Welcome to the 2016 NASA Ames summer series
Imagine being on a spacecraft
Exploring the universe and not knowing how your life-support system works and its weaknesses
This for NASA will be considered a very risky mission
Planet Earth
Is such a spacecraft where its surface is mostly covered by oceans that we don't fully understand
Today's presentation is entitled sushi and satellites
Tracking predators across the blue Serengeti will be given by dr. Barbara block
Dr.. Block is a Charles and Elizabeth proto Protheroe professor in marine sciences
evolutionary cellular and molecular
physiology at Stanford University
she is the co-founder of the
Monterey Bay Aquarium of the tuna research and conservation center
And is a co chief scientist for the tagging of Pacific predators program
Dr.. Block started her career with a Bachelors of Arts at from the University of Vermont
and
began in her
oceanography career with Atwoods Hall
Institute
She earned a PhD from Duke University and did a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania
Please join me in welcoming dr. Block
Well it's a honor a privilege to be here at a NASA facility giving a talk about Earth
And I hope that today I can take you planetary
Explorers back to our planet and give you a sense of what's happening in the fluid part of the the world the oceans
So how many of you a personal question?
eats sushi
Everybody all right, then who's having a tuna fish sandwich for lunch today, Oh
Someone in the back all right so today
I hope that you're going to learn more about one of the Olympians in the sea
Some of the animals we study the oceans they move through and then walk away from the talk with an understanding of how NASA
satellite oceanography and NOAA satellite oceanography provides a lot of the background for
How we understand how animals are moving?
across two-thirds of our planet
So the challenge if I take you back to earth, and we watch the the spinning seawifs
view of the planet is
I'm going to argue today that
Significant portions of our federal budget should be spent on our planet because we really don't understand two-thirds of it
All right, so our view has changed radically since we've had earth orbiting satellites
We see the seasonal changes, but the challenge for
The terrestrial vertebrate the primate called man or woman is we have a hard time understanding
the mathematics the fluid dynamics and the challenges of
modeling
Organisms as they live in this fluid realm. That's not very transparent and to this day. We're just beginning
All right, we haven't been here very long
And we're just trying to figure out really how this planet works now put in context what I do
I study the Olympian of the see the giant bluefin tuna or a white shark
And as they slip and eat the waves just like a whale
Everything becomes non transparent and radio signals don't work
So how do you study animals who move across such large realms and what can it teach us if we're trying to go
to other galaxies season study other places
I've always enjoyed this view this NASA view of our planet. I used it many times in a program called the census of marine life
perhaps our
globe's largest program ever in the last
Decade to understand the biodiversity of our planet. I was fortunate enough to lead one of the projects
Called top and this enabled us to basically
Study large predators as they moved across the Pacific Ocean the largest ocean on the planet
So the dots that you'll see on maps today
Represent where animals go and part of a lesson today is how is it that we build engineering devices?
That enable us to see where the fastest animals in the ocean go
Beneath the waves where you can't use radio signals. I want you to be thinking about that because the challenge is great
So up until recently our view of our own planet
Coming from this institution too was one in which all we could do was see the surface
We didn't really see beneath the sea and the level of spending that we do to understand our planet isn't high enough
to actually ensure that the next generation of engineering tools the next generation of
Computational tools are getting into our ocean quick enough, so we solve the major questions of our time
What's the ocean-atmosphere?
Interaction and how is it?
Creating and
Impacting the change that we call climate
We have to separate the variability from the overall
Change that we know is occurring on this planet, and we haven't yet really spent the time
Created the mathematics created the tools that are allowing us to understand two-thirds of our planet Earth
So then add to that that researchers like myself want to study the animals who live in the planet
beneath the sea that it's not transparent and
Try to figure out how they work before it's too late for many of these populations because our appetite
Across the globe for sushi is actually the many populations of animals such as tunas in the sea
So I'd argue
Here at NASA, but the most important thing we do in the next hundred years the most important thing
We're doing in the next 50 years is using some of the technology. You're creating to go to
other planets
Right here on earth so that we can better understand
How is it that we will know what our seascapes are changing and what is it? We should know to prevent?
having any big surprises happen on our planet and
We're going to tell you today as oceanographers
it's not easy and it requires a
national commitment to
Oceans that we haven't yet seen
So I study big tunas I became fascinated with tunas at the age of an intern in this room a
person who basically started as a
intern in a laboratory at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and was fascinated because these are
one of the few warm fish in the sea, they're
Endothermic warm bodied like we are they're powerful animals that if you catch one at the end of a hook in line
You may be battling it for hours
So these Olympians are known across the planet to everybody else does sushi alright
And the next time you have your sushi dinner or lunch. I want you to take a good look at that piece of red muscle
Which is really white muscle it looks red and ask yourself
Where did it come from and then hopefully you'll share one of the lessons perhaps that you'll learn today
We've made it easy for all of you to see tunas
Just a hundred miles down the road at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Where behind a wall of very thick acrylic
We've got one of the largest displays of
Bluefin tuna from the Pacific an animal that's now being proposed
for an ESA and Endangered Species Act listing here in North America
We've also had in the past
Excuse me. White sharks. We're the only
Aquarium that's been able to keep alive
Young white sharks in captivity, so what's the importance of having tunas and white sharks behind glass?
Well the first thing is if you look at this
Animal moving and perhaps, can we bring the lights down at all so that we can see the ocean a little better?
You'd be interested to know that from a Navy perspective tunas are quite interesting. They're one of the most fusiform
Shapes in the sea they have the lowest coefficient of drag that you'll ever find in nature
And we're interested in how everything from their skin to their biomechanics is
uniquely
Formed morphologically and physiologically to help enhance these animals as they cross the oceans we only just in the past year
we're able to put a
Camera that working with a company. We've helped to
engineer to do exactly what we want on a tuna so that we can watch the flip of its tail as
It goes behind the sea how this animal creates vorticity
Maybe a secret of how the most efficient machines on the planet
If they were in the ocean should be moving all right. These are animals who cross tens of thousands of nautical miles
In a year in the ocean
So my real fascination is what makes the Olympian so unique the tuna
I don't want to give that lecture today, but I've just left you with a few thoughts
They're actually moving like a kangaroo a kangaroo bounces stores elastic energy
And then hops again at a almost free energetic cost but tuna bends its tail
stretching elastic tendons as we've been learning and
actually can bring its tail back to its centre position
without much muscular energy being
utilized if we could make a
Autonomous vehicle, that's using the biomechanics of a tuna. We might be able to go places further
These animals are powered as that infrared image shows you its heat
By warm muscles and it helps us understand the mechanical advantages really of being warm
But when it comes to understanding a tunas journey beneath the sea as I've said they're difficult to study
That's why we know so little up until recently
they're highly migratory a single tuna will be born in the seize off Japan and its lifetime swim over to
Mexico spend four years here in California water swimming north and south between
California and Mexico go back to Japan and then take a post spawning migration down to New Zealand and come back
Largest life history of any fish we know and to see how can we study that?
so in our field
There's been a push towards small miniature electronic devices that we can put on the animals
There's been a push towards using
Genomics and chemical markers these would be elements in the animal that tell us where it's been has it been off the waters of Fukushima
And then come on over we can actually measure that and then we can begin to put together the migrations
And there's a lot of novel techniques in the last few years that have developed
But overall these fields aren't well funded and so knowing simple questions like how many white sharks there are in the sea?
How many are there off, California?
How big is the spawning population of bluefin left in the Pacific Ocean these are not easy to answer questions they require?
interdisciplinary science of ocean science satellite oceanography
electronic tagging and
computational mathematics to help put together models of how many animals there are
So certainly you won't forget this that the next time you go over the Golden Gate Bridge
Let me be the first to tell you that our research has shown that
White sharks are crossing beneath you and moving into the San Francisco Bay
All right, so we know this primarily from electronic tags, but when you see across the bridge into the surface you hardly know
What's happening beneath you?
We know from electronic tags
And I'm just giving you an overview at this point that we can see in the white dots from satellite tags
I'll explain how they work shortly we can see where a white shark goes and the only
boundaries for its protection are the green areas barely visible on the map those would be
sanctuaries and reserves and
You're looking at a third if you will of the Pacific
they're from our shores to Hawaii and
The black areas are easy so a white shark if we're asking is this an animal that has any protection
It's an animal it's listed at the highest levels of
being concerned
It's really got this huge open space where it roams and these open spaces
We've only just been studying, so this is tracks from our satellite tags
I'll be talking about in which a white shark is moving from California to a center place
halfway between Hawaii and California place we call the white shark cafe and
These places weren't even known less than a decade ago
all of the North American white sharks gather in a single place and
This single place. We've never been to but we know it exists, and we want to know why?
We want to know why because that's a picture that has been generated through listening to the radio signals of AIS
That's what we use on ships to avoid collisions our collaborators at
Google and
Sky truth have created a program called global fish watch
That's human beings or predators. That's where we are this is just the fishing human beings with AIS and
Right in the cafe. We've got an area that
humans are actually
Interacting with it so we're concerned that no matter what we do for white sharks on our coast if we have this human predation
Situation this is all sort of the wild west of where humans are on our planet
We might have a problem
Conserving these animals if we can't actually keep track of who's there I?
Also do what some of you do here at NASA at Ames, I'm actually a card-carrying animal physiologist
That's what I teach at Stanford
I'm interested in how an organism works from its genes to its environment?
I'm interested primarily in the cardiac physiology of how the Olympic athlete the tuna works I
Think as a nation. We're not really considering enough if we really are
Headed towards this warming world. What will be the impact on mammals such as ourselves
I study what the impact is on fish and what we're learning is that the atrium of our hearts is actually a
very sensitive or
All right, so what we can learn from studying fish physiology can teach us about what's happening in the world around us of humans
polar bears all from studying an Olympic cart of a tuna
We do this by having unusual facilities in Monterey and back of the Monterey Bay Aquarium at Stanford University. We've got
Treadmills that allow us to put fish
Inside the flume and ask the question
What's it like to swim to Japan and we can find out how these animals operate? We can work with our friends from onr?
Instrument the animals all along their bodies or make models and instrument them and try to learn the secrets of how when they swim they
Actually keep flow laminar across most of their body in a way
That's extraordinarily unique, and then we can build a you v's or automated vehicles that that use these principles
In the mechanical design and then most important even for a mission to Mars
We have to as physiologists work together to understand. What is resilience in the physiological system
What is it that we need to be paying attention to in a warming sea or a cooling sea?
What do you need to be paying attention to?
For an organism that has to travel a long distance without
much gravity and
We are at the cutting edge of trying to figure out. What are the tools of genomics that can teach us?
The clear signals we should be watching for in our
Organelles as we look for these changes that we call
adaptation or resilience to warming seas
It's hard to focus on the individual organism when we really have this collective planet this planet that all of us in this room
Need to be thinking about which is undergoing
extraordinary physiological changes
But we've only just begun to develop the monitoring system to keep our eyes on what's happening this
Ocean is warming along with the planet
Perhaps less understood is the fact it's D oxygenating?
This ocean that gave rise to all of life on this planet
Is losing its oxygen as the physics of warming happened, and then the most?
Concerning aspect of the oceans is as it buffers this planet the co2 that's being absorbed
We're getting an increase of acidity
The physiology of Earth may be the most important thing that we're studying right now
And yet the NASA budget probably doesn't have a whole lot in it for this particular enterprise
All right
This is really our future this planet
Our planet is a planet in which climate change is real
And it's happening and we can measure it in the seas and our planet is a planet in which humans across this planet are
taking the Sharks and the tunas all of the large predators out at an alarming rate and
Despite enormous efforts of good management here in our nation
We still have to actually deal with the fact that much of the problems are in unregulated seas
So predators are in decline and when you put a long line in to capture a tuna or a shark
It often captures a leatherback every species of turtle on this planet
That's the marine turtle is endangered and albatross or many other species
This happens because of our appetite on this planet for sushi and tuna all right
We're at a point where there's 7 billion people headed to potentially eight or nine and now that tuna stocks are down
sharks are becoming a targeted species I
Like to remind myself that all of this happened in my lifetime when I was born
and the Apollo missions were happening our oceans were virgin places barely understood I
Always drawn into Woods Hole Oceanographic like many of you too exploration because of the enormous
excitement around discovery of the vents and
the 50 years of
this lifetime my own is the 50 years that a lot of the
Challenges that we're facing on this planet at the level of Earth have happened
And so the optimism in the room is that we have such great young people
Great universities and that we have to come up with solutions that are based in new technologies
I'm gonna just give you one last glimpse of this. This is a
The Atlantic Ocean number of hooks this is when I was born
This is Japan and other nations exploring what it would be like to set hooks in log scale
Hot color would be lots of hooks. This is when I went to I guess I must have graduated from high school
This is graduating from college
Red areas being very hot and then this is when I came to Stanford and now
After being a professor so when we see these pictures
What they represent are hundreds of thousands of hooks and 5x5 blocks being set across the planet and?
Because it's out of sight and out of mind maybe a tuna might sell for a million dollars, and you'll hear about it
That's not what most tunas sell for but it really is amazing. How much of
the planetary organism ol
Fish and sharks get removed and nobody really pays attention to it all right
So we don't want our kids to grow up in an ocean as daniel pauly says in which we're fishing down the marine food chain
And that jellyfish will be the future we want an ocean with healthy ecosystems
So to have it an ocean with healthy ecosystems
Means we have to build the technologies of today
That will take us into our oceans and allow us to see what's happening a reef
That's changing its acidity a shark population. That's being overfished
We have to use the new tools that we have around us in ways that are really ways they haven't been used and
So my community of scientists have responded to this challenge first for the interest in physiology
but then because of the conservation need
So we call the area of bio logging the area of being able to take data and telemetry it back
An area that certainly NASA created without question I can still remember
Being in my car and hearing about an astronaut who's having its body temperature monitored in two limited at home
And I remember thinking to myself gee I'd like to do that in a tunafish
I want to measure when the tuna eats a meal and learn in the tank exactly when it happens
so we've been building tags with companies for a long time and these tags which you might think of our fish and chips type of
Activity they're helping us understand where everything goes in the sea and to take back our seas
We're even imagining a day soon when chips on fish will allow us to catch the poachers
The bigger challenge we face, and this is one of my favorite images of Earth. It's a seawifs satellite image is
We don't entirely understand how the ecosystems that these animals live in
Actually operate so when we look at a picture of Earth see if I can get the laser pointer working
We see this gorgeous picture in which the green is the pastures of our oceans
The blue is the deserts and until I saw that image
I've learned everything in a textbook about oceans, but then I saw our planet and I realized how it really works
Here are the big gyres where you might not want to go if you're feeding and you begin to understand
Why fisheries happen along our coastlines?
We have the satellite imagery, but why is it we don't know we're carnivores go in the ocean
Why is it that all of you can close your eyes and really?
Imagine what it's like when a white shark excuse me when a lion
Takes down its prey, but it's a little harder for a tuna a little easier for a white chick because of Shark Week
We don't know the basics though, we know how many Lions there are how many giraffes there?
Are we know we're losing elephants and rhinos and we know that disastrous situation for many animals
In the African plains and the Serengeti, but we don't really understand the answers to those questions
For tunas and sharks we barely understand what's going on in Monterey on a summer afternoon
Cloudiest could be all summer there we as oceanographers have begun to figure it out
We know that the winds of spring the northwest winds that are so strong in
Spring are creating upwelling bringing up the nutrient-rich water
That then seeds the pastures of summer, and that would be the phytoplankton that then draws in the krill
That then brings the anchovy
Or the sardine and then brings in the blue whale the humpback in the bluefin tuna
We barely understand until our tagging program where the places like for wildebeest are in which there might be a long
migration or how the seasonal migrations of the Serengeti might work at an ocean scale and who'd be at the watering hole
And it wasn't until 2002 that we began actually putting the first
electronics on a bluefin tuna
Who might swim from our site back to Japan and down to New Zealand him back, and hope that we might see that tag again?
All right, so the challenge is not only in the electronics
But it's also in that challenge of how do you put things on large?
Objects that move through a fluid medium that has a lot of salt
And I didn't keep the engineering going or how like my colleagues in Top?
dr. Bruce mate from Oregon State University
How do you go up to a blue whale and put an electronic tag on a blue oil and?
Then how do you take all of this and put it in a context of a moving fluid?
That changes it both seasonal and decadal scales and tell a story about how our planet earth functions
So you begin by building a tunas Center, which we did in 1994 with the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Stanford
And then you have to convince your colleagues or engineers that this is an exciting area
It's not the most well funded part of our science stream, but what we began doing?
partnered with the Navy and
NOAA and many different funding streams
Under not is we began building the instruments we needed to put on the animals that we can measure what's happening in the ocean
My favorite instrument that we spent a lot of time building. It's called an archival tag. It's simply a computer
I'd say it has the most sensitive light sensor on the planet
It's arguable but it's a nine decade light sensor has oceanographic quality temperature and pressure
It goes into a fish surgically the fish carries it in the ocean
And we want to get it back up to six years later
That's what we're doing right now and tell the journey that fish took. How do we do that?
Well, we have to depend upon humans to get it back. That's not always a good thing to depend upon so there's a fishery
Targeted fishery in which there's about three or four languages on the tag
It says return the tag return the computer, and if you get it back
Rabil underneath the sea to draw a map of a fish that was tagged here went up the coast moved offshore
Once all the way back again, and then went back to Japan and got caught so how did we do that?
We did it using the mathematics that was invested in astronomy and sailing from a long time ago
and that is if I have an accurate clock not an easy thing to build and keeping a tuna and I have
photons I can measure sunrise and sunset
and I can actually do mathematical algorithms that tell me where I am on the planet and
Correct for the diving fish all right, so that's what we're doing and that geolocation
Has now been input into a variety of tag types that sometimes you have to get back and on other times
You can actually pop it off the animal and get it back through satellite uplink and I'm going to tell you about a whole
family of tags that engineers have built around the bio logging community that have really led to a
breakthrough in understanding where animals go a
Second type of tag that happens in animal tagging is
Obvious to most people you put a radio tag on the back of an animal when it comes to the surface it sends up its
signal
but it's harder to put that on a fish because fish don't come to the surface so we use pop-up satellite archival tags at the
top
Sometimes we can take a dorsal fin of a shark
And we can put a tag at the tip
We're only learning every day more and more about how to do this we can send Argos satellite signals
we can now send GPS signals, but only just as a
community learning how to do that well we hope to bring fast lock technology from military applications into
The marine realm because when an animal comes to the surface like a whale and goes
And gets a breath or uh pinniped it's not there for very long and so how long does it take to get a?
Global satellite signal a lot longer than a breathing whale at the surface or a shark who's finning
This is the first shark over the past year that we've put GPS at the tip of its dorsal fin
And what we're able to do is in
Tan is our Argo signal and yellow is our GPS signal
I didn't put the geolocation signal, but we learned that you know we're doing pretty well with the
Methodologies we have and GPS is getting us somewhere there, but it's hard to get the signal off the animal
So these are the types of tags the most complex tags
We're doing right now our camera tags with magnetometers and accelerometers that tell us everything about
pitch and speed underneath the sea
And we're trying to put these on tunas and sharks and find out how they work
But the most important thing we do is we get a lot of points about animals
Who are the most targeted animals on the planet about a hundred thousand points from two thousand days of tagging huge amounts of effort?
catching each fish
Individually and in the Pacific. I took this off the web this morning
There's this is from ten hours ago. It says Pacific bluefin tuna could become extinct without a fishing, ban
All right, so the importance of this type of work is that without
Finding out what they do we can't manage these animals, so I'm gonna give you a couple examples. This is the Atlantic Ocean?
60 nations are meeting next week in Europe in Spain to decide
How does the science support best splitting up the last?
Two not for the two different sides of the ocean and how can we best manage?
What we hope is a recovery so we have two populations that are thought to not cross the ocean originally
But now we've learned from tagging they do
We manage the western side of the basin differently than the eastern side we have a smaller stock in the West off
North America a larger stock in the mid, this is the American stock
So this is lots of breeding tunas it declined long ago. Hovering near its
Minimum down here. Maybe there's an uptick, but then we had a Gulf oil spill, and it's not really clear. What's going on
So as I mentioned we surgically put these tags into the tuna. We let them go we mark the tuna with a
Small mark that's green that says if you return me you'll get $1,000
And we get fishermen returning the tags and when they return the big tunas
It's about 22 percent of our instruments come back and the small tunas where there's a higher
Mortality rate in the Pacific we get about half of them back, and that's a lot to get back from a wild ocean
so then what we do is we compute where the fish went so in the color is a
Track of a fish beneath the sea, it's never sent us a radio signal
This is all beneath the sea all done with the geolocation algorithm
It's a probability function of where is the animal we hook those probabilities together with an error and then?
What we're able to do is run a state-space model that over time has improved
telling us where an animal that's completely beneath the sea is going and
What is the reward for your hard work over 20 years is to get tracks like this the colors are date or months in which?
the first year the animal you was over in America then the animal went to Ireland and then Ireland to Spain and
back and forth again
They breed in the Mediterranean so you start over here and realize that a fish that you met off the coast of North Carolina
is really a
Mediterranean breeder so we begin to separate
Who's who in the ocean?
another
Example of fish in the first year swimming right across to Spain and then the same thing going in the Balearic stew breed for three
Years in a row and so it's through this type of activity that we can begin to separate populations
This is a population. This is one fish who's gone into the Gulf twice to breed and we begin to see that
There is a very very small North American giant bluefin tuna
That's separate from the European bluefin tuna, but they mix on their foraging grounds
We can also see into the ocean with the animal as it dives. It's become a
Sensor there's a day in the life of a tuna down here in which the animals diving
Maybe to get a cod or something like that. This is the ambient temperature
There's the warm body temperature the animal is moving along this trajectory
And over the life of this tag a year and a half of data. You get this gorgeous data at the level of oceanographic equipment
To get the pop-up tag to work took a lot of effort by many people and so this is a
pop-up tagging here at moiré
learning how to pop the tags off first in
Pens and then building an instrument that was robust enough to work in the wild now what we do routinely is
Put the external tag on the outside of a fish pretty hard to keep it on it's 30 grams
hard to get it smaller with its radio transmitters it then does all the
Computational math of the modeling of sunrise and sunset on the tag we correct
The latitude by taking the zero pressure in blue and temperature and fitting that with
Sea surface temperature we get from satellites from NASA, NOAA
We then can bring these two models of where the fish is along a known light longitude together
And then get that probability and the hard part about pop-up tags is you have to send that data back?
So the tag is small it rides records all this data
Does some smart computational functions comes to the surface on a release that you program in and then sends the data back to?
Argos
system so then we're able to take
Imagery from NASA NOAA bring it together with the track and for the first time in our lives
Really see how it is that the Gulf Stream becomes for example the transporter of?
The tuna and how rings off the Gulf Stream are places that they really love to
Go and then how an animal might probe the Gulf of Maine
Look for something in there find
It's too cold and then go back before heading back down to North Carolina, and so this type of work is challenging to do
So we also are able to as I said send back these
oceanographic signals find out how a fish
And a population are using the Gulf of Mexico
We're able to see that some of these fish move across
To the Mediterranean as I told you combine it with
Genetics such that we can see gulf fish Mediterranean fish and fish that are sort of in the North Atlantic
We can use ear bones with elements to tell us from which
Population read from the Gulf and blue from the Med the saltier see the animals come from and we take all this
Information and for the first time we're able to say to the world
There's two populations, maybe a third that's residential in the Med
And we need to manage the mathematics of how many tuners there are we're this
Understanding and tell the bodies that manage the tuna that your models need to have an overlap mathematics and not the separation
Tunas also came into the Gulf of Mexico to breed and this is where we had the world's largest oil spill not too long ago
And we're just publishing some papers now in which we look at what happened after spawning
What did the Gulf oil do to the animals and what did it do to their spawn?
That's going to impact the population and we do that with satellite oceanography again
coming from both no and NASA in which along a trajectory of where a tuna is we can tell a
Behavior of spawning that is we can tell when the tunas if you will have sex and they do like us some unusual things
I'm not going to go into the detail
They have a pattern up here of
Behavior of temperature and pressure that you could almost with your eyes see is on a dial basis different than the pattern below
and
We know from our own work physiologically that petroleum is a cardiac arithmetic agent
we actually showed that and so we can actually then make some population estimates of what happened when
tunas spawn in oceanographic places that are
Oiled so we can bring the layers together and then ask the question
What was the probability in the oil spill of a tuna habitat in?
High probability green being covered with oil and then also having a spawning event occur and that's how we bring together these
disparate fields of satellite oceanography and behavior
I'm going to skip past this because of time and tell you
Slightly about our other projects so out here in the Pacific
Which is a bit more of the unknown? We have big sanctuaries and we're trying to understand as I mentioned
We've been talking about the tunas how does an ocean as big as the Pacific operate?
To do that we took all of our equipment our satellite tags on the heads of seals our
Popup tags or tuna archival tags and the simple questions that we're asking are if we understand that there's a relationship between
Upwelling and productivity how do you get optimum habitats off?
California and why does it occur only for about four to five months of the year?
Why is the hotspot if you will July to November?
So we satellite ocean
oceanographic Li tagged from
UCSC and Daniel Kostas lab in top the
heels off of off of
Ano nuevo we built special tags with our British colleagues that carried CT DS on the top there?
So these are true CT D's like you'd see off an oceanographic ship. They measure salinity
Temperature they now do fluorescence and we put this on
Animals along with the fast lock a GPS and we began to get you know precision oceanography about what they're doing
and what we learned from this type of activity the elephant seal goes a
Third to a half way across the Pacific and comes back to a beach where you can get the data back
We've got the Sharks. I told you about here's some salmon sharks. Here's some tuna here
We found that we had a neighborhood in our backyard
That we have this ocean called the Pacific but once we put tags on we found that from Hawaii to here is sort of an
ocean neighborhood and then in the summer months
from New Zealand from Indonesia from the Bering Sea
Animals know it's such a great place to feed it's sort of the McDonald's of the west coast that they all come up here on
remarkable migrations to feed here and so what we learned by studying many animals and Guilds working together as
Scientists is that the west coast of North America?
Has a place that attracts?
Albatross that has tunas that has sharks and for the first time we could separate in colors there different species and their habitats
With tagging and the main result of the project was to learn in red that if you tagged
4,000 animals and get
tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of points that the hotspot after you correct for having put many of the tags in the west coast
Isn't just a diffusional place that they go to because you tagged him here the hot spot is here because it's actually
aggregating much of the wildlife of the Pacific in the northern
Pacific ocean and there's three hot spots in particular we found the highway the north pacific
transition zone the California Current and the white shark cafe
We also found that much to our surprise when we started we didn't really know this that if you take
Oceanographic values this would be chlorophyll this down here is temperature with red being warm colors
and you run the mean latitude of all these guilds through the year that there's a very seasonal pattern of either going north south or
Going inshore offshore that there's actually a clock that the animals are on that
Clock is a seasonal clock in which this is the hot spot all over the west coast of North America and blue our
Transit periods and yellow is the residency period so I've told you a lot about Pacific bluefin tuna
I'm not gonna say I mean Atlantic bluefin tuna on the Pacific side a tuna would be tagged
excuse me and go north and south for quite some time and
In blue is bluefin in red is yellowfin three different species and white will be albacore tuna
Those are the tunas of the west coast of North America this would be a NASA generated
Surface temperature
Map from JPL and what we'll have is then tuna showing you their migration highway home
They always go along that highway, and then we'll see that in red the yellow fin tuna will be clinging to North America
They'll stay here. That's what makes a population and then the albacore going out towards the cafe
Perhaps the biggest migrators as we learned we took tuna tags and through the work of Scott Shafer at San Jose State
We were able to show that with light-based geolocation that
Animals the smallest shearwaters that you see here in the summer are coming up from New Zealand
Ending up on our coast maybe going over to Japan and then coming back down on some of the largest migrations on the planet
These are with small light-based geolocation tags that the birds carry on their feet
And when we do all this tagging together we begin to see that we understand that the transition zone
we need satellites to really see this is between a subarctic front and the
Subtropical gyre that an albatross on a single trip will use that frontal zone
With a satellite tag that a Pacific bluefin tuna will migrate along this frontal zone
And so will the elephant seals because that's where the food is so begin to know where the highways that we have to watch where
Humans might be gathering well use the satellite data
Make the synthesis of taking all the data that we have putting it together with GAM models and asking the question
What is it that structures the habitat?
How is it that temperature in chlorophyll are structuring these places, and then we'll look at something like our elephant seal or pinniped
Information, and we'll take this to a step further where it helps the planet earth where the data that we're gathering as as
Biologists now as the animals move up and down is being sent to the world
You know GTS data set and the animals themselves as they cross the Pacific and come back with their tags
Can actually take more data than any man-made automated vehicle at a lower cost you know the cost of a sardine or two?
Across the entire ocean basin all right, so this animals as ocean sensors project is something. That's grown up out of top
It's happening across the planet
What we do as animal oceanographers as we take our data
we're learning to strip the ocean data from it send it up to the
World system so that we can have a better view of that in situ look at the oceans such that if this is
Last year's El Nino
This is my colleague Dan Kostas team
Where we're sending out the elephant seals to see the warm blob that developed
And you look at you know we the Argo float program a well-funded oceanographic program
And the red are the hot areas of how much data is coming back in terms of
casts the seals for a very low cost can actually generate quite a bit of data
This has really been taking a heart at the
Arctic and Antarctic zones where those are animal tags from five nations in the Ma'at program being put out
versus the Argo floats in red
Which can't really get to some of the places that the animals can get to so animals are being cohorts in oceanography?
across the planet I
Want to just tell you just a few more stories, this is a satellite tag on a shark
We didn't know when we started we could send data from the fin of a shark
this is
Coming down from Alaska a salmon shark really roving over the Northeast Pacific
Here's a mako over three years tagged here one year two years and the third year and then today off the web
This is this morning a salmon shark we tagged last year your Alaska's right in Monterey Bay
I might go out and see that shark this weekend
So we again another story here learned about this whole other cousins of white sharks
They're enormous migrations with satellite tags there. This is the population on the right a single individual on the on the left
And you know I would argue that we don't have polar bear tracks for this long again from technology. That is
Allowing us to figure out where they are what their impact are on salmon
And then the one that everybody wants to hear about are the white sharks in our backyard to tags acoustic and pop up
Everybody wants to know how we do it. We bring them close to the boat
We don't recommend you do this at home
And when you bring a white shark close to the boat you can attract them with a seal decoy and a piece of blubber
You can get the animal moving right into the boat area
And if you put on a tag like a satellite tag in red our individual tracks and in yellow is the whole population
That's how we learn that every shark here on California coast is going offshore
Back in shore and hanging out at places like the white shark cafe
The depth information on the tag gives us the incredible story that in close to shore
This is what you're most interested in for the surfers in the room
They're right here at the surface red being the high occupancy areas once they go offshore
They're doing a diol behavior and in the cafe
My colleague Sal Jorgensen has shown that they're doing a rapid oscillatory diving we think this could be behaviorally some sort of
behavior that's attracting males and females in the cafe, so
They're eating pinnipeds close-to-home squid offshore
And the cafe is the place for meet and greet and in this cafe. We know very little that's happening there. We know
It's a concentrated place. We haven't been there yet
We can use satellites to look down on it and what we're doing right now with our Google colleagues is looking at
Who's in the cafe? This is now human fishing hours?
In the cafe using the AIS beacons to ask who is in our blue Serengeti and note there's very little activity
In our North American ocean, that's good
All right, so I'll sum that up by showing all three species now make white sharks
Salmon sharks all moving through space and time in an ocean of color of temperature
And we see the three species and their shadows they're separated
And basically the white sharks out there in the cafe. You could learn what time would be a good time to go swimming in Monterey
April looks pretty good
And then these sharks are gonna come back and you'll see that
They'll peak on our shore right about coming up in the in the summertime
They're just headed back the first shark showed up yesterday
And then by November all those white dots are gonna be out of the open sea and in
to the coastal ocean
We sometimes have salmon sharks get eaten by white sharks. That's a good story there all right
You can see the body temperature getting constant and warm
But the main story that I've told you today is we are team working with many others
Discovered that we have a blue Serengeti a place is equivalent to Kruger National Park in our backyard all the animals are here
We're trying now to raise awareness of how do you make an MPA a marine protected area?
That would protect this region beyond the sanctuaries how is it that we make a Yellowstone in the ocean?
How do we make Yosemite in the ocean?
So there's a map of the great blue areas. We call these the large marine protected areas
They're not very many in the ocean less than 10% of the ocean is protected
Here's the Phoenix Isles protected area Chagos. Here's our backyard not very well protected
In order to protect these places and look to the future we need to have
Apex predator monitoring to do that
Cool technologies like wave gliders and buoys are being used
I'm gonna finish up by just give you a couple examples
These are where the animals are from our satellite tags the black is where the protection zones are those of the National
Marine sanctuaries white or white sharks don't get nervous when you see that slide orange are the salmon sharks
It's a Sharky backyard. We have we live in peace in this backyard with our sharks
We've developed a system in which we put receivers built by a company called vent go in the ocean at just a few play
We can keep track acoustically of the white sharks as they come and go those are just different. White sharks hitting the receivers
We've put iridium satellite
Devices on the top of our receivers now and you on your iPhone
Can keep track if you come into our app or or take a look on the web of?
When a white shark swims by the buoy you can see when it's here
This is a you can see the gap when they're away
This is yesterday
And I just noticed this white shark just showed up on our coast
So you can do that by going to top dot org and going to a buoy these buoys have physical oceanography?
They're built in collaboration with and barring ow and we've got a few of them in the ocean right at Hopkins
We can tell our undergrads Hey look. There's 14 large. White sharks that come by
The gliders give us continuous coverage and the future of Oceanography is to begin to enable this
Mechanized world that samples allows us to go in do things like go around Farrell ons
And see with a mechanized glider all in yellow that white sharks are circling the farallon's
Not a great place to go swimming in the summertime. That's a bunch of different
White sharks all gathered there that we couldn't visualize ourselves until we had gliders that were circling
So in conclusion the future really is a future in which we bring together these disparate worlds of
Surveillance
Technologies that our late comers to our oceans that you probably are using on other planetary missions, and we begin to understand
how is it that we can see what's happening in our sea, and that's what we're trying to do with our colleagues right now and
The future is something like having not only the mechanized vehicles and the tagged animals, but also
developing this world of environmental DNA being able to do signatures of
Being able to see where the animals are and also pick up their signature from their genetic material
so an evolving area of science is the fact that wherever you go especially in the sea you can find the shedding cells and
Tell who's been there?
We envision the day soon where we could just send out a glider
To the cafe and the glider remotely could sample what's happening there and said back to the lab something
You'd be doing on Mars perhaps
And then we envision the day soon where we take back our seas from the poachers that with the Google and sky truth enabled
Ability to follow where humans are that we can actually in these remote places the largest MPAs on earth
Build the type of devices that help us prevent the taking of the Sharks
I'm going to just go back back right past this very sad story the largest MPA on earth where we work
Completely overrun with poachers that we can't stop and I'll end on this last note
my hope for the future is that with
coming together of different groups
We can do things like build what we're building right now with our Stanford colleagues in aerospace the fin alert shark tag a tag that
When we take a shark from the sea it will have the same type of device we have in clothes at Macy's
Where it will alert?
The patrol boats that the animals been taken and the patrol boat can come and say hey
You know you're not supposed to be in our MPA our marine protected area that type of technology is what we need
combined with the satellite technology to own this place called Earth and to prevent what's happening the
decimation of the large marine predators in the open sea beyond US borders
So I'm going to end by saying thanks for listening monitoring with technology bringing together these disparate
Paths is really the future of our oceans and to do all this work
There's many people I would have to thank but I particularly want to thank my Linh laboratory that
Actually has led the charge with me throughout the year as many different people and then the combination of philanthropic and federal funding
That's allowed us to span two ocean basins in pursuit of a healthier ocean. Thank you very much
Fuck
So we have time for a few questions if you have a question. Please raise your hand wait for the microphone stand up and
one question only
Hi, thank you for the talk that was great
Wondering when you're making these global conclusions on
Fish trends how do you deal with the potential for over sampling of fish in this region and maybe under sampling of?
populations that are based in Latin America or Australia
Okay, so I'm gonna. I'm not entirely sure exactly which particular
aspect of the study or your you're focused on but let me just talk about fish trends the
fish in the world are reported to
Regional fishery management organizations that are international called are FMOs or to FAO and so most of the grids for fish reporting are
Five by five grids and all you're getting is what humans tell other humans
They're doing so there's a lot of illegal fishing too, but most of what you're seeing in graphs is reported fishing pressure
And there's been study after study across the planet that's shown that the trends. Are you know going down?
It's called the fishing down of the food web
Sharks okay, right when we tagged and we look at where an animal goes we have to actually account for that tagging area
So we either have to do a statistical
Robust analysis in which we have to measure how many animals do we tagged what was the length of a tag on
How do we deal with dispersion versus advection so it's just a math model
I'm not maybe I didn't get your question exactly
Hi, that was fascinating. I have two questions the first question is
When the animals are going out way offshore, they're crossing deserts. I mean are they going deep
I mean are they they're surface waters are
oligotrophic
So how are they managing and there don't seem to be following currents?
They seem to be going counter currents, so what have you learned about that aspect?
And then I have another question
I think that's that's a really great question
That's sort of the secret of the planet Earth so the biggest peanutbutter shop on the planet is in what we call the Mesa
pelagic so that's the layer underneath the open sea so the pelagic and
in that layer is
A fish with oil that may be the real peanut butter of the sea called
Lantern fish so a lot of these animals are diving down to that
Layer that doesn't have light the music pelagic or it's got low light
feeding in that
Sometimes low oxygen layer sometimes not low oxygen and then coming back to the surface so we see a lot of that dial
behavior out in the open sea and so
There's there's three parts to the answer to your question that that we studied today. How are these animals so efficient and moving?
That is how is it that they don't have such high energetic cost that they can do that they can use?
planetary scales that we could only dream of with a
Rover or an AUV so every a UV on the planet what limits where it goes?
anybody
batteries drivers, okay
So unless you have a solar powered a UV you can't go very far on the planet compared to a tuna
And so what the animals are doing is they're combining elastic energy storage with?
Mechanical muscle power once they get out there
It's a desert so the question really is where do you feed and the answer is you're feeding below the surface
Satellite imagery, and I think the cafe is a great example
Where you know by surface signal? We would never know that that was a place that all the white sharks gather
Or would we know why and so when we go there physically perhaps for the first time we've applied for some cruise time
Maybe what we'll find is what I think it's going on and that is that there is an edge there
That we don't naturally recognize as vertebrates as primates the edge is formed by a hypoxic
layer and
A very well oxygenated piece of the ocean and may be along that frontal boundary
That's the kind of frontal boundary that we don't normally see from the surface
There's a stack of like cordwood of prey or maybe it's for some other reason
But I think what the animals are teaching us is we don't entirely yet understand our planet as to where the carbon
gets stored
That then makes for a good food web. Well. That's interesting there may
Also, be some metabolic issues because it's lower temperature, but the following question. I have is that the ocean is
an acoustic environment
not a visual environment
Have you thought about look listening to the animals as they're moving through the ocean and not only to understand?
What they're doing, but also to learn about the surrounding environment acoustically yeah, it's a superb question
I'd say that we vertebrate researchers especially in fish are behind on the acoustics
We actually for the Navy did a project where we measured tunas capacity to hear it's quite good
and so I think what probably is going on that we haven't ever put a
Perception on in terms of a human perception of how it works is that?
Certainly when things move through the ocean there's sound signals right how a fish would pick that up. Isn't something anybody's
You know done at the pelagic level very well, but perhaps
Perhaps, it's working. I think that smell is certainly big you look at a Marlin a tuna swordfish
You've got a very large rosette that is nasal so clearly the smell of a squid
You know may be something they can pick up I mean I get fast
primarily by simple questions like this
How does a giant tuna swimming in the North Atlantic decide to go to a thousand meters and do it in less than ten minutes?
You know how did it know that there was something worth chasing down there?
So how does it find the squid that's down there and wouldn't you love to see from a camera? What's really going on?
Imagine all of you who spend every day wanting to go to some other planet
We barely seen what's on this planet at depth all right?
We've been to the Marianas Trench
We've been to some of these incredible places, but do we really understand?
places like the open sea what's happening in the
Richest most biodiverse region the mesial pelagic which covers the largest zone of the ocean?
So we oceanographers have been behind it sending our message out. We're perhaps
Not as articulate a crowd as our colleagues of this institution
And I think that you know there's some really clear issues
Across two-thirds of the planet that have to be sorted out, and I think that you know it's challenging to make it compelling
Hi, thanks for coming to talk to us
I had a question in terms of you talked about a lot of different technologies that are being developed in terms of
one establishing MPAs a crop for California, and then sort of
supporting the establishment and retaining them what types of
Advancements in technologies, or developments. Do you see is it sort of supporting like?
population or looking at species or
Maybe you could speak a little bit to that okay
and that's a that's a terrific question a very hard question - so thank you for the difficult question and I
Don't think we have a clear answer to that question. I think that many of you may know that
There's been an Act passed in California that protects very
Important domains that are in short so the marine life Protection Act that means that a hundred years from now
You know your kids kids might be able to see what happens in a California intertidal zone
That's almost undisturbed so it protects small places close to shore
We have sanctuaries now and these sanctuaries such as Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary the Gulf of the Farallones
Sanctuary Cordell Bank sanctuary they protect larger parcels of the ocean that are quite important
But they still allow fishing and many activities to occur there
there is a push going on right now by
By the West Coast folks in
Oceans to now take sea mounts and through the monument act
put those out of reach of
Certain types of fishers the fishers who can drag a net along a sea mount and change the biodiversity overnight
so that is it is a
antiquities act type of protection that may go in play at the end of the Obama administration
what other tools do we have to protect pelagic areas very few as the answer even building a
World Heritage Site you know the same type of site that might be around the Great Barrier Reef is something that's very unique to a
temperate zone like ours and
Doesn't necessarily
Come with a lot of protection as much as it raises the profile of an area
So the answer is that's our challenge. How do we tell the fleet's of boats that we are seeing now that we have the AIS?
tool, so remember the biggest tool that came of age in the last two years is the
Capacity to use a collision avoidance system as a way to see what humans are doing on the planet
And it's been shocking to see all the nations out beyond our borders who are fishing every last
Fish they can get so we may be the best at making laws that can serve and manage our fisheries we do quite
Well as Americans, but just beyond our borders where the animals are coming in from we've got many nations
And I'm not going to name names, but the fleet's are big. I'll name some of the biggest fleets, China Korea, Japan
and
They're fishing in the offshore realm
So we won't save that part of this planet
Until we come up with ways of monitoring and monitoring can only be done with satellites and with tools that allow us to count
You know what's being taken so my dream is
beyond the tag I told you about
Unfunded I call it fish. Chip is to chip the carcasses tomorrow not not
You know ten years from now
So by chipping the carcasses with a satellite chip that it isn't as easy as you think you want to have the Iridium
You want to have RFID?
You want to be able to see a animal in container ship?
So you need GPS iridium a bunch of different technologies together on the chip so that we can't have a black market of tuna to
fish
You know other people might worry about rhinoceroses, but you want to be able to chip the wildlife
So it can't be traveling the planet without us knowing and I think we could do that
As soon as people come together and say we care about these problems
So with that please join me in thanking dr. Block for an excellent
You
