TED Radio Hour - A Love Letter to the Ocean: Life, death and mating in the sea

Episode Date: May 31, 2024

Oceans cover nearly 75% of the Earth. While they seem vast and frightening, they're also enchanting and whimsical. This hour, TED speakers dive into stories of connection — and even love — in the sea. Guests include adventurer Catherine Mohr, marine biologists Marah Hardt and Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and venom scientist Mandë Holford. Original broadcast date: June 11, 2021TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at plus.npr.org/ted. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading.

From TED and NPR. I'm Manus Shumeroti, and today, we are spending our time together under the sea. The magic that is under the water, we've only really just begun to explore. This is Catherine Moore, and over the years, she's worn lots of different hats. I'm an engineer turned surgeon turned global health care strategist. Beyond her professional world, Catherine loves adventure, especially in the ocean. I have been a scuba diver ever since I was in college, and I enjoy exploring new things, which occasionally puts you in dangerous way.

So that brings us to January 1997. The start of what turned out to be. a love story, so it really doesn't seem that way at first. I had a group of friends who all wanted to get together and go scuba diving and land exploring in the Galapagos. And it's an area where there's enormous pelagic life, whales and sharks and mantarays. And it's diving like nowhere else. So Catherine and her friends chartered a boat to some of the most remote Galapagos. islands. It was a sunny day and we were pretty sure we were going to see a lot of hammerhead sharks

and they will congregate in very large schools. So you get in the water and you just calmly sink down to the bottom and now you're under the schools and you can look up and see them all. Wow. You weren't scared at all? I had been diving with enough sharks at that point that it was excitement rather than fear. You know, sharks get a really bad rap. We're not their food. They're not going to come and just sort of randomly taste us. So, you know, my heart rate was fast, but that was excitement.

I was on the hunt for the beautiful photograph. So Catherine was there, 50 feet down beneath a school of sharks, and the surge, the back-and-forth movement of the water, was particularly bad that day. Yes. And so the bottom wasn't smooth and sandy. It had some fairly large rocks and a lot of sea life like sea urchins and things like that around on the rocks. So that's where I was. And then I got caught in a particularly big surge.

And I instinctively flung my right hand out because I had my camera rig tucked in my left arm to brace myself against the rock. But I wasn't bracing myself. self against a rock. I slammed my hand into one of those sea urchins and I felt the crunch kind of travel up my arm and and I pulled my hand back and I could see that there were sea urchin spines stuck all the way through my hand. So you were stabbed essentially underwater. Yes. What went through your head? It was absolute disbelief. I mean, I'm looking at these things

through my glove. I'm not actually looking straight at the skin of my hand. And so it was surreal. It didn't feel like that was possible. It felt like it wasn't my hand. Catherine Moore continues her story from the TED stage. Now, this is bad.

I mean, obviously, when you have something all the way through your hand, it's kind of bad. anyway. But in this case, seirichens have a venom on them that if you've ever tangled with them, you know that a sea urchin spine in you gives you horrible painful inflammation. So adrenaline brain kicked in and I just yanked the spines out. I don't remember doing it. I just remember thinking, I can't get my glove off with these in here. I do remember taking the glove off in a big plume of black coming up in front of my face. And biologist brain now shows up and starts freaking out, how could all that toxin have gotten into that wound already? Well, physicist brain then shows up and very

calmly explains, no, no, no, we're at 50 feet. Red wavelengths are attenuated. That's blood, not black. And sharks. So what are you going to do? So I'm in this cloud of blood. And I really at an intellectual level knew that I probably was not in much danger. Can you think blood in the water and suddenly it's a feeding frenzy, but no. Hammerhead sharks don't really feed when they're schooling like that. But I didn't really want to be in the cloud of blood. And I didn't really want to go up through the set of sharks while I was really actively bleeding. So I used this band that you have on your scuba diving rig. And I slipped my hand up underneath it and I cranked that cumberbund down really hard over my hand to kind of put pressure

and then sort of angled off towards where my buddy was so to leave that cloud of blood behind. But so eventually you have to surface, right? Yes, yes. You're out of air. The dive is done. So how did you do it? So I looked for a not very sharky area, but there weren't any very not sharky areas because we were in this big upwelling in this big school. And yeah, leaving down close to the bottom and swimming up through them and being in free water felt a whole lot more exposed. And the temptation to go super fast is really high. But you can't.

So I just chanted. They don't feed when they're schooling. They don't feed when they're schooling. They don't feed when they're schooling. All the way up. Your adrenaline must have been through the roof. So you get pulled into the boat and you're like, hey, so this thing happened when I was down there. I mean, is there venom in your hand at this point?

Well, yeah, there's sort of a slime that's on the outside of the spines. and there were a lot of local ways in which people dealt with getting searge and spine stabs because they can get infected and they can get really quite terrible reactions to them. And we were a good two days away from where I could get any sort of formal medical attention. Oh, wow. And so the guys who were our local guides were like super apologetic, but they said, you know, you've got to get that as hot as you can. And if you can do that, you know, we can minimize the possibility that you'll get an infection or a really bad reaction.

So I put my hand in water as hot as I could stand, and I let it acclimatize a little bit. And so once it got to the equalization point, they started pouring additional boiling water into, the pot where my hand was. And so they would bring the temperature up a little bit. And, you know, it would really hurt and it would acclimatize. And then they'd put more hot water in. And they were just essentially going to go until I freaked out and took my hand out. Because the more they could do that, the more likely I was to not have any bad effects.

Oh, did you? I mean, did it turn you? against the ocean in any way? Were you like, this is, this is crazy. This is too dangerous. Were you angry? Like, no. No?

Nothing like that? No, not at all. Huh. No, no. I mean, the ocean doesn't care about you, but it also means the ocean isn't malicious. The ocean didn't do that to me. I wasn't going to feel resentful. I was a guest and I got hurt, but it wasn't the ocean's fault.

That was my fault. No, I went diving the next day. What? You couldn't keep me out of the water. Oceans cover almost three quarters of the Earth's surface. More than 80% of that underwater world remains largely unexplored. And while those depths can seem vast and frightening, they're also a place of magic, whimsy, passion, and even love. So today on the show, a love letter.

to the sea. We'll dive under the waves to explore connection and intimacy, from the surprising sex lives of fish to villainous snails that will enammer you and a love story, which brings us to the conclusion of Catherine Moore's run-in with that sea urchin. A few weeks later, her hand was starting to heal, all except for one spot which stayed stiff and painful. it turned out I'd broken off a tip of the urchin spine in the joint itself. And that's why it wasn't getting better. And so the orthopedist says, you know, we should get this out. Nothing too urgent, not emergency. So we scheduled a small surgery for a few weeks out on a Monday. And on the Friday before I broke my pelvis in a horseback riding accident. Yeah. So we kind of postponed

that surgery. My broken pelvis and I were now facing six weeks on the couch, and I would have gone absolutely insane if it hadn't been for my friends. Spontaneous parties broke out at my house every night for weeks. I was fed, I was entertained, it was great. But that kind of enthusiasm is sort of hard to sustain over the long term. And eventually it petered down to just one friend, who would send me jokes during the day and come and keep,

keep me company in the evenings. Someone I got to know a whole lot better during this period of convalescence. He and I had been friends for about three and a half years at that point and hadn't really ever thought about a romantic relationship. But he was one of the most stalwart people. And our conversations broadened and deepened.

And so I developed the most important relationship of my life while I was convalescing on that bed. That was 21 years ago, and for 19 of those years, I have been married to that marvelous introvert who never in a million years would have approached me under other circumstances. So this isn't a story about piercings

or sharks or boilings or breakings. It's a love story. It's a love story with a funny little epilogue. Now I was weight-bearing again. I could reschedule that surgery. Get the spine out, but I didn't need it anymore. Turns out, when you break a bone, your body scavenges calcium from all the bones in your body

and from the little sea urchin spine that you happen to have lodged in the joint of your finger. So yes, my pelvis is now part sea urchin. So you don't need to worry, though, that I am not fully human is one of the things that my family loves the most about me. Thank you very much. That's Catherine Moore.

You can go to ted.npr.org to see her full talk, along with beautiful illustrations by artist Natalie Moore, who also happens to be her daughter. On the show today, a love letter to the ocean. I'm Manus Zameroody, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Before we get back to the show, I want to ask you to please consider becoming a member of TED Radio Hour Plus.

You'll get extra advice, stories, and expertise from TED speakers every other week and no ads ever. And you'll be supporting public radio. Listener support is crucial to keeping us going. Go to plus.npr.org

slash TED. Or give it a try right in the Apple Podcast app. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Mnepr. Zamoireodi. And today's show is a love letter to the ocean. I have had the song stuck in my head since I watched your talk. Would it be okay if I played it for you? Yeah, I'm game.

Romantic sponges they say, do it? Do you recognize it? I do. This is the great Cole Porter's Let's Fall in Love. Let's do it. Let's fall in love. Let's do it. That's right. Let's do it. Let's fall in love. Yeah, he's actually a little dirtier than I'm giving him credit for. This is Mara Hart. She's a marine biologist and an author. The name of my book is Sex in the Sea, our intimate connection with sex-changing fish, romantic lobsters, kinky squid, and other salty erotica of the deep. Why ask if Shad do it? I mean, this song just goes on and on about electric eels doing it, lazy jellyfish doing it, goldfish and the privacy of their bowls doing it.

Yeah. What's your reaction to that song as a person who specializes in the sex lives of fish? Oh, well, I rock out to that song. It's fantastic. But it completely misses so much of the more colorful and honestly can. Inky components, because the fun part isn't that they do it. The fascinating and fun and important part is how they do it. For example, clownfish.

Nemo! Where in there is cool? Nemo, don't move. Don't move. You'll never get out of there. Right, everybody knows finding Nemo. They know clownfish. But what they don't realize is that clownfish species all start life. Any individual that's born starts life as an animal.

male. And then later in life, he transitions into a female. Really? Yeah. Yeah. And they pair up. A male and a female will pair up. And for them to make the most babies, what they want is for the bigger of the two to be female. And this is because unlike in mammals where, for example, with humans, right, a woman is born with all the eggs she will ever have. In fish, the bigger the female is, the more eggs she can carry. And since sperm is really cheap to make, a small male energetically can make a lot of sperm. He can make enough sperm to fertilize all of a large female's eggs. And what's happening is the female is actually sort of doing this psychological warfare. And she kind of bullies her mate, the male.

she kind of keeps him from sort of getting too aggressive where he would actually then begin to transition into a female. He then bullies all these smaller males to say, don't you guys get any wrong ideas about competing with me for access to this female's eggs. So his bullying kind of keeps the juveniles in this almost like suspended premature state. And then when that female dies, the male can very quickly transition into a female, and then the next largest juvenile matures into a male, and then they will become the mating couple. And nobody has to leave the anemone and go find a date or a mate, which is much safer. That is crazy. It's crazy.

Who knew that clownfish could be so intriguing? You just can't make this stuff up. You know, nature has the best. imagination of all. But the fact that you and I and most people know very little about how clownfish mate and very rarely think about how marine life reproduce, Mara says that's a problem. Because these animals reproduce in a different way, our actions affect the success of sex in the sea in ways that we might not anticipate right when it's most important. So for clownfish, they're often caught and sold as aquarium.

And the bigger fish, right, are the ones that tend to be the more attractive for sale. So if you imagine on a reef, you go around and you start pulling off all the big clownfish, you're taking all the females. And taking all the females completely disrupts the life cycle of an entire school of clownfish. You skew the sex ratio. You're making it harder for those individuals that are left behind to actually find their mates, or you're forcing them to transition in under condition sooner than they would. And that's going to actually decrease the amount of offspring that is being produced.

Which causes a ripple effect for every creature connected to the clownfish. So just imagine how we are messing with the mating habits of all kinds of marine life, the ones we know about and the ones we don't. It's so varied the way that animals have sex in the way. the sea and it's so different that we really need to take that step back and start to shift the way that we act and shift some of our behaviors so that we can respect the way that life reproduces there rather than thwarting them. All to say, we need to know how marine life do it. And so now, let's dive deeper and move from the coral reefs of the South Pacific down to the cold, cold,

romantic waters off the coast of Maine. Take Maine lobster. They don't look that romantic. Or that kinky. They are both. Here's Mara Hart on the TED stage. During mating season, female lobsters want to mate with the biggest, baddest males.

But these guys are really aggressive, and they'll attack any lobster that approaches male or female. Meanwhile, the best time for her to mate with the male is right after she's moulted, when she's lost her hard shell. So she has to approach this aggressive guy in her most vulnerable state. What's a girl to do? Her answer? Spray him in the face repeatedly with her urine. Under the sea, pee is a very powerful love potion. Conveniently, lobster's bladders sit just above their brains, and they have two nozzles under their eye stock,

which they can shoot their urine forward. So the female approaches the male's den, and as he charges out, she lets loose a stream of urine and then gets the hell out of there. Only a few days of this daily dosing is all it takes for her scent to have a transformative effect. The male turns from an aggressive to a gentle lover. By the week's end, he invites her into his den.

Okay, so urine as an aphrodisiac, also kind of a chill pill. So he invites her in for a nightcap. Is that kind of it? They go for it? So she will occupy the den with him, and they'll hang out for a while, a couple of days. They'll hunt, they'll feed, they'll sleep, do their lobster stuff. And then when she feels that her molts is imminent, she will circle around front of him. And then they go through this wonderful ritual.

He sort of bows his head down and puts his big claws out in the sand. And she sort of rises herself up and she takes one of her big claws and she'll tap him on one shoulder and then the other. What? And we call this, yeah, we call this nighting because it really looks like that. And we are chosen. You are chosen. And we're pretty sure it means not only are you are chosen, but don't go anywhere because all this is about to happen. Oh.

She then goes to the back of the den. And for the next few hours, she will molt. So she sort of slips out of her shell, if you will. That whole time, the male guards over her. He'll walk back and forth from the front of the den to her. He'll sort of stroke her with his antenna and his walking legs, his, his, his walking legs, his small legs. And lobsters, their taste buds are on their feet, on those little legs. So he's actually kind of like tasting her, licking her. That's where like the kinky part comes in. So he's sort of

guarding over her, tasting her, caring for her. And then she sort of gives him a signal that she's ready. And now at this point, she literally is like a blob. She can't support her own weight. She cannot stand up. She can't really move. And so he scoops her up using a his walking legs and forms almost like a hammock and holds her and rolls her over so that they're belly to belly basically in the missionary position and sort of cradles her there and then he inserts these two special little fins that he has sort of at the base of his tail that slot into that pouch and he delivers his sperm packet and then he very gently lays her back down and that's it that's the sex but then for the next few days he will guard the front of that

den while her new shell is hardening and then when she's ready she stands up says thank you very much leaves the den they probably never see each other again and then the next female will arrive at his doorstep and start spraying him the face with her pee and the whole thing repeats it's like marine erotica kind of like so right you go down a lot of rabbit holes when you're writing a book about sex in the sea and I would never want anyone to look at the history of my computer. I'd be terrified at what they'd like. So in terms of the role that humans are playing in lobster sex, I mean, in terms of, I guess I should say, disrupting lobster sex.

Like, can you explain that? Sure. So the ability for her love potion, for her urine, to work as a love potion, depends on her urine having certain chemical signals, right? And the male having receptors that can receive those signals. And one of the things that we're doing in the ocean through climate change is we're making the oceans more acidic. We're actually changing the fundamental chemistry of seawater.

That might scramble the message as it's passing through the seawater. and we know that more acidic seawater is known to damage certain kinds of receptor cells. It's affecting smell and chemical signaling in many species. So imagine if her love potion didn't work, right? That disrupts the whole strategy that lobster reproduction is based on. And it's not just climate change where this happens, right? If there's a big pollution event, you know, oil spill or runoff from land, that can change the chemical's signature of water and mask or mess up the ability of animals to detect those sets.

Dive deeper and sex gets even stranger. Fanfin anglerfish live at about 3,000 feet below the surface in the pitch black waters. And the males are born without the ability to feed themselves. To survive, he has to find a female fast. Meanwhile, the female, who is 10 times bigger than the male, 10 times, she lets out a very strong pherom with which to attract meets to her. So this tiny male is swimming through the black waters smelling his way to a female. And when he finds her, he gives her a love bite.

And this is when things get really weird. The bite itself triggers a whole bunch of chemical reactions. the first is that basically his jawbone starts to dissolve his tissue kind of starts to almost like melt and fuses with her body there's circulatory systems entwine and almost all of his internal organs start to dissolve wow except for his testes his testes actually like kick up into like full-blown maturity mode and he starts producing sperm. In the end, he's basically a permanently attached on-demand sperm factory for the female. It's a very efficient system.

But this is not the kind of mating strategy that we see on a farm, right? I mean, this is weird. It's really strange. But if we don't know that these kind of strategies exist or how they work, we can't know what kind of impacts we may be having, even in the deep sea. Presumably with the anglerfish, this must have been one of the hardest discoveries to make. And if you don't know that these wild procreation activities are going on,

then you can't know when you're impacting them, right? As humans, we don't know what we don't know. We don't know what we don't know. So I think there's two lessons there. So first is precautionary approach all the time. assume you might be doing harm and make sure that when you're putting a new behavior or new activity into place that you're proving no harm in many places on land if you're going to put up a development or you're going to allow industry to come in and do some sort of extractive activity

they have to do an environmental impact assessment they have to show they're not going to hurt endangered species or disrupt the ecosystem we don't tend to do that in the ocean and some of that is because we think the oceans are endless and abundant forever. Right. Now we know that's, right, that's not the case. So taking a precautionary approach is really important. And correcting some behaviors that we know we've gotten wrong. So things like fishing on spawning aggregations.

So again, for fish who release their sperm and eggs into the water, many of them form these annual, amazing, huge sex parties, right? They're like giant orgies. and you'll have tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of fish that will all gather in one place at one time. Often it's like a full moon party. They do it. They love the full moon. There's reasons for that.

But big full moon sex party. And while they're reproducing, let them reproduce. That's not a good time to come in and fish. It's easy, right? For the fishers, it's easy because they can catch a lot of the biggest fish all at once. but you're tapping into the principle rather than taking the interest, right? You're actually cutting off the ability of that population to make more fish for you for the next year. Do you use these examples and sort of the same sort of sexy language about fish, like when you're talking to people who are overfishing or people who might be polluting the oceans?

Do you say, like, let's talk about fish sex? Is that your hook? So I tend to use the fish hook more with folks who I'm trying to get to just care, just genuinely start to awaken to the fact that they are connected to the ocean. I honestly, I can't tell you how many times in bars I've just like struck up a conversation with a stranger over this, right? Like it's just, it's great bar to begin. You talk dirty, you can slide in a little fun factoid, and then you're often running. And the thing that's so marvelous is that, honestly, people are curious about nature. They are curious about oceans.

And whether they admit it or not, they are curious about sex. Everybody is. And so it's a wonderful bridge to start to engage in those conversations without being heavy-handed, without it all being doom. gloom either, right? Because just talking about collapse of our ocean ecosystems and the threat of climate change, that doesn't inspire. It doesn't bring solutions to the table, right? Instead, it's like, wow, isn't this crazy? And what can we do to make sure that lobsters keep getting to have their kinky sex lives? Mara Hart is a marine biologist and the author of the book Sex in the sea. She's also a conservationist at the nonprofit future of fish. You can see. You can

see her full talk at ted.com. I think it's time to update Cole Porter's lyrics. I know. I was just thinking about that. I was like, you know, clownfish in there, and then enemies do it. But they all start males and then transition to females. And there's this crazy psychological warfare where they control one another's maturation and they're stuck in pre-pubescent limbo. You know, it doesn't really work.

No. On the show today, a love letter to the ocean. I'm Anoush Zamoroti, and you're listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anoush Zamoroti. On the show today, a love letter to the sea. And we often hear from scientists on the show who adore their research subjects. But marine biologist Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson is really.

really obsessed with one particular fish. In 2019, Ayanna gave a talk that was both a declaration of her love for the parrotfish and an urgent plea to save them and their home. I want to tell you a love story, but it doesn't have a happy ending. Once upon a time, I was a stubborn five-year-old who decided to become a marine biologist. 34 years, 400 scuba dive and one PhD later, I'm still completely enamored with the ocean. I spent a decade working with fishing communities in the Caribbean, counting fish, interviewing fishermen, redesigning fishing gear, and developing policy.

I've been helping to figure out what sustainable management can look like for places where food security, jobs, and cultures all depend on the sea. In the midst of all this, I fell in love. with a fish. There are over 500 fish species that live on Caribbean reefs, but the ones I just can't get out of my head are parrotfish. Parrotfish live on coral reefs all over the world. There are 100 species.

They can grow well over a meter long and weigh over 20 kilograms, but that's the boring stuff. I want to tell you five incredible things about these fish. First, they have a mouth like a parrot's beak, which is strong enough to bite coral, but mostly they're after algae. They are the lawn mowers of the reef. This is key because many reefs are overgrown with algae

due to nutrient pollution from sewage and fertilizer that runs off of land. And there just aren't enough herbivores like parrotfish left out on the reefs to mow it all down. Okay, second amazing thing. After all that eating, they poop fine white, A single parrotfish can produce over 380 kilograms of this pulverized coral each year. Sometimes when scuba diving, I would look up from my clipboard and just see contrels of parrotfish poop raining down. So next time you're lounging on a tropical white sand beach, maybe thank a parrotfish.

Third, they have so much style. modeled and striped, teal, magenta, yellow, orange, poca-dotted, parrotfish are a big part of what makes coral reefs so colorful. Plus, in true diva style, they have multiple wardrobe changes throughout their life, a juvenile outfit, an intermediate get-up, and a terminal look. Fourth, with this last wardrobe change comes a sex change, from female to male, termed sequential hermaphroditism. These large males then gather harems of females to spawn. Heterosexual monogamy is certainly not nature's status quo. Fifth, and the most incredible. Sometimes when parrotfish cozy up into a nook in the reef at night,

they secrete a mucous bubble from a gland in their head that envelops their entire body. This masks their scent from predators and protects them from parasites so they can sleep soundly. I mean, how cool is this? So this is a confession of my love for parrotfish in all their flamboyant, algae-eating, sand-pooping, sex-changing glory.

But with this love comes heartache. Now that groupers and snappers are woefully overfished, fishermen are targeting parrotfish. Spear fishing took out the large species, Midnight blue and rainbow parrotfish are now exceedingly rare, and nets and traps are scooping up the smaller species. And then there's my love for their home, the coral reef, which was once as vibrant as Caribbean cultures,

as colorful as the architecture, and as bustling as carnival. Because of climate change, on top of overfishing and pollution, coral reefs may be gone within 30 years. an entire ecosystem erased. We're in the midst of the sixth mass extinction, and we, humans, are causing it. We also have the solutions. Every bit of habitat we preserve.

Every tenth of a degree of warming we prevent really does matter. A little bit of good news is that places like Belize, Barbuda and Bonner are protecting these VIPs, very important parrotfish. Also, more and more places are establishing protected areas that protect the entire ecosystem. These are critical efforts, but it's not enough. I am never going to give up working to protect and restore this magnificent planet

because I don't know how to give an honest talk about my beloved parrotfish and coral reefs that has a happy ending. That was marine biologist Ianna Elizabeth Johnson. You can find all of Ianna's talks at TED.com. On the show today, a love letter to the ocean, even to its less lovable inhabitants. We started the hour with a story about sea urchins. We'll end with another terrifying but unassuming creature.

I call them killer's nails. I love to call them killersness. I mean, because that's what they do, right? They kill things. This is venom scientist Mandy Halford. She studies cone snails, a group of venomous, predatory snails found all over the world and at all depths of the ocean. They are net hunters, so they open their rostrums, which is their mouths really wide. Like you're going to, you know, swallow something.

And they are. They're going to swallow fish. So they usually eat a school of fish. So they open their mouths really wide, engulf the fish, and then they start to individually harpoon the fish with venom once they're in their mouth. So they sting the fish, or if you disturb them, they'll sting you, right? And then what happens? How does the venom work?

So inside of venom, you have peptides that are very specific to what they do. And I like to say that they target blood, brains, and membranes. They come at you all at once. and they are trying to shut down or disrupt the normal physiology of the prey so that you're in sort of this excited shock state or they're ripping membranes apart. So they're tearing apart with different membranes on the cells. And so— It's violent. It's very violent.

It's very violent in your body. Your body doesn't know what's hidden, right? But it's designed so to be this all-powerful, shock and awe kind of. campaign that happens when it's injected into the prey where it's fanning out to hit these, you know, molecular targets, hit these iron channels on membranes of cells to disrupt how they would normally function. And so you should be cautious of them, you know, when you encounter them on the beach because from the source of where they're injected, it starts to get sort of paralyzed and that paralysis creeps up to your diaphragm eventually and so it prevents you

from being able to breathe normally. And so you die from that and some also from the heart attack of just realizing that you can't breathe as well. Okay. At this point, I do not feel like writing these things a love letter. But Mandy, you are really deeply in love with these snails and with what they can do, right? You know, we think of snails as supervillains because they feed on fish. snails and worms, and their venom can be lethal to humans too, right? So a snail can kill a human. But we also think of them as superheroes because if we tease out the components in their venom,

we can identify therapeutics that are very effective against pain and cancer. And that's how we're able to use venom from snails as a superpower for good. Here's more from Mandy Hallford on the therapeutic properties of venom in her TED talk. Sounds like a stretch or maybe even snake oil. But actually, while there's snakes involved, the product is legit. The toxins work with the precision of a Swiss army knife. Are there other things that I would like to use venom to attack? For sure.

And one of those is cancer. Cancer tumors are cells. And like all cells, they communicate. with themselves and their environments around them. So we would like to find venom components that are very good at disrupting how the tumor cells communicate. The cancer that we're most focused on right now

is liver cancer. We found a compound from a pterobrit snail that seems to attack liver cancer cells. And then when we took this compound and we injected into mouse models that were expressing liver cancer cells, it significantly inhibited the growth of the tumors. Basically, what we think is happening is that the compound is blocking a specific channel,

prohibiting the transmission of a specific chemical that leads to downstream signaling that enables the tumor to multiply and draw blood to itself. So just to sum up, the components in venom that kill prey are exactly what makes it possible to target specific illnesses and potentially treat them. Yes, exactly. Wild. And I know that your lab is working on using sea snails for cancer treatments, but there are some other medications made from venom already that are on the market, right? Where are we in terms of what is out there, what's gotten approved, and what's hopefully still on the way? So for our peptine, we're still a ways away from getting it into clinical trials because we have to prove the mechanism of how it works and all of that. But currently, there are at least six different drugs that have been approved. by the FDA that are on the market that are either the venom peptide itself or derived from

venom peptides that you can go and get a prescription for from a doctor wow you can find venom in lots of creatures venom is found all throughout the tree of life so you know steaks spider scorpions so the six that are currently on the market one is from cone snail it's a pain therapy called pre-alt that they use for chronic pain and HIV and cancer patients one of the six that from the Brazilian pit viper is captapro, and they use it for hypertension. From the Gila Monster, there's exanatide, which is used to lower blood sugar and diabetes. From the medicinal leech, we find something called angiomax, and they use it for blood thinning. And then we have something from another viper agrostat, which is also a blood thinner,

and then the pygmy rattlesnake gives you another blood thinner. So those six. So we've got Three snakes, a leech, a snail, and a Gila monster. That is quite a group of pharmacists you've got there. So what is your hope for them in the next, say, five to ten years? Oh, my God. In the next five, ten years, I think the venom field is going to really explode. I really think we're at a point in which the technology has advanced so much that it's enabled us to be able to study these fields, study these organisms in ways that are less invasive, so we don't need as many, right?

And also, we can get so much depth in terms of what their genes are doing and how the genes are made. And for that, that I think is the most exciting part is we are interested in looking for things that would give us pain therapies that are non-addictive or looking for ways in which we can talk about treating cancer that would be. be easier for the patient. So looking for selective treatments for cancer that did not have the side effect that all the current treatments have, which is that they're really horrible. They're just as bad as the disease. So those were our two sort of marching orders when we wanted to use venom for good. Can we find a pain therapeutic that is not addictive? So an alternative to the opioids to address the opioid crisis? And can we identify a cancer treatment that was selective for tumors versus healthy cells so that patients don't have to go through this agony when they're going

under cancer treatment. There's so much more venom out there for us to study. In fact, we think that 15% of all the animals on the planet are venomous. And I think this is a low estimate, given the fact that we haven't surveyed all the animals on the planet. But nature seems to have found something that she likes, and she's repeated it over and over and over again, leading to the vast array of animals that we see around us and all throughout the tree of life. We're in a race to harness all of this venom goodness before we lose the vast majority of animals in our planet. It's a holistic process. You can't have the therapeutic treatments without having the animals. And you can't have the animals without having their ecosystems. So for me and the snails, what it means is we have to

save the oceans. And because venomous animals are found everywhere, we basically have to save the planet. So do it for the venomous animals if you don't want to do it for yourself. I want to tie this back to what our episode is all about, which is this idea of our love of the ocean, our need to remind ourselves there are lots of reasons to invest in saving the ocean. And the reasons that you're describing are kind of appeal to our self-interest in many ways, you know, whether we will suffer from cancer or diabetes or high blood pressure. These are all things that humans desperately could use treatment for. And so we need, is this, is that an okay reason to want to preserve the oceans? Oh, yes. No, altruism. Altruism is a good thing, but self-interest is even better.

And so when people make that this can help me, I want it, then they seem to, you know, behave accordingly. And so, yes, whatever the motivation for saving the oceans, we've got to do it, right? And in this case, these snails are helping to make our lives possible by allowing us to find novel treatments for ailments that are not going away, right? And if that isn't enough, if it isn't enough to say that, hey, my dad or my mom or myself, who is this cancer patient suffering. And I know a snail that can help that. And in order for me to get that snail what it needs, I've got to not pollute my ocean. I'm going to say yes to that because I want my mom around or I want to be around myself. And so I think bringing in the story of how we tie nature and humanity is a

powerful one for how we're going to be able to maybe change behaviors and protect our oceans. That's Venom scientist Mandy Halford. You can see her. her full talk at ted.com. And there is more of our love for the oceans coming soon. Join us in two weeks for part two on the ocean, ideas on how to protect the seas and all the amazing marine life that lives in them. Thank you so much for joining us today. To learn more about the people who are on this episode,

go to ted.npr.org. And to see hundreds more TED talks, check out ted.com or the TED app. And by the way, if you have been enjoying the show, we would be so grateful if you left a review on Apple Podcasts. It's the best way for us to reach new listeners. This episode was produced by Rachel Faulkner, James Delahousie, Katie Montalione, and Fiona Girin. It was edited by Sanaz Meskampur. Our production staff at NPR also includes Jeff Rogers, Diba Motisham, J.C. Howard, Christina Kala, Matthew Cloutier, and Janet Ujong Lee. Our audio engineer is Daniel Shukin.

Our intern is Harrison VJ Choi. Our theme music was written by Romteen Arablewee. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Feelin, Michelle Quint, and Micah Eames. I'm Anish Zamorodi, and you've been listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR.