it having i'm going to interpret that as to talk about specifically um very strict protection of the ocean i think for a long time way back further than this what i'm going to talk about you know people have known that it's important to leave parts of the ocean alone and and to to give species and habitats a chance to recover but i'm particularly interested in the movement that's led to a realization that parts of the ocean need to be completely left alone and have no human impacts as far as possible can be excluded from those areas and we're mainly talking fishing this is

the major controllable in an immediate sense impact that humans are having obviously there's climate change and we need to do something about that but that is a kind of global issue that we have to deal with fishing kind of can come down much more to to local and regional um controls so um and it kind of sprung out of really um a scientific endeavor to understand how humans are changing the ocean and also a kind of desire among scientists to leave bits alone so they can study it um as far as i'm aware certainly very early on um ideas of this sort of level of very high protection came from new zealand in the 1960s and there was a research station set up uh somewhere north of the city of auckland and um and a chap called valentine chapman um a scientist who was

a seaweed expert at the university of auckland was helping to set up this research station and had the idea that actually wouldn't it be great if there weren't wasn't fishing around this research station um this this space for scientists to go and understand life in the ocean so that we You know, we wouldn't look from a very simple point of view of, you know, our equipment in the water wouldn't get caught up in fishing gear and the animals that we're studying wouldn't get caught and taken away. So together with another scientist called Bill Ballantyne, they decided to try and set up a highly protected marine reserve, one where no kind of exploitation is allowed at all. And it took them years of lobbying. This kind of thing just hadn't been happening in Aotearoa, New Zealand before. And but they were successful and they got to the point where they set up the first marine reserve. It was the Cape Rodney Okakari Point Marine Reserve, also known as Goat Island.

It's small, really small thing, only two square miles. But it really was one of the I think it was the world's first what we call no take zone. So it was an area where there is just no fishing and no other types of exploitation or extraction. and it's and it really paved the way um for doing more of this kind of thing there's there's loads more dozens more of these things now dotted around new zealand and it helped to inspire other people too and a story i tell in the book is about how some divers from the uk from scotland visited uh goat island and these reserves in new zealand and saw how it can really bring back life on the seabed and to to the ocean it's a simple thing you leave a piece of the sea

alone you don't trawl it you don't catch the animals you let them be and they grow they recover the habitats become healthier and you get this abundance of life that perhaps maybe people you know people forget or didn't know that there could be this rich life which is why these places are important it's a reminder that we can you know bring back life to the ocean we can have really rich and wonderful ecosystems and often it is a simple matter of leaving those areas alone so those Scotsmen came back home to their island up in the north the Isle of Arran and worked to do a similar thing and basically put in place a community-driven project in which they wanted to put their own really small to begin with protected area in and again it took years of

working hard and working with the government and getting people involved and crucially I think what they showed was to be successful for this kind of thing you really need buy-in from people who live there and work there and rely on these bits of ocean so fishers and you know anglers and swimmers and um people who just enjoy being there and they all came together and they achieved that and they created the lamlash bay marine reserve which is about the size of the city of london i think it's around about a square kilometer it's pretty small but again it was enough to show that this is helping the ecosystems to recover years later now i think it began it opened up in in the early in late 2000s and uh you know we're seeing recovery we're seeing bigger lobsters we're

seeing bigger scallops we're seeing intact seagrass beds and they're really important habitats like that and it's places like that i think that are important for showing the critical value of these very highly protected zones it's politically quite charged and there have been issues of getting other ones set up in other places often when there isn't this involvement of community it doesn't work well if it's from on high and the government say right where do you want the right we're going to put this here and you're going to have to figure it out because obviously it has an effect on local fishing communities and it's incredibly important to bring them on board and to have them realize that actually done well this can help their

their livelihoods as well and so it really is a win for everybody um and yeah now we're seeing them kind of popping up all over the world and to a huge other scales of this as well which is rather exciting to see and one of my favorite examples well two really one is um the ross sea marine reserve down in antarctica and that was a really hard one to discuss to negotiate and agree on because because no one owns antarctica and the the way it's set up is that all the nations involved in the antarctic treaty have to agree on any kind of regulations like this and they eventually did despite several nations really dragging their heels about wanting to protect what really is one of the last wilderness areas on the planet this enormous ocean uh sea off the

coast of Antarctica, where there are, you know, unique species of orca and incredible populations of emperor penguins and seals and so much else. And they eventually agreed that it would be closed to fishing, parts of it, at least for the next several decades. That is a real hope spot. And another is the site in the middle of the Pacific, the Papahana Makua Kea Marine National Monument, which is enormous. It's 1.5 million square kilometres, expanded by President Obama at the end of his term and and what we're seeing i think for me that's the most exciting is that it's having an impact and it's helping highly migratory species like tuna an animal that you think how on earth can you protect a piece of ocean when these things swim thousands

of miles and simply will swim beyond the boundaries of your reserve what you know what possible way can it help to to sort of cordon off a piece of the ocean and say no fishing here but the truth is that that he's working that the protected areas helps to protect where they spawn so the next generations are nurtured and we're seeing that outside of the reserve catches of tuna are increasing and that's not because there's more fishing it's because there's more fish and it's really showing that even these incredible long-distance swimmers are benefiting sure from a really big marine reserve um but that's the kind of scale we need to be thinking on if we do want to bring back those species that have been overfished and that aren't doing so well but

it's possible and that's the hopeful message we need to do it more but we need to do it well and and choose those places really carefully to be those protected you know rich and and light where life in the ocean can be as good as it possibly can be and then it also gives the ocean the greatest chance of dealing with the bigger problems like climate change so not to take your hopeful note and bring us crashing back down but uh probably the most reported on uh ecosystem this thus far in this area has been coral reefs uh what does the future hold for coral reefs it's a really tough question and and to be honest that chapter in the book was the hardest one for me to write partly because it's that ecosystem that i've known the best and

the longest I think um it was really what stole my heart when I first wanted to become a marine biologist um I dived and trained as a diver here in the UK in the very cold very murky uh waters um very good training I came out as an excellent scuba diver at the end but my heart was set on going into the warmer parts of the ocean and and exploring these amazingly diverse places and coral reefs really are unparalleled in their diversity and their importance and we we think that something like a quarter of all ocean species live in live on coral reefs and we're still finding so many more that these are incredibly important places for diversity for human populations that rely on them for fishing and for tourism and for coastal protection and so on um but then also

looking back my own career as a coral reef scientist i've realized that really right from the get-go they've been changing because of humanity and largely because of well overfishing but but also climate change and i was one of the first well i guess the sort of i was in belize basically in the mid 90s when the reefs of the caribbean underwent a mass coral bleaching in for the first time in living memory like people didn't remember this happening on huge scale um and coral bleaching is is really the big the big worry we have now for reefs going forward because this makes them so vulnerable to rises in sea temperature. The process basically involves when there's a heat wave comes along

for whatever reason. This last year it's been linked to El Nino, but that in itself is linked to climate change, becoming more frequent and more intense. But this shift of currents in the Pacific, which really leads to heating in huge parts of the ocean. But anyway, when the ocean temperatures rise by just a few degrees, but for several weeks and months at a time,

it's enough to stress the corals and cause them to eject the the tiny celled algae that live inside their tissue the seaweeds that give them food and bring them life and mean that they can survive these are the shallow corals that live near the surface there are deeper ones down that don't have this that they face other other challenges but we'll just talk about the shallow reefs that we know so well here so they bleach because it's the color that comes from those algae leaves behind the bare tissue and the skeletons the chalky calcium carbonate skeleton of the coral underneath and the reef itself turns white and I saw that happening in Belize and didn't really understand at the time the significance of this we'd heard about bleaching oh this can

happen this is a natural process sure but because this whole that ocean scape around us because I was diving every day several times and noticing this slowly slowly changing but things were were losing their color was ebbing away from this scene that i'd i got to know uh and and back then i mean the good news on that bleaching event was that actually the ocean temperatures reduced just in time mainly because some storms came through and reduced the ocean temperature so that the corals stopped being so stressed and they survived and they they could regain those those life-giving algae into their tissues and they most of them carried on living if the temperature remains too high for too long we but we don't see that that survival and corals will die and and we've seen

this more and more the the uh the frequency of bleaching is is just going up and up now we've just seen the barrier reef for instance has bleached um again uh um for the i think it's the fourth time this since 2000 so yeah the barrier reef in australia bleached in 2002 in 2016 and 17 in 2020 in 22 and now again in 2024 much this tells us is that even though this is a natural response for corals to respond to temperature and possibly then survive better if they can take on board an algae that's more heat tolerant after that but what they aren't having that they're used to is the time in between those bleaching events and we're talking about this bleaching happening over regional areas huge huge areas of corals if you've got 10 years from one

event to the next and then we seem to see that's enough for the reefs to recover but we just aren't seeing that anymore it's it's the frequency and the intensity of these bleaching events is just going up and up and that's why it's really hard to to be hopeful about the future of reefs of coral shallow coral reefs in the tropics because we are seeing this rise of bleaching and i think every coral scientist and conservationist and anyone who's heard about the problem we all agree that what needs to be done is the climate crisis needs to be fixed as quickly as possible. We need to bring down carbon emissions already, obviously, but as soon as we can. And that is the greatest hope we will have for reefs. If we can do that, every degree of warming we can avoid is going to

be better for the future of reefs. But there are also a lot of scientists who think, and maybe sadly, rightly, that that may not happen quickly enough. So we need to do something else. And that's where opinions divide over what's the best thing to do with reefs um you know yes protecting them inside reserves will help but also we see that the most highly protected reserves still bleach um places like the chagos islands in the middle of the indian ocean remote from human most human impacts um not too threatened by overfishing or runoff from land which is another big threat to reefs um but they bleached hugely and so therefore that was a big wake-up call and when that happened and scientists thought okay well protection isn't going to do everything for us what else can we do

and that's why some scientists are kind of taking it to this higher kind of technological level and saying well look can we give corals a helping hand and they're doing things like breeding super corals in laboratories and and speeding up evolution and and finding ways of getting a strain of coral strains of corals that are more resilient to temperature whether that's through their the algae and their tissues and that's one quite good way of doing it because the algae can be grown quite quickly and you can make you can evolve speed up the evolution in labs of algae that can just deal with high temperatures by basically ramping up the temperature and a few of them will survive then you keep those ones and you grow more and you do it stepwise that way and you end

up with a strain of algae that really can deal with higher temperatures and then the idea would be put them back in the corals and the corals should survive it's all at an experimental stage at this point no one is putting these things back in the ocean not really um it's all on a very small scale and it's just that just it's almost i really feel like it's quite an act of of desperation because the situation is so so gloomy for reefs globally and so we'll see i mean there are big huge challenges ahead if we're going to go down this road of replanting corals in whatever way it might be somehow the whole scale of it's going to have to go up you know replanting has so far only been done on tiny areas of reef and each year hundreds and thousands of square

kilometers are being damaged and impacted so something's going to have to change so it is tough it's a tough tough thing to look forward to and think what might be the next reefs of the future so i'm not positive if what you were just describing touched on this next question if it is we can move along but what's the concept of rewilding how are you seeing that applied in oceans and then what sort of impacts have you observed so rewilding is a lovely word especially here in the uk people like it at the moment it's generally referred sort of used to refer to putting large animals back into the wild that have a disproportionate impact on the environment so things like beavers i know in the united states wolves and uh reintroduction of wolves to

yellowstone is a classic case of that but we do see it in the ocean too it just wasn't really called that i think for a while and the classic example is is the restoration of otter sea otter populations along the pacific coast um otters were just about wiped out by hunting for their fur in the 18th and 19th century and then it was around that time that scientists realized oh actually the kelp forest these giant beautiful kelp forests that used to fringe the whole of the north pacific and the western coast of the united states uh need the otters because the otters eat sea urchins and sea urchins eat kelp and it's this sort of this ripple effect through the ecosystem that showed us that otters are a critical what we call a keystone species

and so also we saw the flip side of that when efforts were made to bring otters back to parts where they had been hunted out the remaining populations were sort of moved around and then you put the otters back and the kelp forests come back so there's this absolute interdependence between the healthy kelp forest ecosystems and the presence of predators like otters we now know that there are other predators too which are struggling and also need help like these amazing giant sea stars sunflower sea stars are also urchin predators and they were wiped out by a mysterious disease in the early 2010s and their efforts to reproduce those in captivity and perhaps one day put them back in the wild if we need to as well so we are seeing um the otter

story is a hopeful one because you know otters are doing much better than they were and this reintroduction program has worked something like a third of the population which is about 1.5 million a third of them are really descended from reintroduced otters so that effort did did work once they'd figured out how to do it successfully which wasn't wasn't the case right away and there are now efforts perhaps some considerations of putting otters into areas where they're still missing and there are they're going about it in such a way that they're trying to talk with everyone who would be potentially impacted by the return of otters to their local waters and so not going straight ahead and doing it without making sure everyone is all right with

it but it shows just how important it is to have these key species to keep ecosystems in balance and it's not just otters but other species in other places are doing similar things on kelp forests and seagrass meadows and so on but yeah just to rewild this this idea of that there are some species that if you put them back then the rest of the ecosystem can do much better as well so they are they are the focus so we'll close on a what i think will be a more positive note what can you tell us about what's being done for kelp forests and seagrass meadows yeah so i think compared to reefs which take a long time to grow kelp and seagrass can grow pretty quickly um kelp being seaweed based these sort of big dense ecosystems that grow all through temperate

waters um pretty much all around the world so most something like a quarter of the coast of the world have kelp of some sort big seaweeds whether it's giant kelp bullwhip kelp that we get in um california and south africa and south australia through to other species that live through japan and um you know there's a great diversity of these places and they're incredibly important just like forests on land for other species to live um so a really important physical habitat for protecting coastlines and and nurturing diversity but they are in trouble uh for various reasons they suffer from heat waves um removal of species as we've said like sea otters and i think a similar thing similar story with seagrass beds so this is uh basically the equivalent of

lawns of grass on land but they grow in the ocean they are a flowering plant they're not a seaweed um very important habitat again for all sorts of other animals there are nursery areas for young uh fish and other species to grow up really important for fisheries but again have suffered from from habitat loss you know these are kind of places that suffer from dredging and also water quality if we've got problems of of the quality of the water from too many nutrients or pollutants that seagrass can really suffer so for instance here where I am in the UK we think there used to be a lot more seagrass than there is today we might have lost something like 90% historically of the seagrass for all these reasons but now we know that they should be here and also in many

places water quality is improving so the conditions are right for these things to come back whether that's seaweed seagrasses or kelp forests often all you need to do is get conditions right to just to nurture these ecosystems and then they will either come back by themselves or if there aren't enough existing habitats within the region because if there are then they will recolonize by sending out spores and and and so on drifting through the water and they can recolonize but if they're not there then they need a helping hand and that's where the rewilding efforts again are kind of coming in and people are replanting seagrass beds coming up with all sorts of ways to do this on larger scales i think this is an exciting time it's just beginning there's an excellent example

in the united states from chesapeake bay for a huge area of seagrass that was recovered because divers went to collected the seeds from an area of existing seagrass and replant it just like you would a grass lawn and you're back on and now people around the rest of the world are doing this here in the uk i think in australia similar things happening with seagrass seaweeds and kelp forests this understanding more about how to put these things back and i think we're going to see a lot more of this in the future years as people want these things back they realize we used to have these beautiful ecosystems um important ecosystems but they've gone but we can be part of helping to put them back and helping more people to appreciate all of these the species

and the wonders that are in these places that are uh that really need our help to to come back and flourish. Well, it's all the time that we have for today. For the listeners, I do want to point you to one other resource, Sea Control 246, Beyond Static Spatial Management with Dr. Guillermo Ortuño-Crespo and Andrea Galassi. There's a long discussion in there about marine protected areas and having them be able to move to talk about that came to mind as soon as you started talking about the tuna and how do you protect tunas. There's a very long discussion in that episode about that but i'd like to thank my guest dr helen scales helen where can we find you online and what are you working on next uh so you can find me at www.helenscales.com uh and i am currently

working on some books for younger readers uh which are beautifully illustrated by very talented artists not by myself they'll be coming out over the next year but keep an eye on my website i have a bunch of other kids books that came up this year too most recently a book about exploring antarctica and i send a team of uh invented team of scientists on a beautiful boat to study the wildlife around antarctica that's for for younger readers and it's really beautiful that was going to be my only follow-up for you is are those also ocean themed mostly mostly they are even ones that are slightly more nature-based uh you'll find there's plenty of ocean in there too so i get it in pretty much everywhere i i go so yeah thank you again for joining us to listeners thanks for

tuning in. We'll see you next time. We'll be right back.