OCEAN MEMORY LAB -- 4TH BLOCK --
FELICIANO-GREEN
IVETTE
FELICIANO: At northern California’s Monterey Bay Aquarium, scientists are
conducting an experiment in time travel.
KYLE VAN HOUTAN: We put
it in one of those little vials and send it off.
IVETTE
FELICIANO: They’re part of what’s known as the Ocean Memory Lab.
KYLE VAN HOUTAN: So we
can sort of go back in time from zero to the very end here.
IVETTE
FELICIANO: Its mission: to paint a picture of what the ocean looked like 200
years ago.
KYLE VAN HOUTAN:
Imagine opening up a book at the last chapter and trying to understand what the
story's about. We're kind of doing that right now with the ocean.
IVETTE
FELICIANO: Science director Kyle Van Houtan heads the
project.
KYLE VAN HOUTAN: We've
studied the land. We live on land. And we've studied the land for centuries. We
know—quite a bit about the dynamics of how things work in forests and deserts
and grasslands. We know a bit less about the ocean.
IVETTE FELICIANO:
Studies on the ocean’s environmental health only go back a few decades, so
scientists often can’t say what marine life was like before
pollutants—including plastics and chemicals—were introduced to the water.
KYLE VAN HOUTAN: We
really wanna generate an informed baseline for what a
healthy ocean is. To do that, we need more data than we have. And to—we have to
get creative.
IVETTE FELICIANO: To
that end, the year-old ocean memory lab draws on specimens collected by
naturalists and explorers over the last two centuries. Using modern techniques,
lab scientists can analyze those specimens and compare them with samples
collected today.
KYLE VAN HOUTAN: The
seabirds and the turtles and the whales, all these things that we study,
they're essentially drones taking information about their ecosystem experience
out in the ocean and recording it in their feathers, in their bones, in their
blubber, various parts of their body, and storing that away. So by using this
approach and using the animals as drones to measure the environment, we can
actually go back in museum archives and records and repositories and go back
much further than if we started measuring today.
IVETTE
FELICIANO: Seabirds—gulls, cormorants, and albatross—provide the Ocean Memory
Lab with a particularly valuable data set.
KYLE VAN HOUTAN:
Seabirds—are famous for nesting on land, of course, but flying thousands of
kilometers out into the ocean, sometimes spending more than 95% of their life
on the wing, in flight. And these air—these animals search huge areas of the
ocean for fish and squids, and then will come back to their colonies to breed.
IVETTE FELICIANO: To
get data on the ocean from sea birds, scientists cut small fragments from their
feathers and then grind them into a fine powder. They then send the samples to
a lab for protein analysis.
KYLE VAN HOUTAN:
They're recording all sorts of information about their food in their feathers.
And so we recently did an analysis looking at 130 years of seabird feathers and
recreating their diets from those feathers, from the ratio of amino acids and
proteins in those feathers.
IVETTE FELICIANO: With
this technique, the Ocean Memory Lab has been able to map out the changes in
diet for several seabird species over time.
KYLE VAN HOUTAN: What
we learned was that, over the past 130 years, these birds have gradually been
shifting their place in the food web, and they've been eating more squid and
less fish, about twice as much squid than they were eating in the late 1800s.
From our analysis, that's due to climate change and due to the fisheries
activity, that humans have been taking a lot of fish out of the ocean.
IVETTE FELICIANO: But
it’s not just animal life that provides clues to the ocean’s history. Algae samples have been collected at
the Hopkins Marine Station—right next door to the aquarium—for 125 years.
KYLE VAN HOUTAN: This
is from 1916. It’s amazing that they’ve been preserved, so—but what we hope to
do is to recreate what the ocean was like just here, down the coast, in 1916
through the experience of that—of that specimen.
IVETTE FELICIANO: Scientists can analyze the specimen and extract
information on the state of the ocean from the time it was preserved.
KYLE VAN HOUTAN: So, we
can get the temperature of the ocean, we can get pollutants in the ocean, we
can get the nutrient levels. What we hope to do is—is to kind of repeat some of
these things today, but then, pricelessly, go back in time to these specimens.
IVETTE FELICIANO: Other
specimens can provide the lab with centuries’ worth of data. This is the ear
bone of a bowhead whale—which can live to be over 200 years old. The bone can
provide information about the ocean throughout the animal’s lifetime.
KYLE VAN HOUTAN: Yeah,
so this animal could have been several hundred years old and this sample is
from the early 1950s. This animal, uh, could have been swimming around in the
ocean before the Declaration of Independence was written. So, that’s quite
amazing. And all of the information here, it’s not just a snapshot of the
recent life of that animal, it’s the entire life. It’s kind of like a black box
for an airplane, you know, it records all of the data that happened in that
whale’s lifetime.
IVETTE FELICIANO: Van Houtan says that
furthering our understanding of the ocean’s history isn’t just important for
posterity. It’s also vital to understanding how changes in the ocean’s makeup
affect people now.
KYLE VAN HOUTAN: The ocean is the beating heart of the climate system.
And we need to understand that, and we need to explain that and to educate the
world about that. We want to-- them to understand the importance of the ocean,
not just—for fish and things that swim in the ocean, but the importance of the
ocean for them.
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KYLE VAN
HOUTAN MONTEREY BAY
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