Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How can a creature that can grow as tall as a four-story building be hidden from human eyes for so long? Oceanographer Edie Widder was the first person to capture video of the giant squid in its natural habitat, transporting the legendary Kraken from ancient mythology to the modern world. She invented a groundbreaking technique to lure in the squid with a deep sea “scream,” modeling the startling bioluminescent display of the Atolla jellyfish. Below, Widder joins me for a conversation on what we have to lose before the ocean is known.
Amelia Macapia (AM): One of your largest contributions to science is the study of bioluminescence. You have mentioned that working with a lab instrument, the low-light spectrometer, brought a new depth to your studies. Can you explain more about that journey with marine exploration?
Edie Widder (EW): I’ve always been kind of a gadget freak and became the lab expert on a new low-light spectrometer, at which point my professor came to me and said, we need to send you to measure all these light-making animals in the ocean that nobody’s ever been able to measure before. Suddenly, I was doing this thing I had dreamed about being as a kid, which was a sea-going marine biologist. I was going on these amazing expeditions where we were trawling nets behind ships and bringing the animals up. I was getting to see these astonishing creatures, remarkably alive, many of which the only pictures available were drawings. There were a few photographs of bedraggled, dead formalin-fixed specimens, but no sense of life of what was actually there. I was thoroughly enthralled, doing basic research on bioluminescence: Who makes light and why?
AM: You have piloted submersibles in environments almost no one else has ever been to. You had to qualify as a pilot and lift weights for a year to operate the suit for one of your research expeditions. What did you see? What was that like?
EW: So the WASP is a diving suit that was developed by the offshore oil industry for oil rig construction. It’s called WASP because it looks kind of like the insect. It is a yellow pod with thrusters on the outside of it and Michelin man arms that have claws on the end of them. On my first dive, I went down to 800 feet which seemed incredibly scary. I’d never been deeper than 90 feet scuba diving. I thought I would sit for 20 minutes and get fully dark-adapted, and wait patiently to see a flash of bioluminescence every now and then. Instead, it was like being in the center of Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night: Three dimensions of light just swirling all around me, flashes and glows, every shade of blue that you can imagine. Some of them were individual flashes and some of them were what looked like little puffs of blue smoke. When I activated the thrusters, this vortex of light came out with blue sparks like when you throw a log on a campfire. It was breathtakingly beautiful and awe-inspiring.
AM: Previously, scientists did not even suspect life was possible on the deep seafloor. It was only in 1977 on the Galápagos Rift Expedition that whole ecosystems were discovered thriving around deep-sea hydrothermal vents. How have the boundaries of what scientists consider life continued to shift since then? How has it shifted our origin stories?
EW: That was a seismic shift because up until that point, all the textbooks claimed that all life on Earth derived energy from sunlight. That there could be another source, and one that produced such amazing diversity and abundance, was a revelation that actually altered how we do space explorations. So when we think about looking for life on other planets that have oceans, we now recognize that there might be chemosynthetic communities like those around vent sites.
AM: Which brings me to another question: How limited is our understanding of the deep sea?
EW: The number often given for how much of the ocean we’ve explored is 5%. But that was based on mapping with sonar technology. With that, you are just getting the topography at the bottom of the ocean, but it’s not exploring life in the ocean. It’s estimated that we’ve actually visited about 0.05% of the bottom of the ocean, and that’s still ignoring all of the unbelievably vast volume above the bottom of the ocean. We’ve explored just the tiniest fraction of it. And yet it’s the machinery for life on the planet, and we’re disrupting it in truly phenomenal ways, without any great understanding of what that could mean for our future on the planet.
AM: Your contributions to deep-sea exploration also involve breakthroughs in technology. You developed the Eye-in-the-Sea camera system to lure in and record the giant squid. My understanding is that you modeled the system on the bioluminescence of the stoplight fish and the Atolla jellyfish. How did you know what displays to use to lure in the giant squid?
EW: Deep sea creatures have ultra-sensitive eyes, but no protection for those eyes. I spent so much time in submersibles just sitting there thinking: How am I going to be able to ever study these animals if I’m scaring them away? And how can I see animals and bring them in towards a camera system that’s unobtrusive? Dead bait would only attract the scavengers, so I became interested in bioluminescent displays because some of them are so elaborate and especially intriguing. Some of those elaborate displays are produced by jellyfish that don’t have eyes — their bioluminescence is directed at other animals — and I wanted to see how other animals responded to them.
AM: What does it feel like to discover something no one else has seen before?
EW: There is an unbelievable excitement of discovery. I run into students who think we have already explored our planet. There are so many thrills like the one I experienced yet to be made. The giant squid we knew existed because their dead carcasses had been seen. But what about the stuff that doesn’t float? The only way we know about life in the ocean is by dragging nets behind ships, which scientists say only captures the slow, the stupid and the greedy. Or we go in submersibles and remote-operated vehicles which are loud and disruptive and have a lot of light shining out into a world that is normally dark. The most exciting moment was in 2004 when I got the camera system operational for the first time with the electronic jellyfish. The very first time we turned on the “e-jelly” camera we recorded a squid over 6 feet long, completely new to science. The strangest thing was its tentacles. The tentacles on a squid are usually long and elastic but this had short tentacles that were muscular. This was a squid nobody had ever seen before, and I couldn’t have asked for a better proof of concept for the fact that, you know, not only have we not explored much of the ocean, but we’ve been doing it wrong. It’s pretty common still to go down and find an organism that has not been identified yet. Certainly, it’s pretty common to see something you've never seen before — a behavior, if not an animal.
AM: We have entered a new era characterized by deep-sea mining, and the Pacific Ocean has been called the new Wild West. Can you talk more about why this frontier mentality might be extremely harmful if not permanently detrimental?
EW: We are exploiting the ocean before we have explored it. We drag nets behind ships and bring the animals up to us with no understanding of what their communities are like underwater. Bottom trawling and extraction techniques like deep-sea mining do all of this damage. It’s out of sight and out of mind, and it’s completely unsustainable. With bottom trawling for bottom-living fish and shrimp to feed people, the process involves dragging nets that have big rollers. The design of the rollers is to make the shrimp and the fish jump up into the net, but what they do is they just level the ground in front of them. The trawling wipes out forests of deep-sea corals that took thousands of years to grow and won’t sustain life for another few hundred years. With deep-sea mining, on the other hand, you’re dumping millions of tons of toxic waste around the mining site and then creating plumes that travel huge distances, creating light pollution and sound pollution. That’s destroying ocean communities with little understanding of what the long-term implications may be. The concept of it being like the Wild West — that’s the same kind of concept that did a lot of destruction of natural and human habitats, especially [Native Americans]. Everything bulldozed in the name of progress. And we’re doing now the same thing to the ocean, which is most of the living space on the planet and has sustained us for a long time without us even being aware of how it does it.
AM: Plastics are another issue, and they previously weren’t considered a major pollutant, but the magnitude of the problem has escalated rapidly. Plastic debris is ubiquitous and very mobile, and scientists have begun to find it in deep-sea samples. These toxins can collect in animal tissues and be transferred up the food chain, but little is known about the population-level effects. How vulnerable and responsive is the ocean to our pollution?
EW: There is so much we don’t know about ecotoxicity in the environment. Microplastics are absolutely everywhere, as are the forever chemicals, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. With PFAS we are talking about a fraction of a part per trillion as being damaging to life. In Europe, manufacturers are not allowed to release anything into the environment until it’s proven innocent. In the United States, it’s innocent until proven guilty, leaving not-for-profits like mine, the Ocean Research & Conservation Association, responsible to try and figure out how to get that data when we aren’t funded to do so. One of the things that struck me is when you look at the heat maps of the distribution of PFAS pollution in the environment is that they are just as bad in Europe as in the United States. It was being released at such low concentrations that it was below detectability. You and I both have PFAS in our blood now. It’s stressing our bodies in ways we don’t fully understand yet, but it increases the chances of cancer and a lot of other disorders. When you’re looking for a pollutant, instead of looking for specific pollutants, we need to have a canary in the coal mine. This is what I have worked on with developing water quality monitors. I settled on bioluminescent bacteria. The light output of bacteria is different from other types of organisms in that they glow instead of flash. The reason they glow is their light output is linked to their respiratory chain or their breathing. Any toxin that interferes with respiration decreases their light output. What we have been doing is taking sediment samples off the bottom of the lagoon and mixing in bioluminescent bacteria in specific concentrations. We are finding out what concentrations it takes to dim the light. One of my goals with ORCA is to develop a tool chest of assays and techniques that will allow communities to test for themselves and train citizen scientists in what they need to know in order to be able to protect themselves because we can’t trust government or industry to do that for us, we have to take the responsibility.
AM: What other pollutants have you been finding in these assays?
EW: Some of the pollutants are human-made, but some are made by the organisms themselves. We are seeing more and more of these toxic algae blooms. Microcystis algae blooms turn the water neon green and produce microcystin, which is linked to liver disease. Back in 2015, Ohio State University did a study where they took two national data sets: algae blooms nationwide and non-alcohol-related liver disease. They overlaid the two data sets, and any place they found a correlation they put a red spot. There’s one bright red spot around the Indian River Lagoon and Lake Okeechobee, where I live here in Florida. What we have been doing is trying to track where that’s coming from. Around this area we have a lot of subsistence fishermen. People get protein on their table from fish in the Indian River Lagoon or from Lake Okeechobee. We have been testing the fish they are eating and finding very high levels of microcystin. It bioaccumulates, and so that toxin is also in the fish. We have also been finding high levels of mercury, which comes from global air pollution.
AM: How do you emphasize the cross boundary nature of pollution and mining issues, and how little our understanding of the long term effects are?
EW: One of the first points I make is that people don’t realize, for example, how critical [currents] like the Gulf Stream are to the stability of climate, and that we’re actually impacting that. But Martin Luther King Jr. did not mobilize the civil rights movement by preaching, “I have a nightmare.” Environmentalists are doing that, and then wondering why people are shutting down. We walk this tightrope of needing to be able to convey the seriousness of what’s going on, but not to the point where people shut down because they feel so hopeless. A lot of young people are riddled with eco-anxiety and are tuning out. We have to give a sense of agency and make people understand what a huge difference they can make. We have already passed the window of opportunity to prevent catastrophic impacts, but it could be so much worse, or it could be so much better. We are right on a knife’s edge. We have to take on that challenge and do it as quickly as possible.
AM: What alternatives do you see to the alarmist messaging and crisis talk? How do you think we should be framing these issues?
EW: We’re creating a new world order. It’s not a good thing, and it’s going to be very challenging. The sooner we can turn it around the better. But when you’re dealing with a new world, you need explorers. And so I think we need to tap into our instincts as explorers to try to learn as much as we can and as fast as we can about life’s machinery on our planet. We need to do everything we can to protect it, which means we need more people out there looking at it and sharing it with the world. Scientists have to learn to become better communicators. There is a wonderful Richard Powers book, “The Overstory.” He says that the best accumulation of facts in the world doesn’t change anybody’s mind — what does is a good story. By nature we are storytellers, and so we need stories that capture people’s imaginations.
AM: How do you think we should understand our own primordial relations to these deep sea creatures?
EW: It all stems from our basic curiosity about the world. So often when you read these books about getting back to nature, they want you to go for a walk in the woods. But you can’t do that with the deep sea, which makes up most of the living space on the planet. I think we have to foster other ways of appreciating the miracle that is life. The meaning of life is for life to understand itself.
As the public continued to gravitate toward space exploration, Widder navigated the alien and infinitely mysterious worlds of the deep ocean. She takes us inside submersible dives through unknown, uncharted environments and depths of eternal darkness where organisms have to generate their own luminosity. When she started her lifetime’s work of research on bioluminescence, she couldn’t understand why more scientists weren’t studying the surges of sparkling lights in the deep sea. She realized the challenge immediately: How can you study light that you cannot see? First, she needed to design instruments to bring this hidden light to observation. In a realm so boundless and difficult to access, this is only one step in discovering the ocean’s mysteries. Meanwhile, threats like deep sea mining and endangering ocean life itself are compounded by our lack of knowledge. If we are to prevent irreversible damage to the machinery of our planet, we must continue to explore its depths.
