Glow-in-the-dark sharks and other stunning sea creatures | David Gruber

494,845 views ・ 2016-02-16

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

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I'm a marine biologist and an explorer-photographer
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with National Geographic,
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but I want to share a secret.
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This image is totally incorrect,
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totally incorrect.
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I see a couple of people crying in the back
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that I've blown their idea of mermaids.
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All right, the mermaid is indeed real,
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but anyone who's gone on a dive
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will know that the ocean looks more like this.
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It's because the ocean is this massive filter,
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and as soon as you start going underwater,
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you're going to lose your colors,
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and it's going to get dark and blue very quickly.
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But we're humans -- we're terrestrial mammals.
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And we've got trichromatic vision,
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so we see in red, green and blue,
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and we're just complete color addicts.
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We love eye-popping color,
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and we try to bring this eye-popping color
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underwater with us.
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So there's been a long and sordid history of bringing color underwater,
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and it starts 88 years ago with Bill Longley and Charles Martin,
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who were trying to take the first underwater color photograph.
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And they're in there with old-school scuba suits,
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where you're pumping air down to them,
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and they've got a pontoon of high-explosive magnesium powder,
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and the poor people at the surface are not sure
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when they're going to pull the string when they've got their frame in focus,
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and -- boom! -- a pound of high explosives would go off
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so they could put a little bit of light underwater
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and get an image like this beautiful hogfish.
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I mean, it's a gorgeous image, but this is not real.
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They're creating an artificial environment
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so we can satisfy our own addiction to color.
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And looking at it the other way, what we've been finding
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is that instead of bringing color underwater with us,
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that we've been looking at the blue ocean,
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and it's a crucible of blue,
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and these animals living there for millions of years
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have been evolving all sorts of ways to take in that blue light
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and give off other colors.
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And here's just a little sample of what this secret world looks like.
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It's like an underwater light show.
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(Music)
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Again, what we're seeing here is blue light hitting this image.
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These animals are absorbing the blue light
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and immediately transforming this light.
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So if you think about it, the ocean is 71 percent of the planet,
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and blue light can extend down to almost a 1,000 meters.
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As we go down underwater,
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after about 10 meters, all the red is gone.
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So if you see anything under 10 meters that's red,
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it's an animal transforming and creating its own red.
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This is the largest single monochromatic blue environment on our planet.
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And my gateway into this world of biofluorescence begins with corals.
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And I want to give a full TED Talk on corals
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and just how cool these things are.
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One of the things that they do, one of their miraculous feats,
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is they produce lots of these fluorescent proteins,
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fluorescent molecules.
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And in this coral, it could be making up to 14 percent of its body mass --
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could be this fluorescent protein.
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So you wouldn't be making, like, 14 percent muscle and not using it,
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so it's likely doing something that has a functional role.
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And for the last 10, 15 years, this was so special to me,
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because this molecule has turned out to be one of the most revolutionary tools
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in biomedical science,
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and it's allowing us to better see inside ourselves.
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So, how do I study this?
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In order to study biofluorescence, we swim at night.
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And when I started out,
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I was just using these blue duct-tape filters over my strobe,
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so I could make sure I'm actually seeing the light
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that's being transformed by the animals.
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We're making an exhibit for the Museum of Natural History,
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and we're trying to show off how great the fluorescent corals are on the reef,
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and something happened that just blew me away:
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this.
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In the middle of our corals,
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is this green fluorescent fish.
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It's the first time we've ever seen a green fluorescent fish
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or any vertebrate for that matter.
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And we're rubbing our eyes, checking the filters,
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thinking that somebody's maybe playing a joke on us with the camera,
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but the eel was real.
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It was the first green fluorescent eel that we found,
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and this just changed my trajectory completely.
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So I had to put down my corals and team up
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with a fish scientist, John Sparks,
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and begin a search around the world
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to see how prevalent this phenomenon is.
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And fish are much more interesting than corals,
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because they have really advanced vision,
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and some of the fish even have, the way that I was photographing it,
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they have lenses in their eyes that would magnify the fluorescence.
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So I wanted to seek this out further.
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So we designed a new set of gear
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and we're scouring the reefs around the world,
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looking for fluorescent life.
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And it's a bit like "E.T. phone home."
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We're out there swimming with this blue light,
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and we're looking for a response,
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for animals to be absorbing the light and transferring this back to us.
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And eventually, we found our photobombing Kaupichphys eel.
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It's a really shy, reclusive eel that we know almost nothing about.
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They're only about the size of my finger,
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and they spend about 99.9 percent of their time hidden under a rock.
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But these eels do come out to mate under full-moon nights,
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and that full-moon night translates underwater to blue.
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Perhaps they're using this as a way to see each other,
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quickly find each other, mate,
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go back into their hole for the next long stint of time.
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But then we started to find other fluorescent marine life,
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like this green fluorescent bream,
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with its, like, racing stripes along its head and its nape,
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and it's almost camouflaged and fluorescing at the same intensity
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as the fluorescent coral there.
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After this fish,
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we were introduced to this red fluorescent scorpionfish
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cloaked and hidden on this rock.
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The only time we've ever seen this, it's either on red fluorescent algae
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or red fluorescent coral.
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Later, we found this stealthy green fluorescent lizardfish.
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These lizardfish come in many varieties,
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and they look almost exactly alike under white light.
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But if you look at them under fluorescent light,
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you see lots of patterns,
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you can really see the differences among them.
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And in total -- we just reported this last year --
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we found over 200 species of biofluorescent fish.
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One of my inspirations is French artist and biologist Jean Painlevé.
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He really captures this entrepreneuring, creative spirit in biology.
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He would design his own gear, make his own cameras,
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and he was fascinated with the seahorse, Hippocampus erectus,
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and he filmed for the first time the seahorse giving birth.
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So this is the male seahorse.
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They were one of the first fish to start swimming upright
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with their brain above their head.
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The males give birth,
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just phenomenal creatures.
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So he stayed awake for days.
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He even put this electrical visor on his head that would shock him,
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so he could capture this moment.
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Now, I wish I could have shown Painlevé
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the moment where we found biofluorescent seahorses
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in the exact same species that he was studying.
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And here's our footage.
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(Music)
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They're the most cryptic fish.
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You could be swimming right on top of them and not see the seahorse.
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They would blend right into the algae, which would also fluoresce red,
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but they've got great vision,
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and they go through this long mating ritual,
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and perhaps they're using it in that effect.
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But things got pretty edgy
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when we found green fluorescence in the stingray,
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because stingrays are in the Elasmobranch class,
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which includes ...
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sharks.
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So I'm, like, a coral biologist.
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Somebody's got to go down and check to see if the sharks are fluorescent.
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And there I am.
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(Laughter)
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And I was like, "Maybe I should go back to corals."
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(Laughter)
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It turns out that these sharks are not fluorescent.
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And then we found it.
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In a deep, dark canyon off the coast of California,
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we found the first biofluorescent swellshark,
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right underneath all the surfers.
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Here it is.
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They're just about a meter long. It's called a swellshark.
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And they call them a swellshark because if they're threatened,
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they can gulp down water and blow up like an inner tube,
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about twice their size,
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and wedge themselves under a rock, so they don't get eaten by a predator.
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And here is our first footage of these biofluorescent swellsharks.
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Just magnificent -- I mean, they're showing these distinct patterns,
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and there are areas that are fluorescent and areas that are not fluorescent,
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but they've also got these twinkling spots on them
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that are much brighter than other parts of the shark.
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But this is all beautiful to see.
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I was like, this is gorgeous.
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But what does it mean to the shark?
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Can they see this?
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And we looked in the literature,
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and nothing was known about this shark's vision.
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So I took this shark to eye specialist Ellis Loew at Cornell University,
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and we found out that this shark sees discretely and acutely
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in the blue-green interface,
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probably about 100 times better than we can see in the dark,
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but they only see blue-green.
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So what it's doing is taking this blue world
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and it's absorbing the blue, creating green.
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It's creating contrast that they can indeed see.
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So we have a model,
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showing that it creates an ability for them to see all these patterns.
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And males and females also have, we're finding,
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distinct patterns among them.
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But our last find came really just a few miles from where we are now,
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in the Solomon Islands.
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Swimming at night, I encountered the first biofluorescent sea turtle.
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So now it's going from fish and sharks into reptiles,
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which, again, this is only one month old,
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but it shows us that we know almost nothing
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about this hawksbill turtle's vision.
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And it makes me think about how much more there is to learn.
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And here in the Solomon Islands,
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there's only a few thousand breeding females of this species left,
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and this is one of the hotspots for them.
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So it shows us how much we need to really protect these animals
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while they're still here, and understand them.
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In thinking about biofluorescence,
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I wanted to know, how deep does it go?
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Does this go all the way to the bottom of the ocean?
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So we started using submarines, and we equipped them
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with special blue lights on the front here.
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And we dropped down,
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and we noticed one important thing --
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that as we get down to 1,000 meters,
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it drops off.
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There's no biofluorescent marine life down there, below 1,000 meters --
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almost nothing, it's just darkness.
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So it's mainly a shallow phenomenon.
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And below 1,000 meters,
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we encountered the bioluminescent zone,
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where nine out of 10 animals are actually making their own lights
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and flashing and blinking.
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As I try to get deeper,
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this is slapping on a one-person submarine suit --
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some people call this my "Jacques Cousteau meets Woody Allen" moment.
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(Laughter)
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But as we explore down here,
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I was thinking about: How do we interact with life delicately?
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Because we're entering a new age of exploration,
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where we have to take great care,
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and we have to set examples how we explore.
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So I've teamed up with roboticist Rob Wood at Harvard University,
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and we've been designing squishy underwater robot fingers,
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so we can delicately interact with the marine life down there.
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The idea is that most of our technologies to explore the deep ocean
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come from oil and gas and military,
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who, you know, they're not really caring to be gentle.
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Some corals could be 1,000 years old.
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You don't want to just go and crush them with a big claw.
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So my dream is something like this.
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At night, I'm in a submarine,
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I have force-feedback gloves,
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and I could delicately set up a lab in the front of my submarine,
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where the squishy robot fingers
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are delicately collecting and putting things in jars,
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and we can conduct our research.
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Back to the powerful applied applications.
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Here, you're looking at a living brain
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that's using the DNA of fluorescent marine creatures,
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this one from jellyfish and corals,
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to illuminate the living brain and see its connections.
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It's funny that we're using RGB
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just to kind of satisfy our own human intuition,
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so we can see our brains better.
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And even more mind-blowing,
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is my close colleague Vincent Pieribone at Yale,
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who has actually designed and engineered a fluorescent protein
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that responds to voltage.
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So he could see when a single neuron fires.
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You're essentially looking at a portal into consciousness
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that was designed by marine creatures.
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So this brings me all back to perspective and relationship.
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From deep space,
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our universe looks like a human brain cell,
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and then here we are in the deep ocean,
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and we're finding marine creatures and cells
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that can illuminate the human mind.
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And it's my hope that with illuminated minds,
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we could ponder the overarching interconnectedness of all life,
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and fathom how much more lies in store
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if we keep our oceans healthy.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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