I wanted to be a marine biologist since
I was a little kid. I didn't necessarily
know what that meant, but it's something
I always wanted to do. I work in the deep
sea. I'm most interested in deep-sea
corals that live well below where light
can penetrate the oceans.
When the spill first occurred,
Our first thoughts
were kind of like everybody else that oil
floats, and we really didn't think we
were going to see the big impact in the
deep sea that we did. There were these
corals that were literally covered in
oil. The oil went up to the surface they
applied dispersant to it, but some of
those chemicals in the dispersant turned
out to be toxic to biology. These are corals
that are hundreds of years old that are
going to take at least decades to
recover. Some of them won't recover at
all. The deep sea and some of these
habitats that we work on in the lab are
really significant to the productivity
of the oceans. The nutrients that feed
these communities, the plankton in
shallow water that then feed the fish
that then feed us are reliant on the
nutrients that come from the deep sea.
[Music]
We're moving into restoration and what
you can do to actually put them back
together again and try and recover some
of the ecosystem function that the
deep-sea corals have that we know is tied
into the rest of the wider gulf ecosystem,
and that's going to be really
interesting work. It's going to be
something I'm doing for the rest of my
career. I think it's really important
that these students get a chance to do
these things, not just read about them.
It's much more powerful when students
realize that they're the scientists.
They're the ones who can do this. Being a
part of something that you know is
happening for the first time is really
why I started studying the deep sea.
We're doing something that people are
going to look back on for a long time.
