Okay. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the seachange session at the 2017 texas book festival, the 22nd annual texas book festival. Its great to have you all here. I am dr. Spencer wells. Im a a geneticist and anthropologist, and sometimes author. For many years i was the explorer in residence for the National Geographic society, study how are species of pipe with the world and since 2015 i have lived here in austin. Im the founder and ceo of the consumer genomics firm in town, and coowner of a nightclub which is [applause] i would like to introduce our authors. We have juli berwald was an austinbased side letter, and editors contribute to publications such as the new york times, naked, National Geographic and slate. She is a phd in Ocean Science and university of Southern California and she lives here in austin shes the author of spineless which we will be talking about today. [applause] then we have Peter Wadhams who is the purpose of ocean physics and head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Cambridge University in the uk. Hes held visiting professorships at the National Institutes of polar research, the university of washington, currently at the Scripps Institution of oceanography and he is the author of a farewell to ice which we will be discussing as well. [applause] next, a couple quick reminder that after the session to office will be signing books in the book cant over here. The books are for sale courtesy of bookpeople in austin institution. Remember when you buy a book at the festival you support the author, the festival and local independent book stores. Thats good. Texas book festival is nonprofit. Nonprofit. Its mission is to thwart low income students in texas with all the visits and book donations by its reading rock Stars Program and also to fund grants for libraries throughout the state of texas. Your book purchase really does make a difference. Okay, i think were going to kick it off there. Well, lets get into this. Juli, spineless is about jellyfish. It is. Which is an interesting topic. Yesterday in fact, was world jellyfish day. I was just as surprised to find out as probably everyone. Jellyfish are fascinating. Everybody has experienced a jellyfish sting out in the wild so to speak, swimming in the ocean and thats how most of us know about jellyfish. Where i was turned onto a fascinating jolliffe ishtar are was when i visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium back in the 90s when at that jellyfish exhibit with oblique lighting. You can see what the creatures were like and what they were doing. What was your journey to writing a book about jellyfish . I didnt start with the beauty of the jellyfish, which is as it went around to talk to scientists about why this study jellyfish, most of them said it was the beautiful demand. For me i was actually beauty that hold them in. I was a textbook writer in austin and i started to do some mainstream right at is working on a story for National Geographic about ocean acidification, and they had that classic graphic that National Geographic has this as winners and losers in the future acidified c. On the winners side were things like algae, microalgae, tell and jellyfish. And i thought do we really know that . I can be done experienced in that jellyfish can do well in the future in acidified oceans . I dove into the scientific literature and i found that we had not really done any experiments to know that. But it also found this like really interesting scientific argument going on, which was whats happening to jellyfish in todays oceans. And a lot of the things were doing to the seas are making life better for jellyfish. So things like warming, acidification maybe but Coastal Development probably plays a role with the runoff of fertilizers which causes dead zones, overfishing, illegal fishing. All of these things, jellyfish seem to tolerate them very well so there was a big discussion in the scientific literature like our jellyfish taking over ecosystems . There was another, pushback say we just dont know. It turned out resorted systematically not study jellyfish for most of the 20th century because once we started studying the ocean by pulling big nets through it using winches and motors, our view of the ocean became biased about things that are durable, things are hard enough to handle the treatment before we look at them. It was just to meet this incredible scientific question that really led me into the world of jellyfish. Very cool. Jellyfish a really interesting. They are animals and they have relatively complex behaviors, including sleeping. Yes. This is a new city that came out a couple of weeks ago. Yet they have no centralized nervous system. They dont have a brain so how does that work . Tell us about the life history of jellyfish and some of the biology which is a fascinating. And i might just take this moment to say theres a secret in my book that some people are not really picking up on so much but the book is based on like what i structured the book is based on the lifecycle of the jellyfish. The jellyfish starts off as a little, theres medusa and there are males and females and their eggs and sperm the form of the larva, and on the larva is to become like a tick tack with her on it. The first section of the book is kind of the ideas of the book. That thing settles and it becomes a polyp, and a polyp as i can see anemone with tentacles it lives for many, it likes to live upside down. It can live for many, many years like that. And the second section of the book i supplanted here in texas learning about jellyfish science, and then what happens is at some point given some environmental cues that polyp was schism itself into a stack of plates, and this is what i sort of realized i had to get out of texas and find out more about jellyfish around the world. Each one of those hops off and becomes what initially known as baby jellyfish, and then later become medusa which are the mature jellyfish and then the whole thing starts over again. So have this really complex lifecycle, two parts, the medusa is definitely not the only part of the jellyfish denotes what most people think of as a jellyfish. I i probably going on too long, but the question of how bout you like initial thing get around in the ocean, if you look carefully at the medusa, like in an aquarium youll see right around the edge of the bell like the umbrella part this little intensification of once in a while and those are its sensory organs begin each one of those the art couple eyes usually, a thing called a touch plate which is like something that they cah up into the water and spell chemicals. Theres a Balance Center like in our ear. There is a thing called a pacemaker which how fast it pulses. Each one of these different from around the edge of the bell, the nerves run through these and they integrate all the information from all the Different Directions at the jellyfish is experiencing as it moves through the water. Although they are not, they dont have a brain at the top, then this very interesting integrated, interconnected intelligence or ability to get around in the world that has given them enough capability and evolutionary success that they are the oldest animal still swimming in our seas. So theyre quite adept at what they do. Very cool. I love natural history. Peter, switch to you now. Your book is about ice among other things but ice is where youll start off with the book. You talk about going to the arctic in 1970 on the Research Ship hudson. How did that happen and why did you become interested in ice in the first place in the arctic in particular . I i was always interested in the ocean, and the first oceanographic point either opportunity to take part in was when i was young and it was a canadian ship going around north and south america. The hudson, the first and only time the americas have been circumnavigated and it took a year to do it. That meant we started off going down the at arctic and then on the way back we came through the Northwest Passage. So i had plenty of time to study ice. I got very interested in that. As opposed to some of the warm waters in between. And made that my field of research. In those days very few people were working on ice, so there were a lot of unsolved problems and it was a very interesting field. Now ice has become much more important mainly because it is disappearing. A large fraction of the World Environmental scientists are not interested in ice. Ice and the shrinking ice sheets in greenland and the arctic and at arctic that we hear about a lot in the news, but this whole habit of observing ice patterns goes back quite a ways to whalers of all people. Someone named william imaging in the book in 18th and 19th century. Tell us about that and why were whalers so important . Well, the at arctic is where the white whales out because they could catch the fast swing whales. It was important to the arctic. Affect wailing in the arctic produced the oil that was used to light tents in new england. Think about [inaudible] and that was all whales caught in greenland. The waiters in doing that made very valuable observations about the ice, how much there was for instance, a big protrusion of ice on the east coast of greenland that waiters for the first ones to notice and a recently disappeared which had the epic climactic effect. They were very fallible in telling us where the ice limits were in the 19th century. This helped to show us a much ice has retreated over the last few years relative to those days. Excellent. Juli, three words for you. Jelly and passive margin. Explain. I can pass that test. One of the Coolest Stories i found when i was kind of following, as i was writing the book i would start to plan our Family Vacations so that i could go and talk to jellyfish and scientists. We were on tape card cape cod and us are talking to these two jellyfish site is who work on the biomechanics of jellyfish, which is how they move. They had been just given a grant by the navy to try to build a robotic jelly. The navy was thinking about the thickness would be like surveillance. They use very Little Energy so they can kind of hang out in base and surveillance and spike and i dont know, but let me just i dont think there are any jelly ops out there. Anyway, in the course of making the robotic jellyfish, they created the silicone cell and put samosas in it, some sales. They turn it on and it squeezes and it moves forward. And then they turn it off and it opens and it goes back to what started. They were like what . They turn it on again and it goes forward, they open it and it goes back. Its like a yoyo. They were like we got something wrong and this one graduates it was like well, theyre supposed to be amplified round edge of the edge of the bell. I didnt have time to glue it on, and we should glue that on. They said okay. They pull it out of the tank and dried off in the glue this youve you seen the little edge of the jellyfish, and they glued on the people back in the tank and they turn on the power and it goes its just like, swims at a site just like the jellyfish. The discovery is, it has no muscles and get it moves as a consequence of the bell moving. Is everything to pushing something forward through the water. It creates these turbulent eddies at the jellyfish can push against to move forward. That wasnt even the whole story. They continued to work on the project and am able to create almost like a map of the pressure field around a jellyfish. What they discovered is, well liked, when we walked we push back on the ground behind us. We create like a highpressure zone behind us and we push about to go forward. We are terrestrial creatures. We dont have fixed things around us. But in the water much more viscous. So that many of the jellyfish sailed is only push back against the water, it actually creates a section in front of the jellyfish bell, and lowpressure system like when we sucked in air. That lowpressure is a great, contributes more to the movement of the jellyfish than highpressure in the back. Then they started looking around the world, or the ocean, and lots of things thats when, and you notice everything bends. Its all flips and flops in the ocean. The whole reason is because it creates this lowpressure in front of the animal that sucks it through the water. As weve been building ships and submarines and all the things to explore the oceans, weve always just use are terrestrial. If you like lets push back against the water. But, in fact, should probably be bending, creating bending vehicles to the underwater because they are much, much more efficient. The jellyfish by the most efficient swimmer that they look at, compared to Something Like a salmon what you think of as a very powerful swimmer. The jellyfish used onefifth as much energy to move the same distance as a salmon does. Really cool. Its a very cool story. Biomimicry at its best. We should be paying attention to make sugar tell us about dayglo jellies. This is another great story from the jellyfish that is maybe not so well known and that is that many jellyfish bioluminescence and jellyfish lived all over. They dont just live in the service or and coastlines but in the threat the ocean and in the deep waters bioluminescence is one of the major problem with the major way of communication. The animals make little screens holler coming me, check me out and let go away. Bioluminescence, or im getting eaten come help me, they make these bioluminescence calls that have the server meanings. Jellyfish are very good at this. In 70s there trying to understand what makes bioluminescence happens and this one scientist was working on that question in jellyfish in puget sound, and yeah, interestingly he actually, he was about a few miles away from nagasaki when it was, bombed with the atomic bomb so he hera very interesting life story. Anyway, he was able to purify the chemicals which are probably out of his jellyfish from puget sound, then what he notice was that purified the glow was blue, but the jellyfish in the ocean below green. So what was going on, and he went on to discover that there was a small protein called green fluorescent protein, which takes the blue light and ships it to the green wavelength. Its a very selfcontained unit. It doesnt need an enzyme to work or anything. It just needs light. And its a very sturdy. Some biochemists and geneticists picked up on this and they would like we can take the dna for that green fluorescent protein and asserted in front of the genes that were interesting study in the animal and it will light up. Its almost like adding a sentence to an email before you forward it. Every time that gene is expressed in the green horse approaching will be as well. Youre probably seen pictures that are going and thats all started with the green fluorescent protein from the jellyfish. Then servant of the people, i guy named Martin Kelsey if they could with the green fluorescent protein and outcomes in every color of the rainbow really. These scientists won the nobel prize for their work on dayglo jellies. Survey shows the importance of funding for basic research which is being debated these days. Speaking of basic science, peter, were going to get into a discussion about presentday Climate Change, human induced Climate Change. Give us some context, tell us about the length of which cycles in his longer. Diplomatic shift happen naturally over hundreds of thousands or millions of years. To Say Something about whats happening to see ice now in the last few decades, because went ice first started working the arctic, the ice that we could see was very much heavy ice mostly. You can see the picture, multiply multiyour ice which is really thick like mounds of ice. Occupying the whole of the arctic ocean between north american and the asia. And so the feeling, the psychological feeling you felt was that the world from the Northern Hemisphere was joined together at the top because the ice extends across the arctic to join canada to russia, and we all one. In recent years the ice has been retreating faster in the summer but also in the winter as well. So that instead of i continues cover across the arctic, you have open seas in summer months which is change everything. They have changed the nature of the ocean itself and has produced lots of feedback effect the first part of a book is actually concerned with this because when you see the sea ice retreating and thinner ice over the year the temptation is to say this is a curiosity, obviously Global Warming that has caused this, but its just a curiosity like the disappearance of isom kilimanjaro. What were finding is the loss of ice and arctic is having much bigger efax elsewhere in the climate systems. So we cant just think of Arctic Sea Ice retreat by itself. Its affecting the whole climate system to or a greater extent n just the loss of ice. The open water in the summer is now giving an accelerated warming of the world, and its causing warmer air to spread over the Greenland Ice sheet and thats making greenland melt faster which is giving us an increase in the rate of Sea Level Rise globally. So thats no typical here in the gulf of mexico, or everywhere. In fact, in the world. Sea level is rising at an accelerated and thats the extra contributions mainly from the melting of the Greenland Ice sheet. Thats due to the sea ice retreating in the arctic. Another fact is that we are getting the possibility of higher amounts of methane being released from arctic oceans surface because theres a lot of methane held in sediments under the continental shelves of the arctic. And actually the sediments fall out. They are still frozen after the last ice age. That allows the methane below to get out and we now seem big plans of methane commit into the atmosphere. And again causing an acceleration of Global Warming. I guess the final, not final, but two more affects which affect people here, the