With coral reefs and make her way down into darker more mysterious depths. I know what i am excited about is to be joined by two incredible marine scientists and authors for joining us today rip author of life on the rocks, building a future for coral reefs doctor juli berwald. [applause] as well as an intrepid Explorer Research scientist author of below the edge of darkness a memoir of exploring light and life in the deepsea doctor edithin widder. [applause] we like to thank the National Endowment of the arts for sponsoringan the stage. Our plan for our time today is to explore both of these books which explore e Ocean Science as well as personal stories. Julie and edie take us on personal journeys with its navigating medical mysteries or struggling some time despairing before pushing forward. My own career path starred in Ocean Conservation so it is a personal joy to explore these things. And i am so excited to get into this together. Our plan is ill ask each of them to make a provocative statement or ask a question to get all of you thinking because in the final 15 minutes of the session today we will take 1 questions from you. So get those brains thinking. Im going to hand the floor to juli and edie intern to talk about their books and then we will talk for 15 minutes or so before we dive in. At the end of the time today you will be able to get books signed by our two authors. Alright provocative provocative statements or questions, juli lets start with you. So, the story of the coral where youth is one of struggle per think we all knowne that. And so my question is, currently predictions are by 205099 of the coral reefs will be lost on our planet. And if that is the case, what can we as terrestrial people, terrestrial being, people of living appear on land can do to make whats beneath the waves less invisible to us . So, in 20,112,012 we got the first of the video ofde a giant squid in the deepsea. The first time we were able to record this creature in its own environment. And i maintain the reason it took so long to do that is that we were doing it wrong. We were scaring them away. If it took that long to record an animal over four stories tall, how many other creatures are there in the deepsea that we do not even know about customer giant squid happened to float when they die. So we had dead specimens we knew theyn existed. What about the stuff that doesnt float . Ask our rights so on that note lets talk a little bit about your books and what people need toto understand is the approach these questions, juli. I. Okay. Im going to forward the slide. So this is a coral reef. The coral reef take up less than 1 of the oceans area. They are quite small in terms of the basic but they have a disproportional effect on marine life. Estimated one quarter of all marine species depend on coral reefs at some point in their life. Coral reefs are these incredibly vibrant, abundant places rich, rich, rich and marine life. But coral have a problem or bumping up against Climate Change. The reason why coral are for small animals. Like whittlesey and enemies that live in colonies. Most of them about the size of a pencil eraser. Their super power that is that in their tissues you can see a number one the littles green dt our. Algae. Those algae photosynthesize and feed 90 the sugar they make to the coral. That is so much energy the coral can actually make stone they make the limestone skeleton that they live inside a parade that creates the architecture of a reef. But when temperatures rise we dont know exactly who starts a bit in the coral kicked out that algae or the algae abandons the coral and takes witht it its color and also it sugar. So suddenly look coral is on starvation rations at bleach is called bleach at that point. If the temperature falls it can be reestablished. But if it doesnt the coralco d. And a bleach reese looks like skeleton bones its in a graveyard and thats ultimately what it is. This is a true reality for coral reefs around the world. Its estimated already half of the reefs have a bleach. Like a said the productions are 2050 are really bad. But, the book is not completely an obituary for their people around the world doing things that are bolstering the health of the coral reef. So as they come into this period of stress as we warm our oceans and our planet, there are things we can do. So i wanted to tell some of those stories for this is a reef in indonesia. You can see the rubble beneath those bars. That is a dead reef. Those structures are called reef stars there made out of rebar and theyre kind of network together into a galaxy of reef stars. And what happens is the reef has resiliency and after about 18 months the coral has grown. And after three years you o hava reef that is completely restored. There t is a lot of work being done to protect the coral reef and all of the life they support. But it is also a precarious time for them. Xo it was coral reef that got me hooked on marine biology. I was smitten, your words. [laughter] on it so my first coral reef i was 11 years old i got to explore this reef and decided i wanted to be a marine biologist. To become a coral reef biologist i became a deepsea biologist. And my first deepsea expedition was a 1982 at ait little ship we went out and had nets behind the ship. This is the primary where we know about life in the deep ocean. We drag nets behind ships. We were able to keep the animals alive could because we kept them in a container when theyre cold. We dump them out everything glowed. It was incredible for their pulsating plankton and lashes from mangled jellyfish is, i plunged my arm into the coral bucket with icy icy cold water i pulled out a red shrimp the size of a hamster. And had nozzles on either side of his mouth they were spewing out sapphire blue light that pulled in the palm of my hand, dripped between my fingers dropped back into the trial bucket and it went on glowing. These animals had photo fours. They have all kinds of contraptions for being able to makeor light to find a food, to attract mates to defend against predators. I want to know what that world look like. I got the opportunity in 1984 and i got to meet the group of scientists who are testing a new tool for exploring what was then and still is the largest least explored habitat and our planet, theou mid water. It was a diving suit called wasp its not an acronym somebody thought it looked like the insect. It is kind of a yellow body, michelin man armed withy, pinchs on the end of it was developed for the offshore oil industry for diving on oil rigsev down to 2000 feet. I trained in the tank and my first open ocean die was in the Santa Barbara channel for the first dive they put us in one after the other, drop us to 800 feet to make sure we were not going to have a claustrophobic meltdown. I didnt because of so intrigued by what i was seeing. I save that for the next dive. But it went down 800 feet and i turned on the lights. I was just blown away by what i saw for now the time there are no cameras that could record this. But this is what it looks like. Looks like a fireworks display. In fact later one of the entry by a local newspaper they asked me what is like down there and i said its like the fourth of july. Which of course are used as a headline and took a tremendous ribbing for my colleague for such a nonscientific a statemen. I have lost track of the number times over the years ive taken people down for the first dive and had them describe it as being like a fourth of july. It was incredible. Jellyfish that just blew my mind. I quoted these for juli. You sit on the left in the light went on the right by its own bioluminescence. It was longer than this room. I brushed up against it with the wasp and it lit up, propagated down and everything this suit lit up. I could read all the dials engages inside the suit without a flashlight just by the bioluminescence i was seeing. This is a colony sort of like a coral. Its a really bizarre creature. But what an astonishing amount of lights. Thats on these jellyfish produce different displays depending on how they were stimulated. On so the cone gel youre seeing in the light on the left. You see that rainbow color that is because its beingow illuminated. Thats gonna bioluminescence for the cold living like this creature makes can make it intrinsically as you can see in the middle image intrinsically and releases it as a cloud of articles is a squid could release in a cloud tremendous are these animals can release their bioluminescent chemicals into the face of it frederick temporarily blinded them allowing them to make an escape. It was a jellyfish that intrigued me the most. They do not have eyes. So who are these displays been directed at . Where were therepl different displays in the same jellyfish . And so i developed an electronic jellyfish that imitated certain types of displays. And it turned out those enormously attractive to squid which is what led to the giant squid hunt. I like to turn a question to the audience would raise your hand if youve ever been in the ocean . Keep then raised, about a storable question of how about in the room . We have a lot of people been in oceans. In these books we are travelingn from location w near here in the florida keys for example, to the opposite side of the planet. We cover a swath of time from early in your career ill be up to the beginning of the pandemic. That is quite a sweep. I note writing books that combines science and memoir is ancr incredible intellectual and emotional challenge this is a book festival us with the process of writing a book. Curious about tapping into your memories and what motivated you write these books at this point . I asked you to go first . Ill go first. [laughter] mya life to write a memoir pars contacted by a literary agent who saw an article about my research in the new york times. He asked me if id ever thought of writing a memoir i said no, go away. [laughter] and then i got the first video of the giant squid is in the electronic jellyfish, that also got written up in a lot of places. And he contacted me again. This time he had a whole speech prepared how i had seen things that nobodyee had ever seen. I should be willing to share them with the world. I said i dont know how, i am a scientist we do not write in the first person. I counted and from that time there were 40 emails from him. Theyhe were pushy, he said if yu read this memoir have you thought about this . Finally i just a site of pale give the shop. One christmas i just took some time and started trying to write in first person. I had kept firstperson memoirs i mean diaries especially of my expeditions of what i saw on each dive for example. Actually i ended up having fun writing the book. It was so free and compared to writing science papers, i had a blast. I was very much benefited by the pandemic. I run a non for profit takes my time. With the pandemic i had time for the rewrite of the book. Anyway it was unexpected in every possible way. Im glad your agent was that persistent. You can feel the fun thats being had you will enjoy it too especially in the footnotes your sense of humor comes across there. And juli what about you . I was little more intentional in my decision to write in the first person. Well, i was a scientist than i felt the scientists path to start writingen textbooks. And then i got a little bit of big gig writing some short articles for National Geographic that was really cool. There is aea photographer who liked what i was writing asked me too read the text for one of his books. I was like i am a huge reader like crazy i read everything. I think the idea i could actually be an author was something i had not dared to imagine before this photographer asked me too write the text for his photography book. Actually the first chapter was about coral. And i wrote my heart out. And then i did not hear back from him and i did not hear back from him. I called the editor of the book and said whats happened . He said sorry hes not going to go with you. And it was in that moment i was like oh, i really want to be an author. But i understood i cannot do it for someone else. I needed to do it for myself. I need to find my own voice but i started a ton of popular science. I finish reading those books i put them on my night stands and said i could never write a book like that. And then one day put that book on my nightstand and i was like i could never write a book like that because i can only write a book in my own voice. That is when i realized that i could only write a science book if i combined memoir with the science. That was just the way its going to come out for me. And that is kind of the way ive been writing ever since. And in terms of memories it is interesting because i have some very vibrant memories i did not keep journals of all of my dives. I just have to rely on my memories. Now that i am intentional about going out, traveling and telling the stories about what im doing when i am collecting i keep journals like crazy. And i do journal after every dive after every day, after every interview thats really, really helpful. We have already touched briefly on the fact that the weight we write in science republication is very formula its technical you remove your personality and your sense of humor from that. But you did in these books is quite different. Another one of the hard things is science is perpetually iterating a building on that body of knowledge. When you write a book like this you have to stopyo reading, stop researching and published atar some point. So juli, im curious for you is there anything new . Pu anything you learn since the publication of the book are on the status of the coral reefs or the status of the ocean to update us . Was really amazing is coral weser still been discovered. To me that blows my mind. Because coral has to live shallow to provide the algae that live inside their tissue with enough light for them to photosynthesize. The ocean is too dark for that to happen. So coral has to live in clear enough waters near the surface they can have the photosynthesis to get some other energy. And yet, since the book was published i have learned of three coral reefs that we did not know it before. Theres a deepwater one found near tahiti. Ta there was one found at the mouth of the amazon river which has long been considered to said amenity coral to be there. Then there is one in honduras the mouse were all bees and banana plantations were built. The fertilizers been running in the water there for aru century. So people thought there was too muchch fertilizer and sentiment for coral to survive. These ared really healthy reef. The question is what does the reefs of a the future look likef these forebears of the future reefs . These are questions we do not know the answers to right now. Of a followup question for you two. You showed us what bleaching looks like. Youhi mentioned briefly dire the circumstances are. Feels like in your bug or during a balancing act between confronting the brutal reality the damage they have already undergone, while maintaining this unwavering hope in the future. Specifically looking for data, looking for evidence, looking for case studies that give us a foundation for having that hope rather than disclosing our eyes to it. Can you talk about your own feelings about the future of coral reefs as you wrote this book . The book sort of starts with this meeting i went to in florida. As in 2018 in december at the end of 2018. And i went to this meeting expecting a bunch of depressed toscientists being there and people would be reporting on the mass of bleachings the world that are happening. But i discovered were all of these people who were doing the kind of restoration i showed you in the slide. And also looking at the incredible genetic flexibility of coral. Coral are great at hybridizing. The ideale species for coral isa very fluid sort of thing. Theres just a paper published last week coral seem to be able to integrate mutations from the cells in their bodies. Not in their reproductive life or they can take mutations from their body and put them in their genetic line and pass them onto their offspring. Thats crazy and should not happen in animals. There are people doing making sperm bank so coral. Making embryo banks of coral. Freezing them for parks freezing embryos. During all kinds of amazing projects to boost coral reproduction. To boost coralal survival. And it is definitely not game over. If things are happening, oceans are warming force their warmingt an alarming rate, 93 of the heat that Carbon Dioxide in atmosphere hold have gone into the ocean. I only have one 2 degrees of a buffer before they start bleaching. They seem to be trying to use this incredible genetic flexibility they have heard their people around the world that. Bolster i did try to walk this line and i am glad it came off that way. The story is not over on this. It is really an active story for. So in reading these books there is an incredible sort of broadening part of the routing up mind to think about what is happening on the global scale. Talk about heroic efforts to create for genetic material. I think one of the things i want to ask you, edie, its hard for us to imagine the true expanse for some ecosystems we are talking about. You mentioned briefly in passing that mid waters is one of the largest ecosystems on the planet. Can you help us really understand what that means . The most incredible thing to me is how little of the ocean we have actually explored. The number you hear sometimes is only four 5 . That number is not right. That was based on mapping from a Remote Sensing device at the surface of the ocean. Not actually visiting the place. We are up to closer to 30 now and that. If you are talk about actually visiting just the bottom of the ocean. Im not talk but the huge volume above it, we have only visited about. 05 . Or usual protocol with humans is to explore a place and then exploit it. But in the ocean we have reversed that we are exploiting it before we have reversed it. Dragging nets that can hold jumbo jets through the oceans to just decimate the fish populations and dragging nets across the bottom that turn unbelievable gardens of eden into landscape that will not hold life for hundreds of years. As juli says, out of sight out of mind. We are introducing our toxins and pollutants into the environment as we are taking out every last fish and form of marine life there is. And as i said, we do not know how the system works for berlitz on ocean planet when we look for other planets we look for oceans. And yet we do not know how our ocean world works. The order must go off does anyone know . It was supposed to go off today. Its a moonshot. It didnt. Okay, 40 billion weve spent so far and they still havent gotil it off the ground. It is going to be 90 billion and were not spending anything like that on our own planet. It does not make any sense. And. [applause] you are one of the relatively small number of people who have done some of the exploring of our ocean. Can you talk about what is it see long does it take every time i dive in the submersible of the opportunity to see something, possibly as species never seen before. Certainly a behavior. Something nobody has ever seen before. That excitement of discovery is so incredibl