Zitat des Tages von Edith Widder:
I developed an optical lure that imitates certain types of bioluminescent displays that I think might be attractive to large predators. The other way to do it is just use dead bait, but I think dead bait attracts scavengers, and we wanted to attract active predators.
If I go out in the open ocean environment, virtually anywhere in the world, and I drag a net from 3,000 feet to the surface, most of the animals - in fact, in many places, 80 to 90 percent of the animals that I bring up in that net - make light. This makes for some pretty spectacular light shows.
Exploration is the engine that drives innovation. Innovation drives economic growth. So let's all go exploring.
Giant squid aren't rare. Based on the number of beaks that have been found in the stomachs of sperm whales, it's thought that there are actually millions of them in the ocean, and yet, we haven't seen them.
It's a little-appreciated fact that most of the animals in our ocean make light. I've spent most of my career studying this phenomenon called bioluminescence. I study it because I think understanding it is critical to understanding life in the ocean where most bioluminescence occurs.
Since my first dive in a deep-diving submersible, when I went down and turned out the lights and saw the fireworks displays, I've been a bioluminescence junky. But I would come back from those dives and try to share the experience with words, and they were totally inadequate to the task. I needed some way to share the experience directly.
We've only explored about 5% of our ocean. There are great discoveries yet to be made down there - fantastic creatures representing millions of years of evolution and possibly bioactive compounds that could benefit us in ways we can't even imagine.
The giant squid has the biggest eyes of any animal on the planet. It's a visual predator.
I just was mesmerized by all of this life everywhere I looked. And so I wanted to be a marine biologist.
The primary way that we know about what lives in the ocean is we go out and drag nets behind ships. And I defy you to name any other branch of science that still depends on hundreds-of-year-old technology. The other primary way is we go down with submersibles and remote- operated vehicles. I've made hundreds of dives in submersibles.
Finding animals that make light in the ocean is easy. Just drag a net through the water anywhere in the upper 3000 feet, and as many as 80-90% of the animals you catch can make light. The biomimetic lure that I developed imitates one of these - a common deep sea jellyfish called Atolla.
One of the things that's frustrated me as a deep-sea explorer is how many animals there probably are in the ocean that we know nothing about because of the way we explore the ocean.
I developed my camera system, called the Medusa, jointly with a colleague down in Australia as a method of exploring the ocean unobtrusively. The critical thing was that we didn't use white light, which I believe has been scaring the animals away.
I have made hundreds of dives in submersibles, with each dive holding the promise of seeing an organism or a behavior that no one has ever seen before. But I have always wondered about the animals and behaviors that we're not seeing because our bright lights and loud thrusters scare them away.
We've only explored about five percent of our ocean. There are great discoveries yet to be made down there, fantastic creatures representing millions of years of evolution and possibly bioactive compounds that could benefit us in ways that we can't even yet imagine.
If we are to be good stewards of the ocean, we need to understand what lives there and how the animals interact with each other and with their environment, which means we need to be constantly seeking new and improved methods for exploration and observation.
Squid experts have been debating for some time about whether the giant squid is a passive predator that just floats around in the water and waits to bump into something. I was never one to imagine it to be passive.
Exploration is the engine that drives innovation. Innovation drives economic growth.
During my first open ocean dive, I went down to 800 feet and turned out the lights. I knew I would see bioluminescence, but I was totally unprepared for how much. It was incredible! There were explosions of light everywhere, like being in the middle of a silent fireworks display.
That's a real problem when people bring exotics into their homes. Sometimes it's by accident, but sometimes it's on purpose.
