Sea Changes: University of Florida Marine Ecologist Dr. Robbie Lamb Shares His Professional Journey and Underwater Insights
Jacques Cousteau introduced many of us to a place both alien and beautiful – the underwater world. Decades later, our oceans and marine ecosystems have gone through significant changes – so what’s happening down there? My guest today, Dr. Robbie Lamb, faculty at the University of Florida’s School of Forest, Fisheries, and Geomatics Sciences and the Nature Coast Biological Station is determined to answer that question. Robbie’s work in the Caribbean, South America, and the U.S. helps explain how marine communities respond to this changing world. Robbie’s and his colleague’s research has been highlighted by National Geographic and most recently PBS. Oh – and he used to be a professional basketball player in Ecuador. Join us, as Robbie shares his journey and insights.
Listen to Episode #98 Now:
BIO:
Dr. Robert Lamb (Robbie) is a Research Assistant Professor at the School of Forest, Fisheries and Geomatics Sciences and the Nature Coast Biological Station. Robbie studies marine community ecology, primarily focusing on fish population dynamics, food webs and biogeography. With research projects throughout the United States, the Caribbean, and South America, Robbie seeks to understand how marine communities respond to anthropogenic impacts like climate change. Robbie uses tools such as stable isotope tracing of elements to map marine food webs and population monitoring combined with oceanographic and species trait data to understand why some species thrive in warmer oceans while others decline.
Transcript:
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Announcer: This is Pet Life Radio.
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Announcer: Let's talk pets.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: Welcome to Aquariumania.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: I'm your host, Dr.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: Roy Yanong, speaking to you from the University of Florida, IFAS Tropical Aquaculture Laboratory.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: Thanks for joining us.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: Jacques Cousteau introduced many of us to a place both alien and beautiful, the underwater world.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: Decades later, our oceans and marine ecosystems have gone through significant changes.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: So what's happening down there?
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Dr. Roy Yanong: My guest today, Dr.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: Robbie Lamb, Faculty at the University of Florida, School of Forest, Fisheries, and Geomatics Sciences, and the Nature Coast Biological Station, is determined to answer that question.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: Robbie's work in the Caribbean, South America, and the US helps explain how marine communities respond to this changing world.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: Robbie's and his colleagues' research has been highlighted by National Geographic, and most recently, PBS.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: Oh, and he used to be a professional basketball player in Ecuador.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: Join us as Robbie shares his journey and insights.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: We'll be right back after these messages.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: Welcome back to Aquarium Mania on PetLife Radio.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: My guest today is Dr.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: Robbie Lamb, Marine Ecologist and Research Scientist, based at the University of Florida's School of Forest, Fisheries, and Geomatics Sciences, and the Nature Coast Biological Station.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: Oh, and he's also on Nat Geo and PBS Star, but we'll talk about that later.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: Thanks for your time, Robbie.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: Thanks for having me, Roy.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: It's a pleasure.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: So with a lot of my guests, I like to kind of get a little personal early on, and get a little feel for what kind of drove them into doing what they do.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: And who were some of your childhood influences that got you interested in nature and marine life?
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Dr. Roy Yanong: And I have to ask, of course, did you ever have an aquarium?
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: I absolutely had an aquarium.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: We had a freshwater aquarium as I was growing up.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: I remember, I don't remember exactly what kinds of fish we had, but we had a couple different fish and some freshwater salamanders as well, as I recall.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So that was definitely something that I spent long, long hours looking at when I was real small.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: But I guess my first inspiration for being a biologist came from my mother, who was an avid bird watcher, and that was something that she picked up from her grandfather, or from her father, my grandfather.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So this was really a family tradition at that point.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So she would get me up at 4.35 in the morning, and I would be rubbing sleep out of my eyes, but also pulling on these binoculars and getting really excited about seeing a red-tailed hawk or a bald eagle.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And so that kind of honed my observation of wildlife and nature and got me interested in just seeing the diversity of life that is out there in the world.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And that kind of combined with watching Jacques Cousteau documentaries as a child and David Attenborough and crocodile hunter shows and things like that about the wild places that had still so much left to be explored and discovered.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And that sense of being able to observe wildlife, observe nature, and be able to do scientific discovery was really kind of what drew me into this field.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: So were there any high school experiences that were pretty impactful for you, both either life-wise or career-wise?
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: Absolutely.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: I have to say that for all those parents out there, they're thinking about their kids and what they want their kids to be able to do and experience in life.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: I think that when you're in high school, you're in this very sensitive, fragile time when there's a lot of opportunity to grow and expand your horizons.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: My mother, again, I keep coming back to her, but she was fundamental in exposing me to some new opportunities that hadn't even crossed my mind as possibilities at the time, but she came across them and fed them my way and opened my eyes to a lot of possibilities.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: One of them was, there was a scuba diving training and marine science field course in the Caribbean, in the US Virgin Islands, that you had to pay quite a bit for.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: At the time, I think it was like $2,500.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: It was a lot of money.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: It was more than I could make myself as a high school student working.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: My mother was able to get a scholarship, or helped me get a scholarship for this course.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: I went down for four weeks of learning how to scuba dive and learning how to be a coral reef, not biologist yet, but certainly someone who appreciates it and is able to identify species of coral reef fish and start thinking about how these ecosystems are put together.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: That was really my first experience of working underwater, seeing things with my own eyes.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: When you see the surface of the water, it's easy to think that there's not a lot of life out there, because it's just this blank canvas.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: But once you put on a mask and you dip your head under the surface, and you see what's truly out there, it's just this rich world of colors and shapes and swirling particles of water and fish and algae, and it's just the most beautiful tapestry of life.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: The second that I did that, I was hooked forever.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: At that point, I knew I was going to become a marine biologist.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: The other thing that I'd like to thank my mother for is that she sent me, didn't send me, but she encouraged me to go on exchange as a high school student.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So I went to Ecuador for a year in my junior year of high school as a rotary exchange student.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: I lived with two different host families over the course of that year, became very integrated into those families.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: I learned Spanish.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: I did a lot of volunteer work in the town that I lived in, which was Puerto Viejo, very, not that small, but kind of isolated town, doesn't have a lot of tourists visiting or anything like that.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So it was a real immersive experience and just a very rewarding, life-changing experience that, again, my mother really encouraged me to do.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And that really kind of opened my mind to some of the international context of the world that we live in, this global society that we live in.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: I think that the exchange programs like the Rotary One are really fundamental for generating world peace because they show you how somebody else lives and kind of open your mind to other possibilities.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And once we open our mind to those different possibilities, we become that much less biased and close minded to other cultures and other ways of seeing the world.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So those two experiences really kind of shaped who I became afterwards, which is, I guess, an international marine biologist.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: Yeah, those both sounded incredible.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: I definitely would have loved to do that.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: So let's talk a little bit, fast forward a bit and talk a little bit about college and experiences after.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: What did you end up studying in college?
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Dr. Roy Yanong: And did you have any experiences during your undergrad that most influenced you?
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So I was a biology major.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: I went to Oregon State University, Go Beavers, one of the fiercest mascots in the country.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: But it was a fantastic school.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: It was a state school, a state university.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And much like the University of Florida, where I am now, it's a land grant university.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: It's actually one of the, I think there's only one other university.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: It's both a land grant, a sea grant, and a space grant.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So they do a lot of really high level research across the board.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And I got involved very early on with the lab of Dr.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: Mark Hickson, who's a pretty well-known coral reef ecologist.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: He's now at the University of Hawaii, but at the time he was at Oregon State.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And as a freshman, we had a seminar series where they would bring in biologists of different fields.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: You know, people that had gone through biology as an undergrad and then gone into different fields of science or industry, medicine.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: We had a doctor come.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: We had a nurse come and give a talk.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And so each week somebody would come from different fields of biology and give a talk about what it's like to be in their career path and how they got there from being an undergraduate biology major.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So one of those talks was by Dr.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: Hickson, and he was a professor at Oregon State, like I said.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So he gave his talk, and I went up to him at the end of the talk, and I said, hello, my name is Robbie.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: I want to do what you do.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: Maybe you'd have some opportunities for me working in your lab or something like that so that I can learn how this path might unfold.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: He was really gracious and opened space in his lab for me to come work.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: What I started doing was they had this really interesting experiment that they were working with these territorial damselfish.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So damselfish lay eggs on the sea floor and they guard those eggs really viciously from potential egg predators.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: But they also guard the territories where those eggs are laid.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: Those territories are sort of an indicator to potential mates of the strength of territoriality of the fish.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: If I'm able to protect this garden really well from potential herbivores or other things that would want to eat what's there, I'm also really going to be good at protecting your eggs.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So they took advantage of the fact that these guys liked to lay eggs on sheltered surfaces.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: They would put these PVC tubes out underwater and line them with an acetate sheet, like an old projector slide kind of sheet.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: Then when the fish lay the eggs on the inside of the tube, they could pull that acetate sheet out and lay it out into a two-dimensional egg patch, which are, you know, eggs are laid in sort of one layer.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And so by calculating the air, the area of that egg patch, we could then figure out what the fecundity or reproductive output of those fish was.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So I first started off in this lab reading these digital images and calculating area, and then dividing that by the area, the circumference of a single egg, and you would get the total number of eggs or reproductive output.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And that's really fundamental information for studying things like fisheries biology and population genetics.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So he opened up a space in his lab doing this sort of not menial work, but certainly it's not out scuba diving on a coral reef, but still it was working in this field and opening up a chance to see what that research was really like.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And that's actually a model that I've kind of taken on as a professor at University of Florida myself, is that you give students the opportunity to kind of show their worth and their interest level with one of these sort of data processing type of jobs.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: Once I was kind of doing well in that and showing my motivation and dedication to that work, Dr.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: Hickson allowed me to start looking into ways of funding my own way to go to the Bahamas, which is where he was doing his field work each summer.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And so I obtained a couple of undergraduate research fellowships.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And for those of you who are undergraduates currently or who have kids that are undergraduate students in universities, look out for these research fellowships because they often open a lot of doors in terms of field opportunities for research with professors that otherwise don't have the funds to bring you with them.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And so that's how I kind of paid my way to the Bahamas and was able to do my own undergraduate research with Dr.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: Hickson.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And so out in the Bahamas, this is basically working for three months straight every single day under the water for four to eight hours.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: It was a dream.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: It was like, I finally felt like this is what life is all about.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: It was so great.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And obviously challenging work as well.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: You know, you're wet, you're tired, you're cold throughout most of the day, but really rewarding work because I got to be, you know, a part of these core reef ecosystems and see them from the bottom up.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: I was able to publish an undergraduate thesis project as a result of that work.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And learned sort of the basics of what it takes to do underwater research, which is a whole field unto itself.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: Well, that definitely prepped you for what you're doing.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: Now we have to do a really minor break and talk about some Robbie Lamb trivia.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: So can you very briefly kind of tell us how you became a basketball star in Ecuador?
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So basketball is not the most popular sport in Ecuador, not by a long shot.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: But when I moved down there in 2004, or 2008, I'm sorry, when I finished college, I had been playing basketball at Oregon State as part of the practice squad that would practice against the main team, the varsity team, and give them a sparring partner, so to speak.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So I was a decent basketball player, but I didn't even make my own high school varsity basketball team.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: I wasn't good enough.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: But when I moved down to Ecuador, suddenly I was the tallest guy on the court, and I could handle the ball a little bit.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So very quickly, I got roped into this professional basketball league in Ecuador.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And so we would travel by bus to different cities each weekend and play in these tournaments and sign autographs and all this stuff.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: I never made any money out of it.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: You know, it was pretty much enough to pay your bus fare, but it was still a lot of fun and yeah, a little side note away from marine biology.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: That's awesome.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: So let's talk graduate studies now.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: What made you decide to go to graduate school and where did you go?
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So I didn't have probably the most typical progression from undergraduate to graduate school, but I always had a graduate school on my horizon.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: I always knew that that was something that I wanted to pursue because from the get-go, I was attracted to a lifetime of study and learning about the ocean.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: It really was more than a job for me.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: It was a passion.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: It was something that I knew that I was always going to want to pursue.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And so following a graduate program of research in marine science allows you to design a job around that pursuit.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And I always knew that that was going to be the thing for me.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: But when I graduated college, I actually started off with a Fulbright Fellowship to go back to Ecuador where I had worked and lived before.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And I started working in fisheries sustainability and the development of rural fisheries in coastal Ecuador.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So a Fulbright grant, this is another fellowship opportunity for those of you out there interested, take a good look at this one.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: They're available not just for recent post-graduates from college, but for professionals of all ages.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So these Fulbright grants are very similar to a year-long exchange program in that you go to another country and you really immerse yourself in that country's culture.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: You learn the local language, you usually work with a local partner to develop some kind of research project.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So right after college, I received one of these grants to go to Ecuador and work with a series of small fishing villages along the coast of the northern province of Esmeraldas in Ecuador, to develop sustainable fishing practices and to try to get these fisheries certified under international sustainable fisheries paradigms, which would allow them to export their fish at a higher value per fish and also improve the sustainability of the fishery.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And so I would go out with these guys, swordfish fishing.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: We would go out for three or four days at a time in a 15-foot open fiberglass boat up to 100 miles offshore.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: It was really harsh, harsh conditions exposed to this tropical sunlight, the wind, the waves, 24-7.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: At night, we would sleep in the basin of the boat, the bottom of the boat with fish guts and squid kind of slouching around us.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So, it was really quite something to see how these people live and how they make a living off of the sea.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: But it was a really eye-opening experience for another reason, which was that after a year of heavily investing in these communities, we did make a lot of progress, but at the same time, there were outside influences that were undermining our ability to make progress.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: Merchants that saw our efforts, which would divert the production of these fisheries into an international export, they started to undermine our relationship with the community by spreading lies about embezzlement and things like this.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So our connections with those communities were really aligned by that type of lies basically.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: The problem with these types of issues is that when you try to generate a new economic model, if you leave people out of it, they are going to find ways to undermine that new economic model.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And we hadn't taken into account the local merchants that were going to be losing their livelihoods essentially because of this new product export idea that we had.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So that really kind of shifted my focus back towards biology.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: I got the sense that working with humans was too challenging for me.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: These are fickle, fickle beings that will say one thing today and say something completely different the next.
00:18:17.859 --> 00:18:35.479
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And so really my pursuit and my attraction to biology is that there's a natural world out there that operates under relatively fixed rules and it's up to us to kind of learn and understand what those rules are, but they are reliable over time.
00:18:35.479 --> 00:18:40.359
Dr. Robbie Lamb: Whereas with humans, there's just this whole other dimension that comes into it.
00:18:40.359 --> 00:18:45.479
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So I really enjoy sort of the hard and fast nature of biology, I suppose, as a result of that.
00:18:46.039 --> 00:18:49.839
Dr. Roy Yanong: Deciding to go and where you ended up going for grad school?
00:18:49.839 --> 00:18:51.959
Dr. Robbie Lamb: Yes, sorry, I got sidetracked a bit.
00:18:51.959 --> 00:19:01.939
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So that experience of going on a full bright year kind of set my course back towards empirical science.
00:19:01.939 --> 00:19:06.419
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So I decided that I wanted to get a graduate degree in marine ecology.
00:19:06.419 --> 00:19:10.239
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And first, I did that as through a master's program.
00:19:10.239 --> 00:19:16.839
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So I got a master's degree at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, which is a university in Quito, Ecuador.
00:19:16.839 --> 00:19:21.999
Dr. Robbie Lamb: I was looking at biogeography of intertidal communities along the coastline of Ecuador.
00:19:21.999 --> 00:19:36.099
Dr. Robbie Lamb: Because Ecuador is at the confluence of warm water coming down from the north, from sort of the around the coast of Panama and Columbia, and colder water coming up from the south along the coast of Chile and Peru.
00:19:36.099 --> 00:19:40.379
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So those two warm and cold water currents mix around the coastline of Ecuador.
00:19:40.379 --> 00:19:49.119
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And so I was really interested in seeing how intertidal ecological communities varied with proximity to these cold and warm water currents.
00:19:49.119 --> 00:20:00.219
Dr. Robbie Lamb: While I was doing my master's degree, I sort of just by happenstance met the person who would end up being my PhD advisor, who was John Whitman.
00:20:00.219 --> 00:20:05.519
Dr. Robbie Lamb: John was a university professor at Brown University, where he still is currently.
00:20:05.519 --> 00:20:09.699
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And at the time he was doing research in the Galapagos at the same time that I just happened to be there.
00:20:09.699 --> 00:20:15.559
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And so I got to meet John and go diving with him a couple of days and saw what his field operation looked like.
00:20:15.559 --> 00:20:18.219
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And I was just immediately hooked.
00:20:18.219 --> 00:20:20.379
Dr. Robbie Lamb: I thought this is what this is for me.
00:20:20.379 --> 00:20:27.479
Dr. Robbie Lamb: The Galapagos Islands are obviously this incredible place full of marine diversity, one of the most productive marine ecosystems in the planet.
00:20:27.479 --> 00:20:33.619
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And here was this really well renowned professor that was doing high level work there.
00:20:33.619 --> 00:20:37.459
Dr. Robbie Lamb: It seemed like the perfect marriage of my passions, which was Ecuador and marine ecology.
00:20:38.179 --> 00:20:43.659
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So I wrote to John and said, hey, I'm looking for a graduate program.
00:20:43.659 --> 00:20:45.739
Dr. Robbie Lamb: He said, I'm looking for a graduate student.
00:20:45.739 --> 00:20:47.879
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And it just kind of worked out that way.
00:20:48.919 --> 00:20:49.699
Dr. Roy Yanong: That's awesome.
00:20:49.699 --> 00:20:52.639
Dr. Roy Yanong: So actually I had one more quick question before we take a break.
00:20:52.639 --> 00:21:01.339
Dr. Roy Yanong: We're going to talk more about some of your work with John, but were there any real valuable lessons or what would you consider some of the most valuable lessons you got from John?
00:21:01.379 --> 00:21:04.919
Dr. Robbie Lamb: Oh man, John Whitman is a class act, let me tell you.
00:21:05.079 --> 00:21:16.679
Dr. Robbie Lamb: He is one of the most positive, hardworking, and personable scientists that you will ever meet in your life.
00:21:16.679 --> 00:21:21.239
Dr. Robbie Lamb: From the day that I met him, John has always had a smile on his face.
00:21:21.239 --> 00:21:24.659
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And this doesn't matter if it's raining or shining outside.
00:21:24.659 --> 00:21:40.279
Dr. Robbie Lamb: One of the first and strongest lessons that I learned from John was about keeping a positive attitude and seeking out an answer and a way of solving things even in the face of calamitous circumstances.
00:21:40.279 --> 00:21:43.599
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So, the very first summer that I spent in the Galapagos was John.
00:21:43.599 --> 00:21:56.679
Dr. Robbie Lamb: I was helping out on an experiment that they had running where they were filming interactions between fish, urchins, and algae over the full daylight and nighttime period, so 24 hours a day.
00:21:56.679 --> 00:22:05.679
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And so they were filming this using time-lapse camera systems, and then at night, those time-lapse camera systems had an external flash that would light up the scene.
00:22:05.679 --> 00:22:25.099
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And so these experiments were intended to test a trophic cascade, which is the idea that if you change the abundance of top predators, that change in top predator abundance will change the abundance of herbivores, and that change in herbivore abundance will change the abundance of plants.
00:22:25.099 --> 00:22:32.019
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And this is a well-known paradigm in ecological theory, but it's been rarely tested under water.
00:22:32.019 --> 00:22:45.919
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So they had this great experimental setup, looking at predators of urchins, so fish that would eat urchins, urchins which eat algae, and all lit up with this custom-made, like $200,000 video system for underwater filming.
00:22:45.919 --> 00:23:09.839
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And the very first night that we set this all up, you know, it was probably six hours of consecutive dives, trying to get this all set up perfectly on tripods, filming the whole scene, making sure the flashes were working, and we pressed record and saw a little red light blinking away, and we went back up to the surface and had dinner, and a good night's sleep, thinking that we had this great experiment rolling.
00:23:09.839 --> 00:23:18.779
Dr. Robbie Lamb: The next day, we dove back down, pulled up the system, opened up the canister to download the video files, and it was full of water.
00:23:18.779 --> 00:23:41.839
Dr. Robbie Lamb: The whole thing had flooded overnight, and the problem was that we had, you know, a canister that was housing the battery, and the memory cards for the video, and that had these hoses that were connected to the lights and the cameras, and at each of those hoses to compartment connections, there were weak points, and with the waves and the motion in the ocean, all of that caused it to leak.
00:23:41.839 --> 00:23:50.199
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So this was, you know, years of, and hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment up to this point.
00:23:50.199 --> 00:23:51.299
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And what did John do?
00:23:51.299 --> 00:24:05.019
Dr. Robbie Lamb: Well, he looked in there, he said, one F word expletive, and then he said, well, we're just gonna get GoPros out, and we'll film it during the day, and we'll continue forward with the experiment, and we'll just not worry about the nighttime stuff.
00:24:05.019 --> 00:24:11.159
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And he did it, and he got an ecology paper out of it, which is a really high level journal in our field.
00:24:11.159 --> 00:24:20.619
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So that lesson to, you know, keep your head up and not take no for an answer when life is gonna give you lemons, you gotta figure out a way to make lemonade.
00:24:21.279 --> 00:24:26.779
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And in science, in particular, in field science, you often have these issues arise.
00:24:26.779 --> 00:24:29.399
Dr. Robbie Lamb: You know, things don't work the way they're supposed to.
00:24:29.399 --> 00:24:32.359
Dr. Robbie Lamb: Natural elements break things all the time.
00:24:32.359 --> 00:24:46.139
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And just keeping focus on your goal, which is answering that scientific question, and not allowing those types of setbacks to really change your focus, you can come up with a really good solution at the end.
00:24:46.139 --> 00:24:49.179
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And that was a really fundamental lesson I got from John.
00:24:50.579 --> 00:24:51.799
Dr. Robbie Lamb: Awesome, awesome.
00:24:51.799 --> 00:25:02.779
Dr. Roy Yanong: And yeah, for our listeners, I did have an opportunity to work with Robbie, and I see where a lot of his coolness in the face of our adversities came from now.
00:25:02.779 --> 00:25:04.519
Dr. Roy Yanong: So I appreciate that, Robbie.
00:25:04.519 --> 00:25:13.599
Dr. Roy Yanong: So let's take a short break, and we'll continue our discussion with University of Florida Marine Colleges and Galapagos expert Robbie Lamb after a word from our sponsors.
00:25:52.096 --> 00:25:55.856
Dr. Roy Yanong: We're back and continuing our conversation with my guest, Dr.
00:25:55.856 --> 00:26:00.276
Dr. Roy Yanong: Robbie Lamb, Marine Ecologist and Research Scientist at the University of Florida.
00:26:00.276 --> 00:26:09.256
Dr. Roy Yanong: So Robbie, we talked a little bit about your background and how you got a can-do positive attitude that I was able to witness often.
00:26:09.256 --> 00:26:13.956
Dr. Roy Yanong: Let's talk a little bit about your research and your current research and maybe some of the past.
00:26:13.956 --> 00:26:18.896
Dr. Roy Yanong: Can you explain in general, I guess, what questions you are trying to answer?
00:26:18.896 --> 00:26:24.756
Dr. Roy Yanong: I know there's many different questions, but maybe kind of as like a whole, what sort of things are you trying to look at?
00:26:24.756 --> 00:26:26.676
Dr. Roy Yanong: And we'll talk more specifics later.
00:26:26.676 --> 00:26:38.196
Dr. Robbie Lamb: Yeah, so I think pretty much all of my research can be summed up as trying to understand how environmental change is affecting marine life on our planet.
00:26:38.196 --> 00:26:59.356
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And so I look at a variety of types of environmental change, but for the most part, we're looking at temperature change, which is really the largest, most fundamental change that humans are exacting upon our planet, which is climate change via the increase in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.
00:26:59.356 --> 00:27:10.036
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And so the warming of the Earth's atmosphere, and by virtue of that, the warming of the Earth's oceans is expected to have all kinds of ramifications.
00:27:10.036 --> 00:27:14.676
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And I've been trying to test some of those predictions of how things might change.
00:27:15.316 --> 00:27:26.396
Dr. Robbie Lamb: Using either natural variation in temperature that exists in geographic or temporal change of temperature over time.
00:27:26.396 --> 00:27:39.336
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And also doing experiments both in the laboratory and underwater that try to test the mechanisms that explain why things change when temperature or other types of environmental change occur.
00:27:39.336 --> 00:27:48.416
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So a couple of examples of this are, we're looking right now at how food webs are affected by temperature change in the Galapagos Islands.
00:27:48.416 --> 00:27:56.496
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So temperature increases in the ocean tend to stratify the surface waters.
00:27:56.496 --> 00:28:10.996
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And what I mean by stratification is you get a lens of really warm water that sits on the surface of the ocean, and that warm water lens usually has very little nutrients and life in it, especially in the tropics.
00:28:11.836 --> 00:28:15.256
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So we all know that plants need nutrients to grow, right?
00:28:15.256 --> 00:28:28.936
Dr. Robbie Lamb: If there isn't a lot of mixing of the surface waters, that means that the plants that are living up in the very shallowest band of the ocean utilize the nutrients that are there, then they either get eaten or they die.
00:28:28.936 --> 00:28:37.876
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And when they leave the ecosystem because they've been consumed or they sink, there's very little nutrients to replenish what they've consumed.
00:28:39.336 --> 00:28:49.356
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So, temperature increases in the ocean are expected to increase that stratification of the surface waters and reduce the amount of nutrients available for photosynthesis.
00:28:49.356 --> 00:28:56.556
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So in the Galapagos Islands, there is a natural spatial gradient in temperature of about three degrees Centigrade.
00:28:56.556 --> 00:29:03.036
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And three degrees might not sound like a whole lot, but the ocean is an incredible buffer of temperature change.
00:29:03.036 --> 00:29:06.936
Dr. Robbie Lamb: It takes a lot of energy to change water, even one degree Centigrade.
00:29:07.396 --> 00:29:08.676
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And the oceans are enormous.
00:29:08.676 --> 00:29:13.216
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So it takes a lot of heat to change the oceans by one degree Centigrade.
00:29:13.216 --> 00:29:16.936
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And also most of the organisms that live in the oceans are ectothermic.
00:29:16.936 --> 00:29:24.016
Dr. Robbie Lamb: That means that their body temperature mirrors the temperature of the waters in which they find themselves.
00:29:24.016 --> 00:29:33.716
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And so unlike a human, which can go from the Arctic all the way to the equator and not feel too terribly put out by that fact, you might have to take off a few jackets.
00:29:33.856 --> 00:29:38.276
Dr. Robbie Lamb: But humans are able to modulate our temperatures regardless of the external temperature.
00:29:38.276 --> 00:29:48.016
Dr. Robbie Lamb: A fish doing that same migration would suffer a huge physiological change because the rate of metabolic processes is directly scaled to temperature.
00:29:48.016 --> 00:30:13.876
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And so if this warming continues to progress as we, as we've seen it progress already, there is this expectation that the surface oceans will become impoverished of nutrients and that will reduce the amount of primary production and energy available to flow through food webs and generate biomass at higher levels for things like seabirds and sharks and so on.
00:30:13.876 --> 00:30:29.056
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So we're using this natural spatial gradient in temperature and also temporal change in temperature because there are years when the waters are really warm in the Galapagos, those tend to be El Niño years and there are warm years where the waters tend to be very cold which are the La Niña years.
00:30:29.716 --> 00:30:39.776
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And so we have this temporal change in temperature and a spatial gradient in temperature and we're using both of those to examine how food webs change when the oceans warm up.
00:30:39.776 --> 00:30:49.096
Dr. Roy Yanong: So I guess talking a little bit more about the Galapagos, you had some kind of interesting findings when you were there, I guess 2016 or 2017.
00:30:49.096 --> 00:30:54.836
Dr. Roy Yanong: You want to talk a little bit about maybe some of the things that you see that appear to be temperature related, El Niño related?
00:30:55.136 --> 00:30:55.736
Dr. Robbie Lamb: Absolutely.
00:30:55.736 --> 00:30:58.036
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So I mentioned this El Niño effect.
00:30:58.036 --> 00:31:09.156
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So El Niño occurs when the trade winds, which are normally blowing constantly from east to west, those slow down during El Niño years.
00:31:09.156 --> 00:31:18.436
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And the fact of those winds slowing down causes the surface currents that those winds are constantly blowing westward to also slow down.
00:31:18.436 --> 00:31:24.256
Dr. Robbie Lamb: When that happens, the upwelling of cold, nutrient rich water to the surface stops.
00:31:24.376 --> 00:31:27.556
Dr. Robbie Lamb: It's like a conveyor belt that's driven by these trade winds.
00:31:27.556 --> 00:31:31.256
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And so when the trade winds stop, that conveyor belt also stops.
00:31:31.256 --> 00:31:41.596
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And the Galapagos are located at the epicenter of El Niño phenomenon in the ocean, which is this eastern tropical Pacific area right off the coast of Ecuador.
00:31:41.596 --> 00:31:52.716
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And where the Galapagos are located, an El Niño event signifies substantial warming of the surface waters of the ocean, anywhere from one and a half to three and a half degrees centigrade.
00:31:52.816 --> 00:31:55.956
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And that can last for about six to 12 months.
00:31:55.956 --> 00:31:59.716
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So I mentioned that most organisms in the ocean are ectothermic.
00:31:59.716 --> 00:32:04.756
Dr. Robbie Lamb: That means that their body temperature changes with the temperature around them.
00:32:04.756 --> 00:32:08.556
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So there's two things that happen during temperature increases in the ocean.
00:32:08.596 --> 00:32:16.096
Dr. Robbie Lamb: One is that the metabolic rates of microorganisms, things like bacteria and viruses, speeds up a lot.
00:32:16.096 --> 00:32:18.876
Dr. Robbie Lamb: Their metabolism is also linked to temperature.
00:32:19.236 --> 00:32:26.116
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And so those microorganisms suddenly are able to reproduce a lot faster and they become more pathogenic.
00:32:26.116 --> 00:32:33.496
Dr. Robbie Lamb: That means that they incite and cause disease at a much faster rate than in colder normal temperatures.
00:32:33.496 --> 00:32:49.076
Dr. Robbie Lamb: The other thing that happens, as I mentioned, is that the fish and other organisms that are consuming, that are out there trying to forage and feed in the water, they are also speeding up their metabolic rates because of warmer temperatures.
00:32:49.076 --> 00:32:51.136
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So they need more food.
00:32:51.136 --> 00:32:55.176
Dr. Robbie Lamb: All of this is happening at the same time as the waters are stratifying.
00:32:55.176 --> 00:33:04.036
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So the nutrient availability in the photosome, which is where light is available for photosynthesis in the service of the ocean, also decreases.
00:33:04.036 --> 00:33:14.596
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So suddenly, fish have high metabolic rates, they need a lot of food, there isn't much food, and the microorganisms that might cause disease are just going like gangbusters.
00:33:14.916 --> 00:33:31.916
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So this is a perfect storm of conditions where you have basically starving fish that are immunocompromised because of the lack of food, that are being infected at higher rates by these microorganisms that are more pathogenic than normal because of warmer water temperatures.
00:33:31.916 --> 00:33:37.616
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So in 2015, 2016, in the Galapagos, we had one of the strongest El Nino events in recorded history.
00:33:39.776 --> 00:33:51.116
Dr. Robbie Lamb: That event sparked what we know now to be this ulcerative skin disease that affected at least 16 different species of fish in the Galapagos.
00:33:51.116 --> 00:34:09.596
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And what I mean by ulcerative skin disease is these small patches of skin that start off looking almost like a patch of mold that starts to grow in a spherical shape, and then the scales start to fall off, and you get this exposure of the subcutaneous tissue.
00:34:09.596 --> 00:34:13.056
Dr. Robbie Lamb: It's red, it's kind of leeching blood out into the water.
00:34:13.056 --> 00:34:14.396
Dr. Robbie Lamb: It's really ugly.
00:34:14.396 --> 00:34:28.196
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And those lesions grow and they combine, and eventually you can get most of the body of the fish has lost its scales and it's looking really bad, and they can lose the ability to swim if it affects their fins.
00:34:28.196 --> 00:34:38.516
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So it's a really ugly disease that fortunately disappeared as soon as that El Nino event subsided and the waters resumed back to their normal cooler temperatures.
00:34:38.516 --> 00:34:50.196
Dr. Robbie Lamb: But certainly it's an issue that is becoming more common with warmer oceans, that we're seeing more of these wildlife disease outbreaks.
00:34:50.196 --> 00:35:00.496
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And a lot of ulcerative skin diseases are common in conditions where you get high densities of fish and sort of stagnant water conditions.
00:35:00.616 --> 00:35:08.836
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So places like aquaculture pens, even aquaria that aren't properly cleaned, you get these kinds of ulcerative skin diseases quite commonly.
00:35:08.836 --> 00:35:26.716
Dr. Robbie Lamb: But in contrast, the Galapagos Islands are this oceanic island group that's a thousand kilometers off the coast of mainland South America, really, really far from any sources of coastal contamination or pollution, really well mixed water with a lot of wave action and currents.
00:35:26.716 --> 00:35:34.116
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So certainly not the conditions that you would expect would generate this type of an ulcerative skin disease outbreak.
00:35:34.116 --> 00:35:45.196
Dr. Robbie Lamb: But in this 2015-16 event, this El Niño, such an outbreak occurred, and in some species and in some places, the prevalence rates reached over 50 percent.
00:35:45.196 --> 00:35:52.316
Dr. Robbie Lamb: That means over half of all of the fish in some islands showed these ulcerative skin lesions.
00:35:52.316 --> 00:36:03.356
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So certainly it's something that we know is linked to these warm water events caused by El Niño, but the exact mechanism of that disease pathogenesis, we still haven't figured out yet.
00:36:03.356 --> 00:36:08.036
Dr. Roy Yanong: Yeah, it's definitely a challenge doing anything with wild fisheries.
00:36:08.036 --> 00:36:18.696
Dr. Roy Yanong: So since you mentioned obviously and started talking about the Galapagos, maybe can you describe a little bit about what makes the Galapagos so unique biologically?
00:36:18.696 --> 00:36:32.096
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So tropical waters normally have this really strong thermocline, which means that the surface waters are very warm, and there aren't many nutrients available in those warm surface waters for photosynthesis to occur.
00:36:32.096 --> 00:36:39.756
Dr. Robbie Lamb: The Galapagos are located right on the equator, so that means that they have tropical solar radiation year-round.
00:36:39.756 --> 00:36:42.716
Dr. Robbie Lamb: They have all the light that you could possibly want.
00:36:42.716 --> 00:36:48.456
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And in contrast to most other tropical seas, they don't have as much nutrient limitation.
00:36:48.456 --> 00:37:00.496
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And the reason for this is that there's a couple of cold water currents that hit the Galapagos islands, and it just happens to be that that archipelago is located at the confluence of two of these cold water currents.
00:37:00.516 --> 00:37:11.236
Dr. Robbie Lamb: One of them is called the Humboldt current, which comes from Antarctica up the coast of Chile and Peru and then starts to diverge westward and hits the Galapagos islands.
00:37:11.236 --> 00:37:21.516
Dr. Robbie Lamb: There's also the Cromwell, or equatorial, undercurrent, which is a subsurface current that's traveling at about 300 feet depth across the Pacific from west to east.
00:37:22.176 --> 00:37:31.876
Dr. Robbie Lamb: Now, when that current hits the Galapagos platform, it's pushed up to the surface and again brings cold, nutrient-rich water up to the surface where photosynthesis can occur.
00:37:31.876 --> 00:37:50.196
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So you have the combination of tropical sunlight and really high levels of nutrients being delivered to the surface, and that fuels a unique, highly productive marine ecosystem, one of, if not the most productive ecosystems in all of the world's oceans.
00:37:51.256 --> 00:37:57.116
Dr. Robbie Lamb: Another reason why the Galapagos are unique is that they have not really been inhabited for that long.
00:37:57.116 --> 00:38:14.316
Dr. Robbie Lamb: There's only been permanent human habitation of the islands for about 100 years, and for most of that time, there weren't many people moving to the Galapagos because there weren't many services, there wasn't much water, it's a really difficult place to make a living.
00:38:14.316 --> 00:38:18.936
Dr. Robbie Lamb: Then in the 50s, Ecuador declared the entire archipelago as a national park.
00:38:19.696 --> 00:38:29.936
Dr. Robbie Lamb: This was a really forward thinking move by the Ecuadorian government because as a result, the Galapagos Islands are incredibly well preserved.
00:38:29.936 --> 00:38:35.116
Dr. Robbie Lamb: Ninety-seven percent of the land area of the Galapagos are off-limits national park.
00:38:35.116 --> 00:38:40.036
Dr. Robbie Lamb: You can't move there, you can't cut down forest, you can't have agriculture there.
00:38:40.036 --> 00:38:49.796
Dr. Robbie Lamb: Only three percent of the land area is available for cities to grow, for agriculture to take place, for industry to have its home.
00:38:49.796 --> 00:38:52.876
Dr. Robbie Lamb: That's really limited the growth of the population in the Galapagos.
00:38:52.876 --> 00:38:57.736
Dr. Robbie Lamb: All that has translated into minimal effects of humans on the marine environment.
00:38:57.736 --> 00:39:04.576
Dr. Robbie Lamb: It's still a place that you can go and see large sharks, large grouper, large snapper.
00:39:04.576 --> 00:39:09.376
Dr. Robbie Lamb: If you go for a snorkel or a scuba dive anywhere in the Galapagos, you will see all of these things.
00:39:09.376 --> 00:39:20.136
Dr. Robbie Lamb: In contrast, much of the rest of the world's oceans and coastal reefs are fished of many of these large predators, because they are the most attractive for recreational and commercial fisheries.
00:39:20.136 --> 00:39:30.116
Dr. Robbie Lamb: So we have a really intact marine ecosystem that's fueled by one of the most productive combinations of nutrients and solar radiation in the entire world.
00:39:30.116 --> 00:39:32.976
Dr. Robbie Lamb: Yeah, definitely a beautiful place.
00:39:32.976 --> 00:39:35.656
Dr. Roy Yanong: Appreciate your having me work with you there.
00:39:35.656 --> 00:39:39.436
Dr. Roy Yanong: Let's shift a little bit back to the US and North America.
00:39:39.436 --> 00:39:53.716
Dr. Roy Yanong: You had a chance to do some work in the Gulf of Maine, and we had the opportunity to watch you and John and some of your other colleagues on the relatively recent PBS series, Sea Change Parallel in the Gulf of Maine, when we were over in the Galapagos.
00:39:53.716 --> 00:39:59.836
Dr. Roy Yanong: How did you get involved in that work in the first place, and what was the goal of the research there?
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: Yeah, so Cach's Ledge is a sea mount right in the middle of the Gulf of Maine.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: It's about 80 miles east of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: Much of the Gulf of Maine is a sediment bed, and it's really the outflow of the Appalachian Mountains as they've been eroded over millennia by glaciers and rainfall.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: All of that rock and mud has been piling up in the Gulf of Maine.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And so it's this really productive but sedimented, that means like a soft bottom area that's relatively shallow at about 250 feet deep.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: Now Cach's Ledge is a rocky sea mount that sticks up from this surrounding soft bottom habitat.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And there's a major difference between hard and soft habitats in the ocean.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: Hard structures, things like rock or coral, are places where both plants and animals can attach themselves and grow.
00:40:58.076 --> 00:41:08.156
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And there's a lot of organisms, things like kelp, things like corals, things like barnacles, that require a hard substrate to attach to in order to grow.
00:41:08.156 --> 00:41:09.656
Dr. Robbie Lamb: Other things require sediment.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: Then they burrow down into sediment and live in sediment habitats.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: But the fact that Cassius ledge exists in the middle of this sediment habitat means that there's suddenly this rocky hard substrate for things to attach to.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: It also comes up to about 40 feet deep below the surface.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So it doesn't actually break the surface.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: That's why it's a seamount and not an island.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: But it comes to pretty close to the surface, which means that things like algae and kelp can grow on this rocky platform and take advantage of light coming down from the sun.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So Cassius ledge as a result supports one of the largest and most productive kelp forests in the entire Gulf of Maine.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: These beautiful laminarian kelps, Laminaria digitata and Laminaria longichurris.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: These kelps reach up to 15 feet in length and they do form a canopy.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So you can be hunkered down at the base of these kelp fronds and look up and see them swaying back and forth over your head.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: Cassius ledge also supports one of the last healthy cod populations remaining in the Gulf of Maine.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And the fact that it supports these healthy cod populations suggests that Cassius ledge could be a refuge for cod and that those individuals living at Cassius ledge could actually seed other places in the Gulf of Maine that have been overfished and fished completely out of cod.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So my PhD advisor John Whitman at Brown University has been working at Cassius ledge and in the Gulf of Maine since the 70s.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: I was brought into working there by him in 2014, when we embarked on an effort to describe why Cassius ledge scientifically, from a scientific perspective, how is it ecologically important?
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: What is unique about it?
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: How does it compare to the rest of the Gulf of Maine?
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And should we be considering protecting Cassius ledge as some form of marine reserve in order to protect these unique kelp forest and cod populations that we know that it supports?
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So we started doing these surveys in 2014, comparing Cassius ledge to other parts of the Gulf of Maine.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And we've continued that work today to look at not only how does Cassius ledge compare to other parts in the same region, but how has it changed?
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: How has it changed since the 70s and 80s when John Whitman was first working there until now?
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And also how has it changed since 2014 until now?
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: Because this last decade has seen some of the rapid warming that we know that climate change is responsible for, and the Gulf of Maine is one of the fastest warming bodies of water in the entire world's oceans.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So this effort is scientific at its heart.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: We are trying to describe this unique place, what makes it unique, some of the processes that help sustain it.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And then we're also working on the legislative side.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So we're working with a variety of lawmakers, non-profit organizations, and local stakeholders to actually gain protections for Cassius Ledge as this sanctuary, as one of these last holdouts of a healthy ecosystem in the Gulf of Maine.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: That's great.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: And you had a really colorful cap, I have to mention for folks that haven't seen it yet, but definitely encourage our listeners to watch it.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: So yeah, how was working with the PBS crew?
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: Well, it was kind of funny, I got to say.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: We didn't really know what to expect when we headed out there.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: There were great people, really friendly, really curious and genuinely interested in the work that we were doing.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: But it was also kind of silly, you know, you'd go through 20, 30 minutes of getting all your scuba gear on and checking and double checking everything and then getting your gear.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And you're about to jump in the water and then a cameraman comes up and says, Hey, that was really great.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: Can you do all that again?
00:44:59.656 --> 00:45:00.696
Dr. Robbie Lamb: But let me film it.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And so then you'd have to take off all your setup and your, you know, 40 pounds of scuba gear.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: But in the end, it was obviously worth it.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: They got a great product out of it.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: I highly recommend that you guys check out the documentary.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: It's free.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: It's on PBS.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: It's also on YouTube.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: Just look up Parallel in the Gulf of Maine or Sea Change Gulf of Maine.
00:45:20.796 --> 00:45:23.736
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And again, it's on PBS and Nova.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: But it was also quite something to work with the underwater filmographers.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: These are professional videographers that do work for documentaries and things.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And they have these ultra high-speed cameras.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: They also use rebreather systems, which means that you don't exhale bubbles and it recirculates the air back into your system.
00:45:45.216 --> 00:45:52.616
Dr. Robbie Lamb: And that allows them to get really close up shots of fish and other organisms that might otherwise be scared off by bubbles.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So the footage in this documentary is really spectacular.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And I think it really conveys the magic of what it feels like to be down there on Cassius Ledge on this kelp forest.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: Thanks.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: And yeah, although Sea Change was the title of the series, I think that's kind of appropriate for what's happening all over the place.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: Can you maybe give us a brief perspective on how you think things are going overall and maybe what you think can be done or is being done to try to maybe mitigate or stabilize some of these systems?
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: Yeah, we know that we're changing things at an ever faster rate and in so many different ways.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: You know, I just talked about temperature change, but there's all these other things that humans are doing, things like overfishing, pollution.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: We're changing the pH of the oceans and making them more acidic and all these things, while they have happened in the past over longer time scales and due to natural reasons, we're making all of these changes go a lot, lot faster.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And they're so fast that they're faster than the capacity of organisms to evolve, to adapt to these new conditions.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So I think we're really facing some catastrophic change in the very near future.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And we've already seen some catastrophic change.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: But at the same time, we've seen all kinds of new adaptations by humans to try to make things better for us and for the wildlife that we rely on.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So for instance, aquaculture, the production of fish food for humans, as opposed to extractive fisheries that are simply going out there and catching wild animals.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: Aquaculture production surpassed wild caught fisheries in 2014.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And that trend will never reverse again.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So from now on, aquaculture will produce more food for humans than wild caught fisheries forever.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And that's actually a good thing.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: That means that we're actually starting to take more responsibility for the production of seafood as opposed to simply going out there and taking what's there.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: Also, I see a lot of hope in places like the Galapagos, places where I see school children that are five, ten years old walking to school with backpacks where they've made a little drawing of a hammerhead shark or a manta ray.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: And you see murals decorating the walls all along the road saying, let's take care of our oceans, let's take care of our resources.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So there are places in the world where people are actively working to make solutions and generate a different mentality with regard to our natural resources, one of stewardship, not one of extraction.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So I do see a lot of hope for the future, especially in our youth and these new movements to place more value on intact ecosystems.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: Also, from a scientific perspective, we're starting to understand a lot more about what makes ecosystems tick, what's required for a healthy ecosystem, how can we utilize things like living shorelines, so the use of organic materials like mangroves that are growing along shorelines, as opposed to simply putting a concrete barrier there to protect things from storms.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So we're starting to learn ways to work with nature as opposed to against nature to address issues that are affecting all of us, things like coastal erosion and storm impacts.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So I do see a lot of hope for the future in these new initiatives as well.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: That's good to hear.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: Unfortunately, we're out of time, but I definitely want to thank our guest, Dr.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: Robbie Lamb and our producer Mark Winner for making the show possible.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: So Robbie, any final words of wisdom for anyone interested in studying marine life and or who wants to help push things in the right direction?
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: Well, please stick with it.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: We need you.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: We need good people working on solutions.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: We need good scientists trying to better our understanding of how the world works.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: We need advocates for our oceans.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: We need storytellers and communicators.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: We need people out there doing positive stories, not just negative stories, but where are we finding victories?
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: Where are we seeing change in the right way?
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: We really need to highlight those stories because you can only get so far with these stories of doom and gloom.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So I always like to end things on a positive note and just say that I see a lot of potential for improving the way that we interact with our oceans and with our natural resources.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: I really thank you as well, Roy, for having me on your show and for having this podcast in the first place, which I think has really reached a large audience of folks that are that much better informed about marine issues and aquarium issues.
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Dr. Robbie Lamb: So thank you and thank you again for having me.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: No problem.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: A pleasure.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: Please be sure to check out Robbie's web links, which will be found on his Aquariumania episode page.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: If you have any questions, comments, or ideas for a show, email me at drroy at petliferadio.com.
00:50:42.896 --> 00:50:45.976
Dr. Roy Yanong: That's drroy at petliferadio.com.
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Dr. Roy Yanong: Until next time, please visit your local aquarium stores and keep your tanks clean and your fish healthy and do your part to help restore and foster our marine ecosystems diversity and beauty for both the health of our planet and for future generations.
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