- Speaker #0
Welcome to the Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates'interview series on radio and podcast. The show covering all things health, wellness, culture, and more. The show for all of us who aren't old, we're better. Each week, we'll interview superstars, experts, and ordinary people doing extraordinary things, all related to this wonderful experience of getting better, not just older. Now, here's your host, the award-winning Paul Vogelzang.
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Welcome to the Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates interview series. I'm Paul Vogelzang and today's episode is truly special. We are diving, quite literally, into one of the most mysterious, vast, and awe-inspiring environments on our planet, the open ocean. Our guest today, Smithsonian Associate Dr. Sonka Johnson, a distinguished oceanographer and professor of biology, will guide us on this incredible journey. Smithsonian Associate Dr. Sonka? Johnson will be appearing at Smithsonian Associates coming up. Please check out our show notes today and the Smithsonian Associates website for more details on Dr. Sonka Johnson's upcoming Smithsonian Associates presentation titled The Great Wide Ocean. Smithsonian Associate Dr. Sonka Johnson has spent his career exploring the world far beyond the shore where sunlight disappears and the rules of survival. defy everything we know. From bioluminescent creatures that light up the abyss, to translucent animals so clear they become invisible, to predators, the open ocean is teeming with lifeforms that are as bizarre as they are fascinating. But this fragile ecosystem is under threat from human activity and climate change, and Dr. Sanka Johnson's work reveals both its beauty and the urgent need to protect it. Smithsonian Associate Dr. Sanka Johnson's latest book, available at Apple Books, Into the Great Wide Ocean, gives us an intimate look at how these deep sea creatures thrive in the face of crushing pressures, extreme darkness, and the constant battle for survival. Through vivid storytelling and groundbreaking research, our guest today, Smithsonian Associate Dr. Sanka Johnson, will tell us everything he knows about the great wide ocean and he'll open our eyes to the wonders hidden beneath the waves. Today we will hear firsthand about Dr. Sanka Johnson's daring expeditions, the breathtaking discoveries, and the challenges of working in such a formidable and enigmatic environment. Prepare to be amazed as we explore what Dr. Sanka Johnson calls the last great frontier on earth. So sit back, take a breath, and join me in welcoming Dr. Sanka Johnson to the show. This is an episode... you won't want to miss. Dr. Zonka Johnson, welcome to the program.
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Well, thank you. Thank you. I'm glad to be here.
- Speaker #1
Good to talk to you. I am excited to talk about your wonderful new book, Into the Great Wide Ocean. Thank you so much for sharing it with me and congratulations on this amazing work of yours. And let's really just jump right in. We are talking in advance of your Smithsonian Associates presentation coming up. You'll talk about the book. You'll talk about your work. Why don't you just give us kind of a brief review? of what you'll be telling our audience and in particular touch on how you might use Zoom to engage our audience because we're all on Zoom these days and I imagine you've got some images to share and lots of neat things.
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I've never actually done this exactly, you know, this is my first public book. I've written a couple scientific ones but this is meant for the general public and I talked a bit to Smithsonian about well, you know, what they might be looking for and I've decided on a talk that I've given before in public audiences. actually sometimes in bars and restaurants, public areas and so on. I call it a tale of two brothers. It starts out actually with my brother and I and how we moved into different worlds, he into the arts and me into the sciences with both of us doing actually similar things, which leads into the 90% of the talk, which is me showing the artistic beauty of the animals in the ocean. I start at the surface with the animals that live at the surface and the ones below that we see scuba diving. And with each of the animals, you know, I not only talk about their beauty and showcase their beauty, but a little bit about how these animals solve the various problems they need to solve to live in that habitat. And then slowly work my way down in the water column to the deep sea. And that's sort of it. It's like a way of sort of bringing in the fact that many artists are also scientists and many scientists are artists and that we're really not so different. And we actually think in some ways. Similarly, and at the same time, giving people an idea of what that ocean world is that so surrounds us.
- Speaker #1
It's fascinating. That's really a great way to, I will just tell you personally, just a slight deviation here. My wife is a ballet choreographer and she has a real scientific mind. She has an approach to ballet and kinesiology that is rooted very much in science. And so the dancers really get that kind of that approach. And so I wonder, how are you combining? Because the ocean is just this beautiful, magnificent place. It's mysterious and challenging at the same time too, but how do you see it artistically?
- Speaker #2
So for me, I've always just been drawn in by light. I was originally an art major in college and then, you know, work in painting and sculpture and things of that sort. And then a great deal of photography when I was in high school. Basically, my dad and I slapped a big old table on a bathtub in the attic and set up a darkroom. And I would go around with a camera from the 1950s and just wander around every single afternoon and photograph everything I saw and then develop it at night. So for me now, the part of my artistic life that remains is the photography part, because I'm able to photograph animals that most people never get to see. I mean, something I always think about is people save what they love and they love what they see. And so I have the opportunity to show people what is actually out there in the hopes that they fall in love with it. And in the hopes that by falling in love with it, they think about being more conservation minded in how we treat the oceans. I sort of sometimes call it the flipper effect. People really started to love dolphins after flipper. People became very enamored with sea turtles after those television shows that showed the poor little guys racing down the beach. And it was those snippets of footage that really changed our public view of how we care about these animals. So my goal artistically is to photograph these animals that people don't regularly see and then bring them into their lives. And in the book, It's mostly drawings, not drawings of my own, but beautiful drawings and then bringing them in with the stories of how these animals live out there.
- Speaker #1
Dr. Sonka Johnson is our guest today, written a fabulous book, Into the Great Wide Ocean. The illustrations are really wonderful and add so much to it. Again, congrats on all of this. And as you were talking, I was thinking to myself about the artistic image that NASA produced many years ago of the kind of the blue. planet and how that's become such an artistic icon. And certainly as I was reading your book, you talk about the blue water in such a wonderful way that the cover of your book is in this just this lustrous blue. Tell us what the blue water is and how that's different than the open ocean, because I really found that to be very interesting.
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So like many people, I grew up going to the beach for a few weeks each summer. And I thought I really understood that, you know, this was the ocean. The ocean was, you know, the sound of the surf and the sort of brownish, greenish water you get and so on. And it wasn't really until I went away from the coast on my first research cruise for a couple of weeks. And the water was just, it's extraordinary. I mean, the only other water I know like it is Crater Lake. It's just like this enormous moving sapphire. It's incredible. It's deep, deep, as you said, lustrous blue. And the most amazing thing after seeing it for a while was to scuba dive in it, where you can see for hundreds of feet in every direction. And everything is just different, darker or lighter shades of blue. It's one of the most extraordinary feelings. And then realizing that this is most of our world. If we think of our living world, it's about 99% or so of our livable world on this planet. And so if, you know, let's say an alien were to come to this planet and say, what lives here? What's the habitat? What is this? It's that blue ocean in reality, the blue fading to black as it goes deeper, because the ocean not only is larger. which we learn in grade school, it's so much deeper than our habitat on earth. And so this blue, I mean, we really do live in like a giant blue marble.
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Is it about depth and what kind of extra training do you have to go through in order to strike out into some of this blue ocean? I imagine that that gets a little specialized.
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To scuba dive, it does. The real danger, we don't go very deep because we are very conscious of the fact that we're hundreds of miles and several days for medical help. The biggest issue is to not float away because it looks the same in every single direction. I mean, I've seen people turn upside down scuba diving and not realize they were upside down because everything just looks the same in every direction. And it would be very easy to drop hundreds of feet in depth or float hundreds of feet or a quarter mile away and not really know it because you're just busily working to see something like a cute animal or whatever. So we build these rigs that tie us all together. And most of the training is learning how to dive. We look sort of like a calder mobile. There's a big central line coming down and then we all come off as these different tethers. Instead of those beautiful like red and white triangles and so on, there's a diver at each end and they're all floating around the slow moving mobile. And that's what keeps us alive. Otherwise, we would all drift apart and we'll never be seen again.
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That's a great image. Thank you for that. Hi, it's Paul. Do you love entertaining, informative, eclectic, insightful programs about culture, health, science, life, and everything Smithsonian? As part of our Smithsonian Associates interview series on radio and podcast, we're introducing you to the new Smithsonian Associates streaming series. Smithsonian, a nonprofit organization, is excited to present this new aspect of their 55 years as the world's largest museum-based educational program. Join us from the comfort of your home as we periodically interview Smithsonian associate guest speakers. Our audience here on radio and podcasts can explore our website for more information, links, and details at notold-better.com. Thanks everybody. Again, our guest is Smithsonian associate Dr. Sanka Johnson, who's written the wonderful new book into the great wide ocean life in the least known habitat on earth. Really want to recommend this to our audience. We're going to have links so that our audience can find out more about the book and Dr. Johnson and his work, including details about his upcoming Smithsonian Associates presentation. Dr. Johnson, you mentioned the water column, and I wonder if you'd tell us what that term means and about the vast array of life that is really in that column and how it's a little different from other areas of the ocean.
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We never have a good public word for it. For us among scientists, we call it the pelagic world, which is a world that goes all the way from the surface, but not the bottom. Sometimes we call it the water column. We call it the midwater. We call it the blue water. And the big difference is it's kind of like being in space or being in the air and that there's no surface. There's nowhere to sit. Everything is moving. Everything is moved around by currents. No animals, unless they can settle on each other, which they often do, have nowhere to go. And if they stop flapping or stop floating, they'll drop down to the bottom. And it just creates sort of a unique set of challenges. They have to keep from falling to the bottom. They have to worry about pressure. They have to worry about darkness. And one of the biggest things they have to worry about is just the tremendous size of the habitat. It's just utterly vast and utterly the same in every direction. And so if they want to find each other. They want to find food and so on. If they want to run away and hide from food, these things are all made so much more difficult in a world that looks the same in every direction and goes on for thousands, sometimes almost 10,000 miles in a single direction.
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Certainly water and the ocean has been in the news of late. We're kind of on the heels of Helene and Milton. And you really relate this to some of the human activity that's going on and the changes that are rapidly affecting... the open ocean. I was captivated by a news report that I saw talking about the crocodiles and what was becoming of them as Milton was taking place. What happens to the sea life and that are so impacted by some of these changes that come as a result of human activity and climate and other things?
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The short-term things like the hurricanes, some of the animals are clever enough to drop deeper in the water column. If you get a couple hundred feet down the world's most terrifying hurricane, it's as if it doesn't exist. And so the ability to dodge some of the short term consequences, if they do stay up there, everything gets, you know, they get ground to pieces. But the long term consequences are much more serious. The two biggest ones being ocean acidification and the warming of the oceans. And I see that, you know, my research career is not that long. I mean, I've been going to sea for about 25, 30 years. And over that time, we've noticed less and less and less animals that we're able to collect and see. And a lot of this is because as the water gets warmer, it holds less and less oxygen, which means it supports less and less life. Especially if you're working in the tropics or, you know, the subtropical zones like North Carolina, where I live, we start calling it straining water. If we put a net through the water, all we get is more water because there are so few animals now. It's heartbreaking. The other one is ocean acidification. Many of the animals have beautiful, delicate skeletons made out of material that is dissolved when the water becomes more acid. And the water has become more acid due to human activities. And that has led to many of these animals no longer having this delicate protection. That's the only thing between them and one being able to stay alive and also to avoid predation. And so these two things have just dramatically affected the animal life there. Other things are deep sea mining, which is becoming more and more of a possibility. Not only has a huge effect on the deep sea floor, but it creates these plumes that go up thousands of feet and affect everything above them. And then from above, the Deep Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The company. actually funded a number of cruises to look to see what the effect of that was. A number of my colleagues went and they found out that the damage to the animals went down very far. It wasn't just the surface animals that were affected by the oil. Even the oil we think of as floating on water. Animals that were thousands of feet down were also impacted. So they're being hit from above. They're being hit from below. They're being hit by changes we're making to the entire planet. And I'm seeing it in my own short research lifetime, which makes me think. by the time my daughter reaches my age, the oceans may look far different than they do now.
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Tell us a little bit about your experience with some of the sea life. As you reference the delicate skeletal shape of some of the sea creatures, tell us what's inspired you by the ocean. What have you seen that so many of us will never experience because we'll never get to some of these places?
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Being within it, scuba diving has influenced me the most. I've gone down at submersibles quite a number of times. And that, I mean, it's very interesting. You know, you... basically sit in your own weird little chamber and go down thousands of feet and do something. And that's fun. But the scuba diving is much more personal because it's just you in the water and you're surrounded by these animals. And there've been days where I look around and it's like the most magnificent thing ever. I mean, there's one particular day about 300 miles off the coast of Maryland. We were diving in the middle of a bunch of moon jellies and moon jellies. You'll see them washed up on the beach. They just look like a little gristly clear disc. But in the ocean, they're sort of like the most beautiful pink and they can get to be up to about a foot, foot and a half in diameter and have these beautiful collections of tentacles behind them. And we were in a school of, I don't know, probably hundreds of them, all swimming in all different directions around us. It's amazing. I mean, these sort of images never leave you. There was another time we were surrounded by animals that are less familiar to people. They form these long translucent chains. They're called salps and doliolids and each chain was about. 15 to 20 feet long. And so we're just surrounded by these swirling transparent snakes in all directions. These things, they change you. They change the way you think about our world. I mean, they change how I thought about life and my own place in it. It's a spiritual experience is all I can describe it as.
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I'm thinking of some of the pictures that I've seen, some of the television documentaries, perhaps of these beautiful, I think they exist. in very deep water, but they're transparent or perhaps, as you say, translucent. And that's got to be a survival mechanism as well as being something that is just part of the species and that light might not reach them. And so pigment might not exist.
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Funny enough, and this is a very weird thing. It can sometimes be the reverse. So you're right. Yeah, the transparency can be a form of camouflage. It's a way of hiding. But when the animals go deeper, Many of the transparent animals will actually become pigmented. And we've learned that's because many of the deep sea animals travel around with bioluminescent flashlights. And so they're sort of roaming the ocean, like looking for anything that bounces off their flashlights. And if you've ever walked around at night with a flashlight, I do this a lot on the farm when I'm walking the dog at night. And if you shine a light on a window, the window is transparent, but a reflection of that light comes back at you. And the same thing with the transparent animals. When they're down there, the bioluminescent lights give them away if they're transparent. And so they'll actually start covering themselves with pigment to suck up that light to hide. And so, yeah, transparency is an amazing form of camouflage, but it becomes more challenging as animals start breaking out the flashlights.
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Your safety and theirs is of real interest, I think, and perhaps a great deal of concern on your part and your team's part. How do you stay safe in some of these environments? What is it that you're doing? to kind of overcome some of the unpredictability and just the demanding nature of this environment.
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It is very demanding because, I mean, when we're working on the ship itself, it's more or less a factory floor. It has very large winches that can hold like tens of thousands of pounds. It has powerful cranes and so on, except the whole thing is rolling and hurling in all directions and big piles of water are flying everywhere. And you're dealing with people that haven't spent their entire lives working on a factory floor. You're dealing with scientists that go out for a certain amount of times a year. And so safety is a real concern, especially when I'm bringing out new people. And I try to recruit people that, I mean, a lot of times have had experience in their lives working with machinery that have a very good sort of global awareness in that even when they're focused on something, they're able to pay attention to the fact that like a large metal ball might be swinging towards the side of their head or something of that sort. You look for that. You look for people that are... physically cognizant of what's going on around them. And you look for people that are very good at remaining calm, especially in scuba diving, because anything can happen scuba diving. Your air tank can fail. The little thing in your mouth, something can go wrong with it. You can all of a sudden have cold water flood one of your ears, which makes your whole body feel like you've turned upside down. You need to be able to respond in a calm and rational manner. Sometimes if you get too deep, you breathe gas at a high enough pressure, it makes you drunk. And you need to be aware of that and be able to function through that drunken state until you get to shallower water. And so I look very carefully for people that I feel can do that. We call it the lifeboat test, that if you feel like somebody, you know, if the entire ship burnt down and we all had to evacuate in five minutes and jump into a lifeboat and float out there for two weeks, who would you feel comfortable being in the lifeboat with you? It's not so much about the skills they have as it is about their personality traits. There are personality traits that keep people safer. And I spend a lot of time thinking about that when I take people to sea.
- Speaker #1
As you are visiting some of these newly explored sites and areas of the ocean, what is it that you're finding? Tell us about maybe some of the recent breakthroughs that have become part of your work and that you're seeing now.
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Well, one of the most recent was a really fun project. So like I said, one of the things we do is we photograph animals. And two of us, me and Karen Osborne, we photograph a lot. We really love to do it. And we give the photos away to conservation organizations, to art exhibits and so on. And we discovered that there were a certain group of fish we could never photograph. They were just so black. It looked like when you took a picture of them, like it was a Photoshop mistake. You just wouldn't see anything. And so we decided to turn this artistic failure into a scientific investigation and then started to look at these what we called ultra black fish. We were able to measure how black they were, which is about 100 times blacker than any black object in your normal life. Like, you know, I see you're in a studio with a lot of black objects. These are about 100 times blacker than that. They literally reflect almost no light, which is their protection against the bioluminescent flashlights. So when an animal is zooming around trying to find them, almost nothing comes back. And so we were able to measure that. And then after that, we're able to figure out how they did it. And it's kind of like their whole body is a melanoma. They exude tons and tons of pigment and they package it in these special ways. They look sort of like tens of thousands of tiny little black Tic Tacs. They're just the right shape and just the right size so that when you pile them all together, they're able to suck in light and have it bounce around forever among them. and none of the light comes back out. That's been a recent discovery is looking at how these ultra black animals are protecting themselves against flashlights and how they do it.
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Fascinating. I could talk to you for a long time. Again, our guest is Dr. Sanka Johnson, who's written the wonderful new book, Into the Great Wide Ocean. Dr. Johnson will be at Smithsonian Associates coming up. Check out all of our notes today for more information. Dr. Johnson, thanks so much for your generous time. I know you're very busy. I had one final question in the way of follow up. You talked We talked about acidification of the ocean and the warming of the water. And we talked a little bit about weather. I wonder, are you optimistic about the ocean's future? Are you seeing that these beautiful inhabitants of the sea are under such tremendous threat that they're not going to survive? Is it something different? Are you positive and upbeat about this?
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I suppose I'm in conflict about this. I'm a naturally optimistic person. Ever since I was a small child, nature and the world have just interested and excited me to the point where I tend to see the world almost like with rose-colored glasses. But at the same time, I can't deny the reality of what is occurring. I can't deny the fact that the oceans are becoming warmer, they're becoming more acidic, that fishing leaves these giant holes in the ocean as a net moves through it. And some of these nets are truly vast. They just create a tunnel of empty. Most of which is stuff that nobody will ever eat. They're small animals that are not the kind we eat. I see all those things. I see the effects of mining. I see the effects of the oil spills and so on. I know it's all true. And it's a, I guess, conflict with my optimistic nature. And I don't know how it's going to resolve. I mean, my only hope is the hope of, I guess, many marine biologists is that we can increase awareness of the ocean and increase people's... understanding of this world and get them to feel for it. I mean, in the book, I write a small part about, I feel sometimes like we're the little animals on the dust speck and Horton hears a who, and we're just frantically trying to announce ourselves to the larger world before we get boiled. It's a story that always stuck with me as a small child. How do you reach a larger world and tell them, don't destroy us? And I guess I have hope that we can somehow get there. I think of challenges that humans have faced since my childhood. I grew up in Pittsburgh, being a major industrial city. We always worried that we would be one of the first targets in a nuclear war. And so most of us imagined as high schoolers that we would not make it out of high school. And we did. I mean, nobody predicted how things would go. We were told at that time that population would rise to a point that we would no longer be able to feed ourselves. And that has not occurred. And so I guess somewhere in my hopeful nature is that maybe somehow we'll find a way out of this, but I can't deny the evidence of everything that's occurring. And it's heartbreaking. I mean, what can I say?
- Speaker #1
Well said. Thank you for that. And we appreciate your time today and bringing awareness to us, to our Smithsonian Associates audience. We look forward to your upcoming presentation at Smithsonian Associates. Dr. Sankaya Johnson, Smithsonian Associates, been our guest, written the wonderful new book, Into the Great. Wide Ocean Life in the Least Known Habitat on Earth. Check out our notes today for more information about Dr. Johnson and all of his work. Congrats again, Dr. Johnson, for all of this effort. We certainly appreciate your time. We'd love to have you back as you're doing more work on this. I know our audience is going to be excited to hear this episode as well as any ongoing work that you're doing on this subject. But thank you so much for being so generous. And again, congrats.
- Speaker #2
Well, thank you. And thanks for having me on the show.
- Speaker #1
My thanks to Smithsonian Associate Dr. Sanka Johnson, who will be appearing at Smithsonian Associates coming up. Please check out our show notes and the Smithsonian Associates website for more details on Dr. Sanka Johnson's upcoming Smithsonian Associates presentation titled The Great Wide Ocean. My thanks always to the Smithsonian team for all they do to support the show. My ongoing thanks to executive producer Sam Hanegar and my thanks to you, our wonderful audience here. on radio and podcasts. Please be well, be safe, and let's talk about better. The Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates Interview Series on radio and podcast. Thanks, everybody, and we will see you next time.
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Thanks for joining us this week on the Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates Interview Series on radio and podcast. To find out more about all of today's stories or to view our extensive back catalog of previous shows, simply visit notold-better.com. Join us again next time as we deep dive into some of the most fascinating real-life stories from across the world, all focused on this wonderful experience of getting better, not just older. Let's talk about better. The Not Old Better Show. Hi,
- Speaker #1
one final thing. Please check out our website for this episode and all episodes at notold-better.com or subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts and be sure to check out your local radio stations to find out more about the Not Old Better Show on podcast and radio. radio. You can find us all over social media. Our Twitter feed is not old, better, and we're on Instagram at not old, better to the not old, better show is a production of NOBS studios. I'm Paul Vogelsang, and I hope you'll join me again next time to talk about better the not old, better show. Thanks everybody. We'll see you next week.
