The Space Between: How We Understood, Valued, and Governed the Ocean Through the Process of Marine Science and Emerging Technologies

Home , Blue Abyss, Clio (gastropod), Clio pyramidata, Sea butterfly

AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF

Samantha Newton for the degree of Master of Arts in Environmental Arts and Humanities presented on December 11, 2018.

Title: The Space Between: How We Understood, Valued, and Governed the Ocean Through the Process of Marine Science and Emerging Technologies

Abstract approved: ______Jacob Darwin Hamblin

Ian Angell, in the New Barbarian Manifesto, wrote “A ‘brave new world’ is being forced upon unsuspecting societies by advances in information technology.” It would seem then, that technological advances happen automatically and have a life of their own. There is a logic to technological advancements that is outside human control, so people tend to react to and accommodate technological change, rather than try to reverse or redirect it. Angell’s idea draws a line between two academic theories—either technology shapes people (technological determinism) or people shape technology (social constructionism). Although other scholars, like Tommy Tranvik and Bruno Latour, propose a hybrid approach to understanding the role of science and technology in contemporary culture. Tranvik argues that merging determinism and constructionism can show a more accurate depiction of reality, and in Aramis, or The Love of Technology Latour illustrates that technology and society co-develop. The combination of these two claims is a good starting point to further understand the powerful process of knowledge production, as it shapes and is shaped by the sciences, emerging technology, resource management, and environmental value. This thesis argues that a reflexive relationship unfolded between the use of pteropods in the sciences, and their role in popular representation. Marine researchers assigned value to pteropods according to their research goals and the technologies available, which constrained the questions researchers asked about pteropods. That process of knowledge generation influenced the emergence of pteropods in popular representation. How the value of pteropods were

represented in turn influenced the very process of scientific inquiry that made pteropods real, and valuable to begin with. In the case of groundfish, in the same way that policy and economy acted as constraining factors, so too have the complex relationships between scientific inquiry, technological choice, and data within the traditional ecological inference paradigm. The datasets needed to move the predictive power of the sciences forward was not available, so they had no incentive to develop them further. In turn, if management could not incorporate new datasets (like the ones collected nearshore, or with video), there was no incentive to make new, possibly better datasets available. This caused an iterative process of mutual stagnation between ecological inference and environmental decision making. An additional chapter provides analysis of the authors own approach to knowledge generation and future directions for critical ocean studies. For example, experiences on interdisciplinary research projects, and the exploration of mixed methods in individual scholarship, provided unique opportunities to apply both traditional and non-traditional humanities methods to the study of political ecology, which has until recently been dominated by the field of geography. As the ocean is made knowable through the sciences, studying the enigma of scientific production is critical to understanding the politics of nature. Political ecology, it turns out, has nothing to do with the environment separate from us, out there somewhere. Instead it engages with how the ocean is measured, represented, and composed; how it is taken into account, and put into order.

The Space Between: How We Understood, Valued, and Governed the Ocean Through the Process of Marine Science and Emerging Technologies

by Samantha Newton

A THESIS

submitted to

Oregon State University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

Presented December 11, 2018 Commencement June 2019

Master of Arts thesis of Samantha Newton presented on December 11, 2018

APPROVED:

Major Professor, representing Environmental Arts and Humanities

Director of the Environmental Arts and Humanities

Dean of the Graduate School

I understand that my thesis will become part of the permanent collection of Oregon State University libraries. My signature below authorizes release of my thesis to any reader upon request.

Samantha Newton, Author

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author expresses sincere appreciation to the many faculty of Oregon State University that helped me on my way including my committee (Jake Hamblin, Ray Malewitz, Lorenzo Ciannelli, and GCR Chris Langdon) as well as others that made my work possible through mentorship and support like Al Shay, Alix Gitelman, Ana Spalding, Brenda McCullough, Charles Robinson, Dana Warren, Flaxen Conway, Fuxin Li, Julia Jones, Julie Green, Lissy Goralnik, Michael Nelson, and Ricardo Letellier. Additionally, the author would like to especially thank Environmental Arts and Humanities Program Manager Carly Lettero for her unconditional leadership, friendship, and mentorship; her abundant support was incredibly meaningful. Special thanks also goes to Barbara Muraca for making the time to guide me through the bottomless abyss that is Bruno Latour. Thank you also to: The Department of Microbiology and Steve Giovannoni for trusting me with your worlds and forever altering the trajectory of my creative practice and scholarship; to the School of Art and Communication, for taking a chance on me (I hope you see that as a win as much as I did); to the Environmental Arts and Humanities initiative for giving me the space to take academic and creative risks; and finally to the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Science for including this environmental humanities student in efforts to better understand and communicate changing ocean conditions. I am grateful to Amy Maas, the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Science, David Murphy, and the National Academies’ Keck Futures Initiative for orchestrating and funding Swimming in Sea Butterflies, and to the National Science Foundation’s National Research Traineeship fellowship for funding Emerging Technologies in Fisheries Science. Kudos to the anonymous professors, peers, and mentors (you know who you are) that accepted me—with my rough edges and big dreams—and encouraged me to push boundaries and question dominate paradigms of knowledge and scholarship.

CONTRIBUTION OF AUTHORS

Chapters three and four were completed in partial fulfillment of the OSU NRT program in Risk and Uncertainty quantification in marine science and policy (an author contributions visual can be found in Figure 20). Chapter three was co-authored by Katlyn Haven and Alrik

Firl. Although I am the primary author for all the text in chapter four, some of the work I discuss was made possible through collaboration with Haven and Firl.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Chapter One: Introduction ...... 1 Taking the Oceanic Turn ...... 1 Concepts and Applications ...... 6

Chapter Two: Pteropods Realized ...... 14 Swimming in Sea Butterflies: An Interdisciplinary Approach ...... 14 Changing Ocean Conditions ...... 16 Pteropods as Bio-Indicators ...... 25 Seeing Pteropods ...... 32 Chapter Two Summary ...... 50

Chapter Three: Groundfish Realized ...... 54 The Measurement and Management of Fish: An Interdisciplinary Approach ...... 54 The Value of Northeastern Pacific Groundfish in Oregon ...... 56 Measuring Groundfish (Part I): Institutions ...... 63 Measuring Fish (Part II): Individuals ...... 66 Managing Fish (Part I): Best Scientific Information Available ...... 74 Managing Fish (Part II): Fish Under Risk ...... 80 Chapter Three Summary ...... 83

Chapter Four: Critical Ocean Studies ...... 85 An Essay on Interdisciplinary and Amodern Approaches to Political Ecology ...... 85 Forming and Articulating Collectives ...... 88 Approaching the Gordian Knot (Part I): Together ...... 95 Approaching the Gordian Knot (Part II): Individually ...... 104 Chapter Four Summary ...... 108

Chapter Five: Conclusion ...... 111 The Space Between ...... 111

Bibliography ...... 115 Appendix ...... 124 Acronym Glossary ...... 125

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

Figure 1: International Polar Year Stamp (2010) ...... 32

Figure 2: L. helicina by Russ Hopcroft ...... 32

Figure 3: Limacina helicina (2011). Cornelia Kubler Kavanaugh...... 33

Figure 4: Sea Butterfly Upwelling (2016). Lily Simonson...... 34

Figure 5: Pteropod: Limacina helicina (2012). Cecile Derel...... 34

Figure 6: C. pyrimidata (2007). David Liittschwager...... 37

Figure 7: Photography from Fabry's lab. (2007) David Liittschwager...... 38

Figure 8: Oyster Seed (2011). David Liittschwager...... 39

Figure 9: L. helicina (2010). David Liittschwager...... 40

Figure 10: 2009 Cover of Oceanography ...... 42

Figure 11: Steve Ringman's iconic pteropod photo ...... 45

Figure 12: Ringman's photo on the cover of pH ...... 47

Figure 13: Alexander Semenov and the cover of Nature Climate Change (2015) ...... 48

Figure 14: Still capture of David Murphys fluid mechanics video ...... 49

Figure 15: Unidentified Flatfish (2018). Samm Newton...... 57

Figure 16: Beam trawl research timeline sketch, by Lorenzo Ciannelli ...... 71

Figure 17: Visual representation of author contributions as required by the OSU NRT ...... 84

Figure 18: Latour's purification & translation from We Have Never Been Modern...... 89

Figure 19: Amy Maas and Samm Newton collaborating on the series Through Water (2018). .. 99

Figure 20: Amodern approach to studying collectives via The Politics of Nature ...... 105

Chapter One: Introduction

“It is impossible to understand what is happening to us without turning to the sciences – the sciences have been the first to sound the alarm. And yet, to understand them, it is impossible to settle for the image offered by the old epistemology; the sciences are now and will remain from now on so intermingled with the entire culture that we need to turn to the humanities to understand how they really function. Hence a hybrid style for a hybrid subject addressed to a necessarily hybrid audience.”1

Taking the Oceanic Turn

There is something that happens to human skin when enveloped in the ocean’s salt air—it is an exfoliating experience unmatched in the natural world, save maybe the weight of the sea’s great waves crashing upon your chest. Fifty-nine years after Rachel Carson first published The

Sea Around Us, a best-selling book inviting the American public to go to the ocean, see the sea, and know the unknown, Sylvia Earle eloquently reminded us that “even if you never have the chance to see or touch the ocean, the ocean touches you with every breath you take, every drop of water you drink, every bite you consume.”2

The human-ocean interface is a political one. Oceanographers, engineers, explorers, naturalists, and the public have pushed the boundaries of how deep we can dive into that dark blue abyss that is Earth’s oceans. Even now, after more than 50 years of new discoveries and expanded exploration, 95% of the ocean remains unexplored.3 The high seas, what some would consider Earth’s last true wilderness, have been idealized as a final frontier, an imaginary concept, for precisely this reason, and we have been quite industrious in figuring out how to

1 Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia. (Polity Press, 2017), 11. 2 Sylvia A. Earle. The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One. Washington, D.C.:National Geographic, 2009. 3 “Oceans & Coasts,” NOAA, www.noaa.gov/oceans-coasts, (accessed November 24, 2017).

2 immerse our terrestrial selves within it.4 William Bebe and his invention of the bathysphere, the first deep sea submersible, Jacques Cousteau’s introduction of the Self Contained Underwater

Breathing Apparatus (SCUBA) just a few years later, along with the many more technological advances that followed took us deep below the surface of the ocean.5 What could change our relationship with the ocean more than a device that allows us to enter it for science, leisure, exploration, treasure hunting, foraging, even drilling—for whatever our hearts desired? What does our relationship with the ocean even look like, and why does it matter? How that relationship influenced our understandings of, and attitudes toward the ocean is at the heart of how I approach political ecology. I wish I could call it political oceanology, because the words ecology and environment are so often correlated with terrestrial systems, and they are also so often used to “designate the beings of nature considered from afar, through the shelter of bay windows, something other than ourselves.”6 Yet, we are a species inextricably bound to every facet of marine systems, from the geography of the seafloor and the resources held there, to the dissolved organic carbon moving in and out of microbial ecosystems, to the charismatic megafauna that captures our imagination and fills our bellies. Water may only cover 71% of the

Earth’s surface, but it constitutes 99% of the planet’s habitable space. Of that glorious life providing liquid, 96% of it is saline, and contains an estimated two million different species, possibly more. International waters, also referred to as the high seas comprise 64% of those salt water environments. Because over one third of the global population lives near the other 33% of

4 Gary Kroll, America’s Ocean Wilderness: A Cultural History of Twentieth-Century Exploration (Lawrence, Kan: University Press of Kansas, 2008). 5 Craig Mcclain, “Archangel with Aqua-Lung.(BIOGRAPHY)(Jacques Cousteau: The Sea King)(Book Review),” American Scientist 98, no. 4 (2010): 354–55. 6 Latour, Facing Gaia, 14.

3 the ocean, those coastal ecosystems in particular play a huge role in the well-being of humans.7

The ocean as a whole provides air for us to breathe and the tolerable climate in which we reside.

Most of the oxygen produced by photosynthesis comes from the ocean, and it is also responsible

8 for cycling at least half of the CO2 introduced into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels.

Excess CO2 is causing problems for marine systems that are compounded by rising global temperatures, an extractive economy, and poor land use practices during a time of rapid climate change. Bruno Latour suggests that the problem of climate change, what is often referred to as an ecological crisis, “should instead be called a profound mutation in our relation to the world.”9

Initially, this idea of a fractured relationship perpetuates modern, dualist ideas; it suggests two worlds, the ocean world and the human one. Latour also writes though that these domains “are at once distant and impossible to separate completely… which means that we are not dealing with domains but rather with one and the same concept divided into two parts, which turn out to be bound together by a sturdy rubber band.” 10 Hence, understanding how we are bound together, delving into that rubber band, is critical for future social and environmental justice.

Political ecology proves to be the best term then to describe this work that seeks to understand what the oceans, the politics, and the sciences have to do with one another in creating collectives. Latour argues that since the ocean is made knowable through the sciences, studying the enigma of scientific production is critical to understanding the politics of nature, or in this case, the ocean. Scientific knowledge production does not happen in a vacuum and is shrouded

7 Linwood et.al. "Assessing the Value of Marine and Coastal Ecosystem Services in the Sargasso Sea." Duke Environmental and Energy Economics Working Paper Series 14, no. 05 (July 2014). 8 "Oceanography | Science Mission Directorate,” NASA, www.science.nasa.gov/earth- science/oceanography, (accessed July 15, 2018). 9 Latour, Facing Gaia, 14. 10 Ibid., 17.

4 in contingency and debate.11 Scientific knowledge is “an embodied cultural practice enabled by instruments, machinery and specific historical conditions.”12 Understanding these intricacies in human-ocean networks makes us better suited to creatively address wicked problems during the

Anthropocene. Wicked problems were characterized by Horst Rittel in a 1973 article concerning design and management.13 The term has since grown and been used to describe a myriad of environmental issues regarding anthropogenic disturbances to global climates and ecosystems.14

Rittel offered ten characteristics of wicked problems still widely used in academic literature, although these four main properties are often cited across disciplines and publishing media as indicative of wicked problems: incomplete or contradictory knowledge, a high number of perspectives and stakeholders, high cost or economic burden, and the interconnected nature of these problems with other problems.15 The mutation in our relation to the ocean certainly creates many wicked problems under these guidelines, and their wicked nature also makes the ocean political.

Understanding the political ocean requires open, critical scholarship and an “oceanic turn.” In the 2008 book, America’s Ocean Wilderness, Gary Kroll argues that 20th century exploration turned the ocean into a wilderness frontier, abstracting it in the American mind. It was a marine take on previous work from William Cronon who argued that concepts of the

11 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 12 Koffman, Ava. “Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher, Mounts a Defense of Science.” New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-latour-post-truth- philosopher-science.html (accessed November 19, 2018). 13 Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4, no. 2 (1973): 155–69. 14 Peter J. Balint, Wicked Environmental Problems: Managing Uncertainty and Conflict (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2011). 15 Jon Kolko, Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving: A Handbook & a Call to Action (Austin, Tex: ac4d, 2012).

5 wilderness set it outside of us, creating a mythical place that didn’t really exist. Cronon also remarked that “if wildness can stop being out there and start being in here, it can start being as human as it is natural, then perhaps we can get on with the unending task of struggling to live rightly in the world—not just in the wilderness, but in the home that encompasses them both.”16

Kroll suggests a similar idea. “Can the transformation of the ocean into a wilderness frontier truly be a reason for the failure of a benign human-ocean relationship to materialize in attitude as well as practice?” He pointed out many advancements made in oceanic thinking, specifically during the 60’s and 70’s: Carson’s The Sea Around Us was published, Sylvia Earle led the first team of all female aquanauts in an underwater habitat off the Florida Keys, the Stratton

Commission led to the creation of NOAA, the report Our Nation and the Sea warned of oceans in crisis, Jacque Cousteau, Eugenia Clark and Carson were speaking out on ocean pollution and dumping, and the Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act was established. Yet, fifty years later it would seem the state of the human-ocean network hasn’t improved much even though there has been a similar resurgence in oceanic thinking evidenced by continuous reauthorizations of the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Conservation and Management Act (MSA), countless nonprofits focused on ocean advocacy, and continued research and science communication echoing the oceans-in-crisis message.17 Kroll wrote that it all seemed eerily familiar. “What happened,” he asked? His answer is underwhelming: “answers to this important question are better left to historians of ocean policy and international diplomacy.”18 This response is inadequate because it suggests that we piece the history of the ocean apart. But to

16 William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, 1st ed (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1995). 17 Mike McGinnis, “Restoring Our Contract with Nature and the Ocean Commons,” Pacific Ecologist, no. 20 (January 1, 2011): 55–61. 18 Kroll, America’s Ocean Wilderness, 191.

6 truly understand wicked problems and their overlap with human-ocean networks requires, a turn towards amodern approaches in the environmental humanities and engaging in critical ocean studies in increasingly open ways is essential. Elizabeth DeLoughrey believes an “oceanic turn allows for a radical re-thinking of imaginaries, of materialist ecologies, and of praxis.”19 She also argues that an interdisciplinary turn is “vital to figuring the more-than-human Anthropocene.20

As J.R. McNeil writes, environmental history is as “interdisciplinary as intellectual pursuits can get.” Although, according to McNeil and Bolster environmental history as a field has had a terrestrial bias and environmental thinkers and writers generally have had “more to say about the land than the sea,” further separating the ocean from the concept of nature and supporting the need for an oceanic turn.21

Concepts and Applications

The following chapters seek to apply an open, critical, and interdisciplinary approach to epistemological and ontological understandings of the ocean. How was knowledge of the ocean generated, and how has it changed? What has been the role of knowledge generation at the human ocean interface? The thesis begins with Critical Ocean Studies, an essay on interdisciplinary and amodern approaches to political ecology that expands on my personal approach to critical ocean studies and lays out my process of knowledge inquiry. The following

19 “The Oceanic Turn - ACLA 2018 - ASLE,” accessed November 22, 2018, https://www.asle.org/calls-for-papers/oceanic-turn-acla-2018/. 20 Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “Submarine Futures of the Anthropocene,” Comparative Literature 69, no. 1 (March 1, 2017): 32–44. 21 W. Jeffrey Bolster, “Opportunities in Marine Environmental History,” Environmental History 11, no. 3 (2006): 567–97; J. R. Mcneill, “Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History,” History and Theory 42, no. 4 (2003): 5–43.

7 chapters, Pteropods Realized and Groundfish Realized, apply that process to analyze frameworks of ecological inference (or generally how humans have gone about knowing nature) and the many iterative relationships among the process of ecological inference and environmental thinking and decision making (or generally how humans have gone about valuing and governing nature). Both chapters look at the role of the sciences and technology, specifically video, in the process of ecological inference and how that is wrapped up with human attitudes towards the ocean during a time of planetary vulnerability. They look at how things come together, and attempts to employ an anti-systematic, amodern approach to marine environmental humanistic scholarship. Environmental history, unlike more traditional histories, tends to focus on processes and forces, rather than the stories of individuals; I attempt to do both. I argue that the human- ocean interface was changed most not by what we know about the ocean; instead it was sensitive to how the ocean was known. In both chapters, that claim is examined through looking at the choices and stories of individuals in light of larger processes and forces.

Tommy Tranvik and Bruno Latour propose a hybrid approach to understanding the role of sciences and technology in composing collectives. Tranvik argues that merging determinism and constructionism can show a more accurate depiction of reality, and in Aramis, or The Love of

8 Technology Latour illustrates that technology and society co-develop.22,23 This co-development is possible because of “both the history of humans’ involvement in the making of scientific facts and the sciences’ involvement in the making of human history.”24 The combination of these two claims is a good starting point to further understand the role of sciences and technology in knowledge production, description, and distillation at the intersection of marine values and decision making.

Groundfish Realized, delves into the complex connections among how ecological inferences were made about fish populations and how those populations are managed. Fish life history, abundance, and distribution are key components of the measuring and managing of marine fish, which can be difficult due to their complex life stages, ocean dwelling habitat, migratory cycles, and at times, elusive existence. Marine systems pose challenges as humans cannot easily access them. As a result, the sciences and associated technologies have been the dominant method of knowledge production when it comes to understanding the nature of fish harvested for food. Over time, scientists have chosen methods of technology, sampling analysis, and modeling to collect, examine, and better understand fish populations. Often, that understanding has been used to make decisions about how to manage fish as a natural resource; creating a dynamic and coupled natural-human system. The datasets needed to move the predictive power of fisheries sciences forward was not available, so there was no incentive to develop them further. In turn, if management could not incorporate new datasets (like the ones

22 Tommy Tranvik, Michael Thompson, and Per Selle, Doing Technology (and Democracy) the Pack-Donkey’s Way: The Technomorphic Approach to ICT Policy (Oslo: Makt- og demokratiutredningen 1998-2003, 1999). 23 Bruno Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology, 4. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2002). 24 Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999).

9 collected nearshore, or with video), there was no incentive to make new, possibly better datasets available. This caused an iterative process of mutual stagnation between ecological inference and environmental decision making.

Pteropods Realized examines how the process of ecological inference was mirrored in popular representation. Ocean acidification is a relatively new field of study, with 62% of the research papers on the subject published since 2004.25 Pteropods were a big part of that research, and how humans studied and communicated changing ocean conditions. The associations of attitudes towards pteropods, and societal understandings of them was not built upon what we have known about pteropods, but by the compound associations at play in how (and why) we came to know them. This expands on the questions posed by Latour in The Politics of Nature— does the process of ecological inference mirror the world, or does the world mirror what is learned from ecological inference (or is it more complicated than that)?26 These questions are a good starting point to further understand the role of sciences, technology, and value in marine environments; as they shape, and are shaped by, one another. Similar work was done by Stephen

Kellert in relation to whales. He argued that whale’s scientific value was paralleled in popular representation and significant shifts in government policies.27 Kellert outlined the different ways in which humans value marine environments: utilitarian, aesthetic, humanistic, dominionistic, moralistic, negativistic, symbolic, and scientific. However, he claimed that the human need to

25 SCOR; IAEA. Marine Environmental Laboratories. International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme. “Ocean Acidification: A Summary for Policymakers from the Second Symposium on the Ocean in a High-CO2 World,” Sweeden: Stockholm, IGBP Secretariat, 2009.

26 Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). 27 Dorinda G Dallmeyer, Values at Sea: Ethics for the Marine Environment (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2003).

10 know the world was independent of culture and history, which is in opposition to how Latour suggests we approach understanding these processes. The blue part of our planet is teeming with natural scientists that communicate the state of the sea to a society concerned about an uncertain future. This tension among the cultures and sciences is a dizzying, whirling entangled knot that exemplifies the inseparable realms of the natural and the social, the human and the nonhuman.

Latour writes that “it seems obvious to everyone, and not only to historians of science, that we are immersed in a history that can no longer be deanimated.”28

My individual research, further analyzed in Critical Ocean Studies, seeks to complicate and animate the interface between humans and the ocean through studying the complex networks in constant reflexive flux among ecological inferences, human cultures, and marine environments. Latour suggests that research of this nature can be approached through the science of associations, which is wrapped up in his development of Actor-Network-Theory.29 My interpretation of his framework, a translation of his ideas, is what guides my individual scholarly methods, and provides the flexibility needed to be open and critical in my individual research.

Gerard de Vries eloquently summarizes Latour’s five methodological propositions.

“A first trick is to study innovation, the practice in which mediators are introduced or invented and in which they have not been stabilized… A second one is to take distance. Archaeologists have to reinvent the use of the artefacts they have found on site; ethnologists have to do the same with the artefacts of other cultures… A third trick is to study accidents, breakdowns and strikes… Fourthly, one can bring the role of objects as mediators to light by using archives, documents and historical accounts. Finally, one can use one's imagination… Latour even illustrated the mediation of objects by using a comic book.”30

28 Latour, Facing Gaia, 52. 29 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007). 30 Gerard de Vries, Bruno Latour, Key Contemporary Thinkers (Cambridge Malden, MA: Polity, 2016).

11 My translation of de Vries understanding of Latour, along with my own understanding of Latour, gave rise to a transcribed framework for producing knowledge through studying the networks that manufacture human understanding. This framework, a hybrid scholarly style inspired by

Latour’s theories, has defined my disciplinary boundaries, and guided my modes of inquiry into political ecology and the human-ocean network. Latour’s five suggestions move from theory to practice in my application of them through employing methods from Science and Technology

Studies (STS), Environmental History, Critical Theory, and Creative Practice. I navigate the discipline of contemporary marine environmental history in novel ways. Environmental history—defined loosely as the study of mutual relations between humankind and the rest of nature, and the desire to bring nonhuman worlds into the story as equal players—is an appropriate vehicle for researching the human-ocean interface.31 McNeil also writes that traditional environmental history has been divided into the material, cultural/intellectual, and political. Hayley Brazier argues that marine environmental history has four common conceptual frameworks: the coastal ocean, the oceanic stage, the technological ocean, and the timeless ocean.32 There are arguably more concepts that complicate those boundaries; in her example ice crosses all these boundaries. Work from people like Carmel Finley and Michael Weber also show how the economic ocean and the role of commercial hunting and resource extraction complicates those boundaries.33 In Latour’s cosmopolitics, these too are all distant but

31 McNeill, “Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History.” 32 Hayley Brazier, “Ice and the Ocean: Re-Envisioning the Difference Between Land and Sea” (Poster, March 14, 2018). 33 Carmel Finley, All the Fish in the Sea: Maximum Sustainable Yield and the Failure of Fisheries Management (Chicago ; London: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Michael Weber, From Abundance to Scarcity: A History of U.S. Marine Fisheries Policy (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002).

12 inseparable domains.34 An amodern approach to marine environmental history considers the plurality of reality, and does not consider itself to be in one or any of those domains alone.

Blending STS with environmental history allows for this ability to be here and there at the same time. It brings the enigma of knowledge production into the foreground of how the ocean is

“perceived, contested, and (re)shaped by historical actors.”35 STS combined with environmental history has the potential to “deepen and sometimes even transform, our understanding of past human-natural interactions.”36 Additionally, in their collection of essays, Knowing Nature,

Goldman, Nadasdy, and Turner assembled several essays at the intersection of political ecology and STS, and believe that the domains need to be addressed collectively.

“The production of environmental scientific knowledge is shaped by management goals and directives as well as widely circulated ideas about society and the environment… These and other questions which transcend the conventionally understood divisions of production, application, and circulation of knowledge, need to be addressed for us to understand the politics surrounding most environmental problems.”37

A hybrid scholarly style allows me to broach the complexities of reality and approach the world with the openness of an artist, and the critical methods of a scholar. The divide between art and sciences supposedly arose in the 19th century.38 A similar divide remains in scholarship. I have been told that in the pursuit of higher education, of knowledge generation, one must be either a producer of material, or an analyst of material, a form of traditional academic

34 Mcneill, “Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History.” 35 Dolly Jorgensen, Finn Arne Jorgensen, and Sara B. Pritchard, eds., New Natures: Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology Studies (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 2. 36 Ibid., 2. 37 Mara Goldman, Paul Nadasdy, and Matt (Matthew D. ) Turner, Knowing Nature: Conversations at the Intersection of Political Ecology and Science Studies (Chicago ; London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 3. 38 Stefan Helmreich and Caroline A. Jones, “Science/Art/Culture Through an Oceanic Lens,” Annual Review of Anthropology 47, no. 1 (October 21, 2018): 97–115.

13 gatekeeping that demeans the knowledge embodied in visual artefact. The contemporary arguments about the similarities and differences between art, sciences, and other scholarship, artist and scholar, are too many to cover in this manuscript. But, one notable difference between many artists and traditional scholars is how they approach knowledge generation. Artists rely on their subject matter to direct their methods. It is often their topic or material that guides the lines of inquiry they pursue. Scholars are trained in particular methods. They can approach any topic and will use the methods they know to interrogate it. I am an artist. Not in that I woke up one day and told the world it was so, or that I spent so much time creating that it became so, but because my mind approaches the world and asks, what is the best way for me to better understand this? If

I am not trained in the best way, I learn the way by letting my material speak to me. The ocean spoke to me, it is my material, and my interest—the human-ocean interface—demanded I explore all the spaces in-between that were missed, forgotten, and have been knocking at the door for too long without an answer. And, Latour’s concept of cosmopolitics provides the framework necessary to interrogate human understandings of, and attitudes towards, marine environments. The future of environmental history rests on the ability of scholars to build “real intellectual bridges to the territories of other specialists.”39 This approach to knowledge generation mirrors successful work on interdisciplinary teams in that it abandons pure disciplinarity and makes space for topic-based scholarship that is still constrained enough to be considered rigorous and critical, but is open enough to contribute novel perspectives to existing discourse.

39 McNeill, “Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History,” 9.

14 Chapter Two: Pteropods Realized

Swimming in Sea Butterflies: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Dr. Amy Maas did not begin her research career with marine invertebrates; she began with much larger and recognizable ocean organisms—whales (ancient ones). Her work may have started with a nonhuman creature of established value and prestige, but after several scientific cruises to the Ross Sea, her gaze unintentionally shifted to an animal whose value was less certain. After those first cruises to Antarctica, she built a career researching the life history, biology, and ecology of open ocean, migratory zooplankton. Scientists from all over continue to travel to the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Science (BIOS) to work with her because of her almost superhuman ability to find, identify, and experiment on tiny aquatic creatures. The geomorphology of Bermuda, along with the establishment of the Bermuda Atlantic Time Series

(BATS), has made BIOS an ideal location for studying zooplankton ecology, like that of tiny pelagic snails, also known as pteropods, or sea butterflies. She once joked that it was her excellent eyesight that made her so good at her job. Maas is one of the best in the world at working with zooplankton, not only because of her 20/20 vision.

“I learned how to do some more things that other people didn’t know how to do, I start doing this gene expression stuff in invertebrates. Other people do them first, but I try really hard to do them better. To do it well. I’ve never been first in any of the research that I’ve gotten out. But I always do it better. Unfortunately, first things still get cited more. But my work gets cited more widely because I use good techniques and methodologies… I also know how to put little critters in chambers, and make them breathe and pee.”40

Maas has worked with researchers across disciplines—engineers, chemists, artists, historians, writers, and a variety of oceanographers. Although her work involves marine

40 Amy Maas. Interviewed by Samm Newton. November 5, 2018.

15 invertebrates of all sorts, much of her research has pertained to pteropods. Pteropods, popularly associated with the study of ocean acidification (OA), are commonly referred to as bio-indicators because the chemical make-up of their shell mirrors the ocean waters where they are found.

Their calcium carbonate shells are also sensitive to ocean pH, acting as a proxy for understanding, and possibly predicting, changing ocean conditions. But Maas did not limit her work to ocean chemistry; she had an instinctive curiosity and interest in basic understandings of pteropods and their role in marine ecology. That curiosity led her to collaborations with researchers who were not exclusively interested in OA. Instead, they wanted to study things like the fluid mechanics of how pteropods swim, how their shells are constructed, or even how pteropods fit into existing frameworks of environmental value. What could an engineer design through the study of pteropod locomotion? Could a materials chemist invent the next super material inspired by a pteropod shell? From bio-indication to bio-inspiration, pteropods represent living creature as a tool, at the whim of human desires, and tangled in how society interacts with marine systems.

The current chapter considers the history of how researchers utilized and interrogated pteropods. It looks critically at the associations formed among emerging photography and video technology, teleological perspectives of nature, and marine science, and asks if those connections influenced attitudes toward, or understandings of, the ocean. Closer examination of how pteropods have been studied and valued in recent history provides a platform in which to examine the influential capacity of technology, ecological inference, and popular representation at the intersection of environmental values and changing ocean conditions. For example, a tiny pelagic snail, of which there are many species and countless individuals, exemplifies collaborations between the human and nonhuman, the biotic and abiotic. The use of pteropods in institutional research mirrored their presence in popular representation, vacillating over time.

16 Their value, in and of themselves, was mediated through their role in scientific inquiry, and as a speaker for the open ocean. The story of how humans came to know them is an opportunity to investigate how collectives are formed and articulated (i.e. how human attitudes towards, and understandings of, nature arise).41

A reflexive relationship unfolded between the use of pteropods in the sciences, and their role in popular representation. Marine researchers assigned value to pteropods according to their research goals and the technologies available, which constrained the questions researchers asked about pteropods. That process of knowledge generation influenced the emergence of pteropods in popular representation. How the value of pteropods was represented in popular culture in turn influenced the very process of scientific inquiry that made pteropods real, and valuable to begin with.

Changing Ocean Conditions

The unique nature of shelled pteropods eventually made them an important bio-indicator for changing ocean chemistry. Although, chemical oceanographers largely overlooked the role of biology in the ocean-air carbon pump until around twenty years ago; the materialization of rapid environmental change had to become clear before pteropods made their way to the center of ocean crisis discourse. Human understandings of climate change began in the 19th century and continues to develop through to the present. Excess CO2 has been warming the planet and creating massive changes that affect both human and nonhuman communities.42 But the warming

41 Latour, Reassembling the Social. 42 Bert Bolin, A History of the Science and Politics of Climate Change: The Role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

17 of the planet has not been the only problem created by excess anthropogenic CO2. The “other

CO2 problem,” a term coined by Peter Brewer in 2009, has been developing within the scientific

43 community for over a hundred years. The other CO2 problem is that of ocean acidification. It was once believed that the ocean would absorb any extra CO2, and it is generally accepted that a large fraction of it is taken up by the sea, but the consequences of that process have led to regional fluctuations in pH and carbonate mineral saturation, or ocean acidification. OA has been exacerbated by other compounding factors such as global temperature changes (climate change), widespread pollution, and marine eutrophication (to name a few); the combination of these issues with other risks and uncertainties facing marine systems is now commonly referred to as

“changing oceans”.44

The architecture that built human understandings of changing ocean conditions is worth considering. Roger Revelle was famous for his publication with Hans Suess in 1957.45 They studied climate, and the influence of human combustion, and concluded that the sea could not in

46 fact absorb all excess CO2. Revelle was interested in climatic responses to CO2 and argued passionately at the Committee on Appropriations House of Representatives 85th Congress that work started in the International Geophysical Year (IGY) should receive continued funding. That he would continue to ask them for funding studying the fluctuations of CO2 and fossil fuel combustion required more data over longer periods of time, and were of utmost importance.47

43 Peter G. Brewer and James Barry, “The Other CO2 Problem,” Scientific American 18, no. 4 (2008): 22–23. 44 Richard E. Zeebe, “History of Seawater Carbonate Chemistry, Atmospheric CO2, and Ocean Acidification,” Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 40, no. 1 (2012): 141–65. 45 Roger Revelle and Hans E. Suess, “Carbon Dioxide Exchange Between Atmosphere and Ocean and the Question of an Increase of Atmospheric CO 2 during the Past Decades,” Tellus 9, no. 1 (1957): 18–27. 46 Revelle and Suess. 47 United States et al., “Hearings.” (1958a 1957), 93–110.

18 Inconceivable amounts of data were collected from the oceans during that time, which laid a foundation for the emergence of OA as a scientific, environmental, and cultural concept.

In the past 100 years there were numerous oceanographers, committees, conferences, and published papers that considered the importance of understanding and modeling the oceanic carbon cycle. Everyone from the Office of Naval Research to the National Science Foundation invested heavily in more advanced oceanographic instruments and measuring methodologies, as well as more representative geographic sampling. These ventures brought to the scientific community a wealth of data points indicative of a curiously changing ocean. The data posed challenges for scientists that included gaps in technology as well as the incredibly complex and multidisciplinary nature of the sea. Yet, they still made ecological inferences through scattered and changing information, and continuous knowledge renegotiations about atmospheric and oceanic carbon exchange.

Many publications concerning the global carbon cycle cited Svante Arrhenius as he is famous for developing a calculation to estimate how Earth’s global temperatures would rise as a function of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and his suggestion that the ocean would absorb the excess caused by human combustion. But it is the thoughts of his professor, Arvid Gustaf

Högbom, that seemed to indicate an understanding of carbon equilibrium not fully realized by the scientific community until many decades after Arrhenius published them in 1897.

“The carbon in the air can neither be conceived of as very great, nor as very little, in comparison with the quantity of carbon occurring in organisms. … carbonic acid is not so excessive that changes caused by climatological or other reasons in the velocity and value of that transformation might not be able to cause displacements of the equilibrium… production and consumption of carbonic acid tends to displace this equilibrium.” 48

48 S. Arrhenius and Edward S. Holden, “On The Influence Of Carbonic Acid In The Air Upon The Temperature Of The Earth,” Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 9, no. 54 (1897): 19–20.

It is that exact displacement in equilibrium that was of significance in understanding the carbon cycle. Excess anthropogenic CO2 changed the oceans, and their role was more than just a buffering of global biogeochemistry. Additionally, the link between carbon and marine organisms played a large role in how humans understood OA, and the general chemistry of the ocean.

In 1951, W. W. Rubey published one of the first extensive reviews on the history of seawater and the role of carbon in its chemistry. And while a geologist may seem like an unlikely voice for seawater, Rubey had several insights that would prove useful as knowledge of the ocean’s carbon cycle evolved. Because scientific findings associated with the ocean’s carbon cycle were scattered across disciplines and somewhat patchy, Rubey’s article has been cited regularly in scientific reviews of ocean acidification as a nice compilation and interpretation of research up to 1950’s. Although, one of the more insightful concepts he introduced, not covered by any of those scientific reviews, was a harbinger for the future of OA research. Rubey believed that “the most definite information about the paleochemistry of sea water and atmosphere may come eventually from the biologists.”49 Another observation communicated by Rubey in his grappling with seawater’s geologic past and possible future was that the problem was “likely long to remain one of those hardy perennials that need a new look and reappraisal every few years, as new observations accumulate.” 50 There were tones of self-doubt in his choice of language both in the introduction and conclusion; for example, he writes that perhaps his arguments were just “another case of putting 2 and 2 together and getting 22 instead of 4.”51 His

49 William W. Rubey, “Geologic History Of Sea Water,” Geological Society of America Bulletin 62, no. 9 (1951): 1114. 50 Ibid., 1143. 51 Ibid., 1143.

20 hope was that his review would, if nothing else, stir critical thinking about the problems facing

Earth’s oceans, and the importance of that understanding for humanity. In this, he succeeded. OA is a constantly evolving area of oceanic understanding that is arguably one of the most studied topics in recent oceanographic history.52 And, in the decades after his retirement, enormous efforts were put towards addressing the problems he so poignantly addressed in 1951.

In “Biological Considerations–The Fourth Phase,” at a conference convened for the express purpose of exploring further research needs related to the physical and chemical properties of seawater, Alfred Redfield argued that understanding the biology of the sea would enhance how we understood marine chemistry, and the ocean carbon cycle as well.53 Redfield grew up near the coast, was a born naturalist, was integral to the birth of Woods Hole

Oceanographic Institute (WHOI), and spent his life entangled in the interactions of biology and chemistry.54 It is hard to say now, if at the time, he understood the dots he was connecting. He was a biologist, perhaps the first ocean ecologist before ecology became what we know of it today. He had a firm grasp and deep interest in chemistry as well as biology. He began his career studying animal physiology of marine creatures and in that study of physiology he seemed to be most interested in biochemistry, specifically of blood and respiration.55 In 1929, he published

“The significance of the Bohr effect in the respiration and asphyxiation of the squid, Loligo pealea” with collaborator Robert Goodkind, and reported that the combination of increased CO2

52 JP Gattuso, Ocean Acidification (Oxford [England] ; Oxford University Press (2011). 53 Alfred C. Redfield, Biological Considerations–The Fourth Phase, Conference on Physical and Chemical Properties of Sea Water (Washington: National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council, 1959), 104. 54 Revelle, Roger, “Alfred Redfield,” Biographical Memoirs., no. 67 (1995)., 316 – 317. 55 Ibid., 316 – 317.

21 56 and decreased O2 acidifies the blood leading to death. This work went beyond the contemporary quid pro quo question of carbon absorption, and deeper into the relationship between increased CO2 absorption and organismal biology. In his research on the stoichiometry of the ocean, he set the stage for a line of inquiry essential to the scientific interrogation of the

‘other CO2 problem.’

At the 1958 Conference on Physical and Chemical Properties of Sea Water Redfield had the only paper of seventeen others, that (similarly to Rubey) urged chemical and physical oceanographers take a closer look at biology. Based on his understanding of marine organismal physiology his ideas concerning the relationship between sea water chemistry and marine creatures would become integral to understandings of ocean biogeochemistry and pH. Although,

Redfield was not alone in his pairing of biology and chemistry in the study of ecological systems. There were other scientists who explored these ideas as well. For example, AB

Macallum published two articles, one in 1904 and one in 1926 on paleochemistry that seem to foreshadow Redfield’s work. Macallum posited that the protoplasm and fluids of living creatures mirrored the composition of their environment.57 Macallum’s conjecture was not accepted as fact until Redfield’s 1934 discovery of the famous Redfield Ratio—the idea that the chemistry of the sea mirrored the biological life forms that inhabited it. Additionally, in the earliest days of pH, decades before the scientific community understood that increased atmospheric CO2 lead to a destructive increase in hydrogen ion concentration, Edwin Powers looked at how the hydrogen

56 Alfred C. Redfield and Robert Goodkind, “The Significance of the Bohr Effect in the Respiration and Asphyxiation of the Squid, Loligo Pealei,” Journal of Experimental Biology 6, no. 4 (September 1, 1929): 347. 57 A. B. Macallum, “The Paleochemistry of the Ocean in Relation to Animal and Vegetable Protoplasm,” Transactions of the Canadian Institute, 1904, 535–562; A. B. Macallum, “The Paleochemistry of the Body Fluids and Tissues,” Physiological Reviews 6, no. 2 (April 1, 1926): 316–57.

22 ion concentration of water effected salmon’s ability to absorb oxygen.58 He asphyxiated fish under different pH levels and found that pH was a key factor in their ability to intake oxygen. pH was still in its early days then, being realized just a few years earlier in 1909. There are more articles, published after Redfield’s squid asphyxiation days, that are cited regularly in modern

OA research. For example, both a 1966 article on the effect of pH on frog muscles and a 1988 article on regulation of intracellular pH in eukaryotic cells have both influenced research studying the connection between pH and marine organisms.59

th In the late 20 century, impacts from anthropogenic CO2 were becoming apparent, but how the ocean would be effected was not fully realized until concerted efforts took biota into consideration. In a 1959 report, oceanographers of the US Committee on Oceanography projected that over the following 50 years increased combustion of fossil fuel would lead to a global warming effect. But they still believed in the “great absorptive” abilities of the oceans.60

Even so, the committee (including Revelle) continued to push for more research focused on the carbon cycle to estimate exactly how much of that anthropogenic CO2 could be removed by the sea. The question of how that CO2 would impact the chemistry, and subsequently the biology, of the ocean was still not the specific subject of inquiry. At the International Oceanographic

Congress held the same year, two days, of the twelve-day long congress, were devoted to cycles

58 Edwin B. Powers, “The Physiology Of The Respiration Of Fishes In Relation To The Hydrogen Ion Concentration Of The Medium,” The Journal of General Physiology 4, no. 3 (January 20, 1922): 305–17. 59 (I H Madshus, “Regulation of Intracellular PH in Eukaryotic Cells.,” Biochemical Journal250, no. 1 (February 15, 1988): 1–8; Bakula Trivedi and William H. Danforth, “Effect of PH on the Kinetics of Frog Muscle Phosphofructokinase,” Journal of Biological Chemistry241, no. 17 September 10, 1966): 4110–14; Trivedi’s article has been cited over 600 times, much of it marine science work. The Madshus article similarly has been cited over 500 times. 60 National Research Council (U. S.). Committee on Oceanography, “Oceanography, 1960 to 1970.,” Basic Research in Oceanography During the Next Ten Years (Washington: National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council, 1959), 17.

23 of organic and inorganic substances in the ocean, with even more special attention to chemistry and air-sea exchange.61 In discussing interactions between aragonites, calcites, and magnesium calcites with seawater, The Marine Chemistry Panel (1968 – 70) used words like “perplexing,”

“primitive,” and “obscure” to define the scientific community’s level of understanding on the subject.62 Those specific chemical interactions would become critical to understanding biological

st responses to increased CO2 absorption at the turn of the 21 century, and the role of marine organisms in OA research. In the 1970’s, the “fate of fossil fuel CO2 in the oceans” became more visible in existing scientific discourse. For example, Roger Pytkowiz presented at both the 1971

Nobel Symposium on the changing chemistry of the oceans, and at the 1976 symposium of the

Ocean Science and Technology Division of the Office of Naval Research on a new way of considering the oceanic carbon cycle.63,64 He applauded Revelle and Suess for their early work on air-seawater exchange, but criticized them for not including biota in their calculations. The

Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS) ran from 1984 to 2004 and focused specifically on biogeochemistry—the coupled nature of chemical, physical, and biological marine processes—to earnestly address the ocean’s buffering capacity.

“The importance of the ocean in the natural regulation of atmospheric CO2 levels was recognized more than 60 years ago. However, lack of data from many regions and the difficulty of making precise and accurate measurements have, until recently, hampered calculations of the distribution and amounts of carbon in

61 L. Fage, Hill, M.N., and Sears, Mary, “News and Notes,” Deep Sea Research and Oceanographic Abstracts 5, no. 4 (May 1, 1959): 319–20. 62 National Research Council (U.S.), ed., Marine Chemistry; a Report (Washington: National Academy of Sciences, 1971); National Research Council (U.S.), ed., Applications of Analytical Chemistry to Oceanic Carbon Cycle Studies (Washington, D.C: National Academy Press, 1993). 63 W. S. Broecker et al., “Fate of Fossil Fuel Carbon Dioxide and the Global Carbon Budget,” Science 206, no. 4417 (October 26, 1979): 7–23. 64 Pytkowicz, R.M., “The Chemical Stability of the Oceans and the CO2 System,” in Twentieth Nobel Symposium Held 16 - 20th August, 1971 at Aspenäsgården, Lerum and ... Göteborg, ed. David Dyrssen (The changing chemistry of the oceans, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell [u.a.], 1972), 147–60.

24 various forms in the ocean and the exchange of CO2 within the atmosphere. Conceptual advances that fostered a better understanding of ocean ecosystems and biogeochemical cycles were needed as well.”65

The goals of the JGOFS was to better understand, on a global scale, the processes that affect fluxes in carbon, and to look specifically at anthropogenic perturbations of those processes. The data collected from the JGOFS not only provided information about what was happening right then in the oceans, but how the ocean had changed over geological time; to make observations far beyond what could be made in one’s academic career, or what was available before the late

20th century.

The JGOFS implemented multiple times series in this effort, most notably the Hawaiian

Ocean Time Series (HOT) and the Bermuda Atlantic Time Series (BATS). A 2001 report concluded that “the sampling record at each station shows that the concentration of dissolved

66 inorganic carbon is increasing as a result of the increase in atmospheric CO2.” Data from over

1000 cruises associated with the JGOFS was made available to the public and after that report in

2001, great scientific attention was directed at the other CO2 problem. And, after the 2003 paper by Ken Caldeira and Michael Wickett describing how OA was taking shape in the oceans, hundreds of papers were written and multiple international scale programs have funded, and directly encouraged, scientists to explore how OA would impact human and nonhuman nature.67,68 Among that early 2000’s era research, pteropods surfaced as the biota key to not only understanding air-seawater exchange (per Pytkowiz’s suggestion), but also as a symbol that

65 Michael J. R. Fasham, Beatriz M. Balino, and Margaret Bowles, “A New Vision of Ocean Biogeochemistry after a Decade of Teh Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS),” AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment Special Report Number 10 (May 2001): 4. 66 Fasham, Balino, and Bowles, 22. 67 Ken Caldeira and Michael E. Wickett, “Oceanography: Anthropogenic Carbon and Ocean PH,” Nature 425, no. 6956 (September 25, 2003): 365–365.

25 ignited further contemplation on the value of marine environments and public understandings of changing ocean conditions.

Pteropods as Bio-Indicators

In the 1852 editor’s letter of Histoire Naturelle des Mollusques Ptéropodes J.-B.

Baillière prefaced that first expansive work on pteropods by telling the story of how the 82-page manuscript was cobbled together after (among other things) death and abandonment of the project. He felt obligated to finish it because it was partially completed and had already been cited by other naturalists. So, he hired Paul Charles Léonard Alexandre Rang and Louis François

Auguste Souleyet to complete the work. The last line of that letter states “j’espère que les naturalistes accueilleront favorablement un ouvrage qui manquait à la science, et qui se recommande par les noms de deux observateurs justement estimés,” meaning he hoped that naturalists would welcome the work, since an in-depth natural history of pteropods wasn’t available before that time.69 Later, at the end of the introduction Rang and Souleyet write that little is known about pteropods, like what they eat, how they reproduce, and their relationships with the currents.

“Les circonstances particulières du séjour des Ptéropodes sont encore peu connues ; tous les naturalistes qui se sont livrés à la recherche de ces mollusques savent que, dans certains points, l’on ne rencontre que des individus isolés ou en petit nombre, tandis que, dans d’autres, ils forment quelquefois des bancs considérables.”70

69 Sander Rang and Louis François Auguste Souleyet, Histoire Naturelle Des Mollusques Ptéropodes : Monographie Comprenant La Description de Toutes Les Espèces de Ce Groupe de Mollusques (À Paris : Chez J.-B. Baillière;, 1852). 70 Rang and Souleyet.

26 This is of note because over a hundred years later in 1989 Carol M. Lalli and Ronald W. Gilmer express strikingly similar remarks in the introduction to their book, Pelagic Snails. While

Pelagic Snails wasn’t exclusive to pteropods, as was Rang and Souleyet’s, pteropods (along with heteropods) dominated the content through three of their five chapters.

“The purpose of this book is to draw attention to some unusual and poorly known gastropods that are highly specialized for life in the open ocean… Although these animals have been known and studied since the late seventeenth century, much of the information has remained scattered in scientific journals, expedition reports, or specialized monographs.” 71

The main monographs they were referring to are presumably those published by Rang and

Souleyet in 1852. Pteropods entered the gaze of many naturalists, as stated, in the late seventeenth century mainly by Georges Cuvier, but initially first recorded into history by

Friderich Martens in 1675 after spending time on a Norwegian whaling expedition.72 Although, much of the work by Cuvier and other early zoologoists before Rang and Souleyet’s monographs were of a taxonomic nature—describing and grouping the new alien wonders they had found and naming them accordingly. The details of their biology and habitat were widely unknown because of their affinity for the open ocean, and the specimens that naturalists had to work with were few and far between. Their knowledge of these planktonic gastropods was also misconstrued as much of their work was based on observations of individuals that were seriously damaged by the process of retrieving them from the sea. Lalli and Gilmer sought to remedy that by only working with pristine specimens and in situ research.73 Their work remains widely cited in contemporary research involving pteropods.

71 Carol M. Lalli and Ronald W. Gilmer, Pelagic Snails: The Biology of Holoplanktonic Gastropod Mollusks (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1989). 72 Chev Cuvier, “Le règne animal distribué d’après son organisation, etc.,” Bibliothèque Universelle des Sciences, Belles-Lettres, et Arts 4 (1817): 41. 73 Lalli and Gilmer, Pelagic Snails.

27 Lalli and Gilmer continued to do research on pteropod biology and ecology, although by the early 2000’s there was still little known about things like life cycles or metabolism.74

However, research was beginning to suggest that they played an important role in carbon flux.75

Also, during that time, large multi-institutional research findings, coordinated by James Orr,

Richard Feely, Brad Siebel, Victoria Fabry and others, claimed that anthropogenic CO2 would change ocean chemistry and negatively impact marine organisms—chief among them, pteropods.76 Pteropods were found to be essential in the production of aragonite, a form of calcium carbonate whose saturation contributes to ocean pH. Their aragonite shells were sensitive to pH as well. They became a proxy, a bio-indicator, a tool, that researchers used to study and predict the impacts of OA.

Several factors influenced the OA research boom, and subsequently the emergence of pteropods as a bio-indicator in ecological inference. The 1996 IPCC Report on Climate Change warned of serious impacts from increased anthropogenic CO2 , the 2001 JGOFS report was released, the 2003 Caldeira and Wicket paper was published, and a 2005 report from the Royal

Society of London claimed outright that ocean acidification was increasing.77 By 2011, funding

74 Ae Maas et al., “Metabolic Response of Antarctic Pteropods (Mollusca: Gastropoda) to Food Deprivation and Regional Productivity,” Marine Ecology Progress Series 441 (November 15, 2011): 129–39. 75 Susumu Honjo, “Particle Export and the Biological Pump in the Southern Ocean,” Antarctic Science 16, no. 4 (2004): 501–516; Susumu Honjo et al., “Particle Fluxes to the Interior of the Southern Ocean in the Western Pacific Sector along 170°W,” Deep-Sea Research Part II 47, no. 15 (2000): 3521–3548. 76 James C. Orr et al., “Anthropogenic Ocean Acidification over the Twenty-First Century and Its Impact on Calcifying Organisms,” Nature 437, no. 7059 (September 2005): 681–86; Brad Seibel and V.J. Fabry, “Marine Biotic Response to Elevated Carbon Dioxide,” Advances in Applied Biodiversity Science 4 (January 1, 2003): 59–67. 77 Fasham, Balino, and Bowles, “A New Vision of Ocean Biogeochemistry after a Decade of Teh Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS).” Caldeira and Wickett, “Oceanography.” Royal Society (Great Britain), Ocean Acidification Due to Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. (London: Royal Society, 2005).

28 was made available from organizations like the National Science Foundation (NSF), reports about OA were created for US policy-makers, and NOAA established its OA program. Another forcing factor was the Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery crisis that began around 2007 in the

Pacific Northwest and continued for several years. It was an economic crisis, impacting oyster fisheries from California to Canada, caused by regional manifestations of OA. OA became a tangible threat in the American mind, and a lot of applied work went into understanding the impacts OA on oyster larvae and other vulnerable species. 78 Although oysters, a food enjoyed by many Americans, were at the center of that crisis, the pteropod was still the creature that dominated OA research.

In 2007 and 2008 Amy Maas went on her first scientific cruises to the Antarctic during graduate school at the University of Rhode Island; it was a trip studying pteropods, the Southern

Ocean, and ocean acidification. Although, what Maas’ work focused on was the missing pteropod information, and in 2011, she published her first paper from that work looking at pteropod respiration and metabolism.79 At first, Maas was not immediately enamored with the small flying sea snails specifically. But, after an experience night diving in the tropical Pacific, bathing in the bioluminescent snow of a rich, miniscule world, Maas grew irrevocably intrigued by the zooplankton world and spent the following years with her gaze on pteropods. Based on her expertise in pteropod physiology she was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship through WHOI working with Gareth Lawson, Ann Tarrant, and Karen Wishner. The project was looking at OA in the Atlantic, as most of the work by that time was from the Pacific or at the poles. Her

78 Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery et al., “Impacts of Coastal Acidification on the Pacific Northwest Shellfish Industry and Adaptation Strategies Implemented in Response,” Oceanography 25, no. 2 (June 1, 2015): 146–59. 79 Maas et al., “Metabolic Response of Antarctic Pteropods (Mollusca).”

29 interests did not lie solely on OA though.80 Rather, she was interested in basic pteropod physiology and ecosystem dynamics; a subject not well represented in scientific literature at the time, despite their important place at the center of understanding, predicting, communicating, and mitigating a global environmental issue.

Maas continued her work on the physiology and metabolism of pteropods as a staff scientist at BIOS, and she worked to catalog pteropod distribution and seasonality for the

Bermuda Atlantic Time series (BATS). She has worked with an array of scientists, especially those studying biogeochemistry, contributing a deep biological understanding of the animal at the center of their OA work. As more studies took place, the impacts of OA, especially to marine life and its ability to adapt, became more contested. For example, in 2017, Clara Manno, Nina

Bednarśek, and others (including Amy Maas) published a paper titled “Shelled pteropods in peril: Assessing vulnerability in a high CO2 ocean” suggesting that knowledge needed to expand before anyone could conclusively determine pteropod vulnerability.

“Our understanding of the underlying organismal biology and life history is far from complete and must be improved if we are to comprehend fully the responses of these organisms to the multitude of stressors in their environment beyond OA. In addition to playing a critical ecological and biogeochemical role, pteropods can offer a significant value as an early-indicator of anthropogenic OA. This role as a sentinel species should be developed further to consolidate their potential use within marine environmental management policy making.”81

Then in 2018, Victoria Peck, with Manno, published another paper titled “Pteropods counter mechanical damage and dissolution through extensive shell repair” claiming that pteropods were more resilient than previously thought.

“The dissolution of the delicate shells of sea butterflies, or pteropods, has epitomised discussions regarding ecosystem vulnerability to ocean acidification

80 Amy Maas. Interviewed by Samm Newton. May 14, 2018. 81 Clara Manno et al., “Shelled Pteropods in Peril: Assessing Vulnerability in a High CO2 Ocean,” Earth-Science Reviews 169, no. C (2017): 132–145.

30 over the last decade. However, a recent demonstration that the organic coating of the shell, the periostracum, is effective in inhibiting dissolution suggests that pteropod shells may not be as susceptible to ocean acidification as previously thought.”82

Maas agreed that they may be more adaptable and does not agree with scientific findings that claim pteropods might disappear as ocean chemistry shifts. Rather, she believes pteropods are a good proxy for understanding ocean chemistry and biogeochemical cycling, their metabolism and physiology might adapt to changing ocean conditions. In recent years, the roaring river of institutional support and financial investment in OA research shifted to a small stream, making grants more competitive, and the need to diversify as a scientist more pressing.

Maas observed that science, and society, placed more value on some creatures over others, and believed that the pteropods she studied were just as interesting, important, and worthy of basic understanding as the other animals that scientists devote their lives to. In fact, all zooplankton were charismatic little creatures. On top of their aesthetic and curious character, she believed there was more to learn through them—beyond OA.83 Yet, funding for basic research on pteropods, despite the published need to know more about them, was getting harder to find.

Most of Maas’ research focused on how environmental factors interacted with biology. As an undergraduate student at Hiram College, a highly interdisciplinary liberal arts college, Maas worked with Sandra Madar looking at the relationship between swimming locomotion, environment, and anatomy in several kinds of swimming animals, making inferences about the swimming behavior and habitat of ancient whales. During that time, she was not sure she would pursue marine science, but those early scientific experiences reflected how she would navigate

82 Victoria Peck et al., “Pteropods Counter Mechanical Damage and Dissolution through Extensive Shell Repair,” Nat Commun 9, no. 1 (2018): 264–264. 83 Amy Maas. Personal Communication. November 27, 2017.

31 ecological inference in the future. For example, at the 2016 National Academies Keck Futures

Initiative (NAKFI) Conference (Discovering the Deep Blue Sea), Maas met fluid mechanics engineer David Murphy, which launched an innovative interdisciplinary project, and also resembled her work in Madar’s lab, comparing animal morphology and swimming behavior.

Murphy was a young engineer who had just become faculty at the University of South Florida.

His PhD work had focused on the flight mechanics of terrestrial insects and marine zooplankton, in particular the pteropod Limacina helicina. Murphy observed that pteropods swim in a similar manner as terrestrial insects. He was excited at the prospect of continuing his research on flight mechanics in his new lab, applying it to different species of pteropod, and developing technology that could both fly in the air and swim in the sea. NAKFI awarded their grant, “Swimming in

Sea-Butterflies: Physics, Physiology, Ecology and Inspiration,” in 2017.

Murphy’s fluid mechanics research employed emerging high-speed video and computer technology to analyze the flow of particles around the pteropods as they swam in lab experiments—depicting pteropods in a way not seen before. Maas as a research partner could contribute her expertise in working with pteropods to acquire specimens for Murphy, and with information about their flight mechanics, she could relate their locomotion to their physiology and environment. The NAKFI project stripped away the context of OA, and engaged with pteropods through different perspectives. The interdisciplinary nature of the work, combined with the use of high speed video, allowed the research team to ask questions about pteropods that were previously not possible, and explored how the resulting ecological inferences and images fit into the existing attitudes towards, and understandings of, pteropods. In leaving behind OA, the role of pteropod as tool shifted from bio-indicator to bio-inspiration and still allowed Maas to continue her baseline research. The videos that resulted from the NAKFI collaboration were drastically different from what existed up to that point, both in scientific literature and popular

32 representation. OA research was not happening in a vacuum, scientists and journalists used pteropods as a tool to communicate the risks of OA to audiences outside of sciences.

Seeing Pteropods

Pteropod images, and the interpretations that go along with them, influenced public imagination through the movement of pteropod images online, in contemporary art, and within popoular and scientific literature. For example, the pteropod photography of marine biologist

Russ Hopcroft was far reaching. His photos, taken as early as 2005 were used in everything from scientific literature, popular news outlets, conference presentations, and school curriculum, to stamps and fine art. One image (Figure 2), was not widely circulated until around 2008, but has been continually used ever since—most notably in the Australian International Polar Year stamp of 2010 (Figure 1) and the fine art of Cornelia Kubler Kavanagh.

Figure 1: International Polar Year Stamp (2010) Figure 2: L. helicina by Russ Hopcroft

Figure 3: Limacina helicina (2011). Cornelia Kubler Kavanaugh. Aluminum Kavanagh was interested in the fragility and diversity of deep sea ecosystems, after searching that topic on the internet, she stopped on an image of Hopcroft’s L. helicina photo from an Arctic cruise. When she began The Pteropod Project, OA’s entanglement with pteropods was just beginning. She got all her reference materials from online searches for pteropods, and as she worked on the project, she quickly learned that pteropods were coalescing at the center of an emerging environmental issue. Eventually, she began working with WHOI marine biologist Gareth Lawson (who was also working with Maas at the time), and they published a book together in 2012 referring to pteropods as “charismatic microfauna.” She saw her work as “imaginary solutions” that she hoped would raise awareness about the risks facing pteropods.84 A 2013 Smithsonian article quoted Kavanaugh as saying that,

“by making visible that which is essentially invisible, my pteropod sculptures could dramatize the threat of ocean acidification in a refreshing new way, causing the pteropod to become a surrogate for a problem of far-reaching implications.”85

Her minimalist stone sculptures depicted both healthy and corroded pteropods during a time before any in situ acidified pteropod work was published (Figure 3). It was, however, during a

84 Cornelia Kubler Kavanaugh. The Pteropod Project: Charismatic Microfauna. Epub: blurb.com, 2012. 85 Hannah Waters. “The Gorgeous Shapes of Sea Butterflies” Smithsonian. www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-gorgeous-shapes-of-sea-butterflies-7399527/. (September 16, 2013).

34 time when the abundance of pteropod images in popular representation was growing. And, it was a time that their relationship to OA, oceans at risk, and anthropogenic CO2 was well on its way to surrogacy.

Fine art continued to emerge with its gaze on pteropods resembling the increased scientific gaze on pteropods that was also occurring during that time. For example, glass artist

Cecile Derel built L. helicina (Figure 5) in 2012. She wrote that pteropods “have become a focus in scientists’ research into the impact of ocean acidification, which causes pteropods’ delicate calcium carbonate shells to dissolve.86 But, as the role of pteropods in scientific research grew and became more contested, so too did the way that artist’s depicted pteropods. One example of this is the art of Lily Simonson. Simonson produced Midnight Sun in 2016 after a three-month science cruise in Antarctica. Her 2016 piece (Figure 4) featuring L. helicina, was featured at the

CB1 Gallery Los Angles and seemed to move away from alarmism, breaking free from

Figure 4: Sea Butterfly Upwelling (2016). Lily Figure 5: Pteropod: Limacina helicina Simonson. Oil and acrylic on canvas. (2012). Cecile Derel. Stained glass, wood, electrical components.

86 Cecile Derel. “Pteropod: Limacina Helicina.” www.cecilederel.com/artwork/3371862- Pteropod-Limacina-helicina.html (accessed November 9, 2018).

35 pteropods as the embodiment of OA. Simonson’s art “reflects a passion for the process of science, deep affection for the natural world, and dedication to seeking out and ‘bringing to light,’ the beauty and mystery of places and lifeforms little known and rarely seen.”87 In a 2016 interview Simonson said that her art did something that “photographs can’t really do; I sort of create my own narrative.”88 The proliferation of pteropods in institutional research and popular representation in the early 2000’s was an evolving relationship, and how pteropods were represented was indicative of how OA research, and pteropod science was being interpreted and perceived. There is no doubt that many artists, writers, and basically anyone with an internet connection, including Kavanaugh, Deres, and Simonson, came across the photography of David

Liittschwager in internet searches during that period.

Liittschwager introduced the world to the plight of pteropods through his evocative photography, which ranged from purely aesthetic imagery to extreme depictions of OA predictions. A select group of scientists worked with pteropods first hand, but Liittschwager presented the (at the time) little known sea creature to the public through stunning photography.

In 2006, his colleague Elizabeth Kolbert published “Darkening Seas” in a November issue of the

New Yorker. It introduced ocean acidification to the world in a compelling way, through the story of Victoria Fabry and pteropods, specifically Clio pyramidata.89 In 1985, Fabry had unintentionally observed the effects of excess CO2 on the shells of pteropods.

“Like other animals, pteropods take in oxygen and give off carbon dioxide as a waste product… seal them in a container and the CO2 starts to build up, changing

87 Harvard Museum of Natural History. “Lily Simonson: Painting the Deep,” hmnh.harvard.edu https://hmnh.harvard.edu/painting-deep (accessed November 9, 2018). 88 Zoe Harris. “Lily Simonson Tests Divides Between Art, Science,” Hyphen, http://blogs.lwhs.org/hyphen/2016/05/29/lily-simonson-tests-divides-art-science/ (May 29, 2016). 89 Elizabeth Kolbert, “Annals of Science: Darkening Sea, What Carbon Emissions Are Doing to the Ocean,” The New Yorker, November 20, 2006.

36 the water’s chemistry. By overcrowding Clio pyramidata, Fabry had demonstrated that the organisms were highly sensitive to such changes.”

Kolbert’s article additionally offers an in-depth scientific overview of the history of science associated with OA, and warns of the risks of increased combustion of carbon dioxide. In standard New Yorker style the article had no photographs specific to the text, save for some uncreated comics and contextually irrelevant line drawings. After reading Kolbert’s 2006 article,

Liittschwager decided that he wanted to take a picture that would better communicate the message in The New Yorker, like a pteropod being destroyed by OA, as it was described in the article. So Liittschwager called Fabry and worked in her lab capturing pteropods on film.90 His L. helicina series in the November 2007 issue of National Geographic became one of the most circulated and repurposed pteropod images in the world. National Geographic facilitates the critical transformation of scientific findings from peer reviewed journals into popular representation (in the form of science communication). It has been one of the most widely consumed and highly regarded photo journalism and reporting outlets of the 21st century,

90 Personal Communication. David Liittschwager, November 18, 2018.

Figure 6: C. pyrimidata (2007). David Liittschwager. winning several awards and recognitions, including a Pulitzer Prize finalist in reporting. The magazine is printed in multiple languages, in over thirty countries, and has a total audience estimated at over 30 million people.91 Liittschwager won the 2008 World Press Photo Award (in the nature category) for the photo story, “Small Wonders: The Secret Life of Marine

Microfauna.” The full-color, multi-page spread featured a variety of zooplankton in rich, vibrant color, focalizing clean, white backgrounds, and short evocative captions. The pteropod included,

C. pyramidata (Figure 6), was described as, “spreading angel wings, a pteropod snail emerges from its fragile shell. The wings—actually a modified foot—propel the animal while it snares food with a sticky mucous net.”92 Coincidentally, this C. pyramidata came from the seas, off the island of Kona, as Fabry’s original messengers of OA from 1985. Nothing was mentioned of impending acidic doom, just an inspiring and award winning image of a fragile, almost alien, ocean snail. But C. pyramidata is not the pteropod that would become an icon for snails (and

91 National Geographic Magazine, “Media Information Kit,” National Geographic. www.nationalgeographic.com/mediakit/assets/img/downloads/ (accessed June 4, 2018). 92 Jennifer Holland, “Small Wonders,” National Geographic, November 2007.

38 seas) in peril. It was this one (Figure 7), of L. helicina. Liittschwager acquired the photographs during lab experiments with James Orr, Richard Feely, Victoria Fabry (and many others) with support from NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Lab (PMEL).93

Figure 7: Photography from Fabry's lab. (2007) David Liittschwager.

This image is the title picture for the article directly following “Small Wonders,” on the backside of the C. pyramidata photo. “The Acid Threat: As CO2 rises, shelled animals may perish,” was a comparatively short article, at two pages, that quoted Fabry, briefly described the PMEL lab experiments, and discussed how scientists used pteropods to understand ocean chemistry and predict future disturbances in marine food webs.94

Between 2007 and 2011 the messaging shifted from an acid threat, to an acid present. In the beginning of a 2011 National Geographic article titled “The Acid Sea,” an Oregon State

University faculty member and head of NOAA at the time, was quoted by journalist Elizabeth

Kolbert as calling OA the “equally evil twin” to global warning.95 Somewhere between the halls of the university and the pages of a globally circulated magazine, OA transformed into something evil—a normative term that carries weight. OA was not referred to in that moment as a risk facing the ocean, it was not a byproduct of anthropogenic pressure, it was not a factor

93 Orr et al., “Anthropogenic Ocean Acidification over the Twenty-First Century and Its Impact on Calcifying Organisms.” 94 Jennifer Holland, “The Acid Threat,” National Geographic, November 2007. 95 Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Acid Sea,” National Geographic, April 2011.

39 negatively impacting marine environments and wildlife—it was evil. Later in the article Kolbert used more even handed language writing that, “in 2008 a group of more than 150 leading researchers issued a declaration stating that they were ‘deeply concerned by recent, rapid changes in ocean chemistry,’ which could within decades ‘severely affect marine organisms, food webs, biodiversity, and fisheries.’”96

The title image for “Acid Sea” featured more of Liittschwager’s photography. Although, this time it was a Pacific Oyster releasing a cloud of sperm (Figure 8) with the caption, “in some coastal waters acidification is already severe; here [Oregon’s Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery] it has cut production in half by stunting oyster larvae.” Even though the oyster seemed to be the featured creature, Kolbert mentioned nothing of the Whiskey Creek Shellfish seed crisis, or of how it impacted coastal communities from Mexico to Canada in the body of her article. The additional photos situated within the article’s pages featured other calcifying creatures from corals to sea stars, and of course, the pteropod. Kolbert mentioned pteropods by name twice, writing that scientists had reported significant impacts to the sea snails, and qualified their

Figure 8: Oyster Seed (2011). David Liittschwager.

96 Ibid.

Figure 9: L. helicina (2010). David Liittschwager. value by adding that pteropods were an “important food for fish, whales, and birds in both the

Arctic and the Antarctic.”97 The text mentioned pteropods once more in the caption of

Liittschwager’s photo (Figure 9) as swimming sea butterflies, and in “five years parts of the

Arctic Ocean will be corrosive to its shell.”98 The majority of Kolbert’s article covered the value of, and risks facing, corals. Then she ended with an insinuation of uneven power dynamics between the lowly pteropods and anthropogenic CO2, “at the moment, corals and pteropods are lined up against a global economy built on cheap fossil fuels. It's not a fair fight.”99 Kolbert’s “Acid Sea” article referenced the 2008 Monaco Declaration issued by H.S.H

Prince Albert II of Monaco from the 2nd International Symposium on The Ocean in a High-CO2

World (the first symposium was in 2004). The Monaco Declaration mentioned only a few creatures by name, “oysters, sea urchins, and squid.”100 It put weight on the socioeconomic impacts of OA.

97 Ibid. 98 Ibid. 99 Ibid. 100 Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation & Principauté de Monaco. “Monaco Declaration” (2008).

41 “Ocean acidification could affect marine food webs and lead to substantial changes in commercial fish stocks, threatening protein supply and food security for millions of people as well as the multi-billion dollar fishing industry. Coral reefs provide fish habitat, generate billions of dollars annually in tourism, protect shorelines from erosion and flooding, and provide the foundation for tremendous biodiversity, equivalent to that found in tropical rain forests. Yet by mid-century, ocean acidification may render most regions chemically inhospitable to coral reefs. These and other acidification-related changes could affect a wealth of marine goods and services, such as our ability to use the ocean to manage waste, to provide chemicals to make new medicines, and to benefit from its natural capacity to regulate climate. For instance, ocean acidification will reduce the ocean’s capacity to absorb anthropogenic CO2, which will exacerbate climate change.”

This excerpt stands out in its anthropocentric tone; the human ability to use the ocean was at risk.

The utility of the ocean was under threat. Kolbert seemed to navigate around that overarching theme, and discussed the marine environment at risk. The Monaco Declaration was a public announcement declared by the Prince of Monaco, and as Kolbert mentioned, signed by 155 scientists from 26 nations who attended an OA symposium there. In the following year, 2009, the scientists involved in the OA symposium published multiple papers and reports.

Oceanography published the “Research Priorities for Understanding Ocean Acidification,

Summary from the Second Symposium on the Ocean in a High-CO2 World,” as a special issue feature in their peer reviewed journal.101 That report, authored by Orr et al., included big names in the dialogue of OA including Caldeira and Fabry. The Orr et al. paper did not mention anything specifically about socioeconomic factors or human use à la the Monaco Declaration.

Instead the authors wrote, “so far, only limited analyses have been conducted on potential economic impacts of ocean acidification (e.g., Cooley and Doney, 2009). There is a great need to expand such efforts.”

101 James Orr et al., “Research Priorities for Understanding Ocean Acidification: Summary From the Second Symposium on the Ocean in a High-CO2 World,” Oceanography 22, no. 4 (December 1, 2009): 182–89.

42 The Orr et al. paper is the only publication of the 2008 OA symposium series that

mentioned pteropods (briefly) referring to how “the Northeast Pacific Ocean [had] already

become undersaturated with respect to aragonite during some or all of the year,” citing a 2008

paper by Feely and Burke Hales (of OSU, associated with the Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery

crisis). The December 2009 cover of Oceanography, containing the Orr et al. report, featured

Liitschwager’s 2007 PMEL photography (Figure 10), it resembled the famous photo first

published in National Geographic in 2007. Pteropods were not the center of that Orr et al.

article—they were one line—yet Liitschwager’s striking and recognizable work graced that issue

with the title “The Future of Ocean Biogeochemistry in a High CO2 World.” The issue contained

several articles about OA, including an article from Feely that mentioned pteropods explicitly

twice. Pteropods had become the de facto image to associate with any work on OA, despite their

role in that work, and they became the de facto victim featured in communicating OA both in

scientific literature and popular representation. O

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43 Orr et al. mentioned negative impacts of OA to other marine life like foraminifera, corals, and oysters and concluded that the most important factor influencing the future of OA research would be understanding tipping points.

“To detect such tipping points, it will be important to establish a global observation network to routinely measure parameters that reliably detect biotic effects of ocean acidification, such as indicator-species abundance, calcification per cell, biochemical signatures of physiological stress, and ecosystem species composition.”102

While the authors did not name pteropods specifically, their role as the indicator species was implicit. Another publication from the OA symposium, “Ocean Acidification: A Summary for

nd Policymakers from the 2 Symposium on the Ocean in a High-CO2 World,” was touted as a synthesis of the Orr et al. Oceanography paper.103 That report mentioned impacts to general nonspecific creatures, like the shell corroding capabilities of OA as well as how OA impacts other physiology, but also states that “how or if marine organisms may adapt is not known,” and did not mention pteropods by name.104 It named oysters, crabs, corals, and coccolithopohores (a type of phytoplankton). The policymakers summary echoed the Orr et al. claim of compounding effects, in that it is harder to predict and understand how OA will change the oceans as it interacts with things like overfishing, pollution, and rising global temperatures. It loosely resembled the anthropocentric tone of the Monaco Declaration, claiming that OA may have serious impacts to global food security and may impact multi-billion dollar fisheries. Although, they also wrote that

“Despite advances in understanding the impacts of elevated CO2 concentrations on a wide range of marine organisms, we are still unable to make meaningful projections of impacts on marine ecosystems and fisheries as a whole, or to identify

102 Ibid. 103 SCOR, “Ocean Acidification: A Summary for Policymakers from the Second Symposium on the Ocean in a High-CO2 World.” 104 Ibid.

44 thresholds beyond which marine ecosystems may not recover. Most studies on marine organisms have only examined the responses of single species to one environmental factor, such as an increase in acidity, CO2, or temperature.”105

One of the single species dominating that scientific literature was pteropods. Whether pteropods will adapt to changing ocean conditions was not, and is still not, collectively agreed upon.106 But, their ability to be a proxy for the water in which they spend their lives was an evolving idea that began in the mid-twentieth century with Redfield and Ruby.

Liitschwager was not the only photographer to popularize pteropod worlds. In 2013,

Seattle Times photographer Steve Ringman began a seven-part series titled “Sea Change” with writer Craig Welch.107 Ringman’s pteropod photography ranged from in situ specimens gathered from the Eastern Pacific coast to specimens examined in lab experiments. Ringman has worked with NOAA and the PMEL several times as a photographer, giving him access to OA research and scientists. His photo, cited as belonging to NOAA, but first made public in the Seattle Times, has been repurposed by other news outlets, government agencies, photography stocks websites, and personal interest pages on the internet hundreds of times. From the New York Times to

National Geographic, from 2014 to as recent as 2018, this photo (Figure 11) became synonymous with OA, dying pteropods, and oceans in crisis. L. helicina was famous. National

Geographic published “Ocean Acidification Chipping Away at Snail Shells” featuring

Ringman’s image. In the article, author Jane J. Lee, wrote about the 2014 Bednaršek et al. paper that first showed in situ effects of OA to pteropods off the coast of Washington, Oregon, and

105 Ibid. 106 Amy Maas. Interviewed by Samm Newton. November 24, 2018. 107 Craig Welch. “Acidification Eating Away at Tiny Sea Snails | Sea Change.” The Seattle Times, http://apps.seattletimes.com/reports/sea-change/2014/apr/30/pteropod-shells-dissolving/ (April 30, 2014)

Figure 11: Steve Ringman's iconic pteropod photo

California. That research used samples from a 2011 R/V Wecoma cruise, and was also funded by the PMEL along with NOAA’s Ocean Acidification Program.108 Feely (part of Bednaršek’s 2014 paper) was quoted as saying “we see for the first time a clear indication of the effects of ocean acidification on a critical marine organism [in the wild].” Then Lee quoted WHOI’s Scott Doney, not on the Bednaršek paper, but who regularly publishes on OA, writing that “while it is clear these snails are being affected, it’s not clear exactly how long their deterioration will affect the food chain.”109 These seemed to be contradictory messages.

Ringman’s famous in situ pteropod photo, showing a clear crack in the shell moving from the center out, made Littschwager’s experimental lab photos seem manufactured and embodied

108 N. Bednaršek et al., “Limacina Helicina Shell Dissolution as an Indicator of Declining Habitat Suitability Owing to Ocean Acidification in the California Current Ecosystem,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 281, no. 1785 (April 30, 2014): 20140123–20140123. 109 “Ocean Acidification Chipping Away at Snail Shells,” National Geographic News, May 4, 2014, https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/05/140502-ocean-snail-shell-dissolving- acidification-climate-change-science/.

46 the idea of pteropods in peril in an even more immediate way—despite the lack of scientific consensus about the reality of that peril. This specific picture continued to accompany discourse on pteropods as a threatened, even endangered animal. For example, in 2017, Nancy Lord’s climate fiction debut, pH A Novel, featured Ringman’s pteropod on its cover (Figure 12). Lord spent time several years earlier on the Seward Line, a long-term sampling site south of Seward,

Alaska. During that initial experience, she met Russ Hopcroft (of pteropod photo fame), who was leading the team in collecting basic oceanographic data like salinity, temperature and pH. In her 2012 essay, My Acid Cruise, Lord recounted the experience. The beginning of the essay discusses the nature of the cruise and the importance of long-term sampling.

“Russ Hopcroft, chief scientist for our cruise, talks to me about what he calls Cinderella science. ‘It’s science that’s not appreciated but could turn into something beautiful,’ he says. ‘Long-term data sets are so important, but nobody wants to fund them. If publication is your goal, then this is not a productive way to do science. But if you want to measure change, you can’t get it any other way.’ In other words, the kind of monitoring done on the Seward Line, year after year, is unsexy.”110

She then shifts her gaze to pteropods and spends a large portion of the essay on ocean acidification.

“These little animals, so unimposing in themselves, play a huge role in the marine food web, especially in high-latitude seas. They’re eaten by other zooplankton, fish, whales, and marine birds. Juvenile salmon in particular depend on them; one study showed they made up 60 percent of a pink salmon’s diet. That’s now. The future may be very different. If pteropods’ ability to build shells is compromised by increasing acidification, as controlled laboratory studies have demonstrated, the cascading effects through this marine ecosystem—and others at both ends of the world—will be profound. The pteropod is coming to be known as the ‘poster invertebrate’ of ocean acidification, just as the polar bear is the poster child of climate change.”111

110 Nancy Lord, “My Acid Cruise.(Essay),” Ploughshares 38, no. 2 3 (2012): 90-100,186. 111 Ibid., 98.

47 The laboratory studies she referred to are the famous PMEL experiments that Liittschwager shared with the world. The follow-up 2017 novel pH (Figure 12), Lord’s first work of fiction, told the story of a scientific cruise, the artist who accompanied the scientists on board, how people collaborate to make change, the political aspects of scientific inquiry, the complications and influence of funding in sciences, and most notably, she highlights the plight of pterpopods— perpetuating the concept of pteropod as “poster invertebrate.”112

Pteropods were synonymous with acid seas. A sentinel species was born, a speaker for oceans in crisis emerged, a cumbersome concept became embodied—not by chance but by intention.

“Pteropods have an emblematic role as a sentinel of anthropogenic OA since their shell-state response illustrates the anthropogenic OA problem in a way that the public and policy-makers find tangible. As such, pteropods can be a very effective outreach component in communicating the impact of OA.”113

Figure 12: Ringman's photo on the cover of pH

112 Nancy Lord, PH: A Novel. Portland, Oregon: Alaska Northwest Books, 2017. 113 Manno et al., “Shelled Pteropods in Peril.”

48 An example of this sentinel status can be seen in the the December 2015 cover of Nature Climate

Change (Figure 13). It featured a collage from another famous pteropod photographer, Russian marine biologist, Alexander Semenov.114 In the issue, titled “Marine Life at Risk,” pteropods are not named specifically in any of the articles, although they are implied in one line of one article through a citation, not explicit mention, of a pteropod dissolution paper. In the context of that citation, Mathesius et al. claimed that OA, in combination with other anthropogenic factors,

“would exert a dangerous complex of pressures on some marine ecosystems.”115 “Some marine ecosystems” equaled pteropods. How long would pteropods be defined by that role? The depictions of them were beginning to shift, evidenced by Simonson’s work. Murphy’s slow motion videos were also beginning to disrupt the dominant narrative.

Figure 13: Alexander Semenov's iconic pteropod photo, and the cover of Nature Climate Change (2015)

114 Alexander Semenov, Limacina Helicina - Perfect Pose, www.flickr.com/photos/a_semenov/23391467446/ (May 7, 2013). 115 Sabine Mathesius et al., “Long-Term Response of Oceans to CO2 Removal from the Atmosphere,” Nature Climate Change 5, no. 12 (December 2015): 1107–13.

49 In 2016, over 100 popular national and international news outlets featured Murphy’s work.116 A Popular Science article, authored by Lindsey Ktratochwill, synthesized Murphy’s

PhD work with L. helicina for a general audience (it coincidentally also features Hopcroft’s famous photo). The article, “This Tiny Sea Snail Flies Through Water Like an Insect,” makes no mention of OA, peril, or anthropogenic CO2. It does discuss their important role in open ocean ecosystems and the global carbon pump, but focused on what technological advances could be learned from the sea butterfly.117 Another article in New Scientist (featuring Semenov’s famous photo), mimicked the tone and message of Ktratochwill.118 In 2017, video captured with Maas at

BIOS (Figure 14) was featured on The Discovery Channel’s “Daily Planet” segment.

These images were collected at great cost. The cameras alone were worth almost a million dollars. Once, the pteropods have been collected and sorted, the engineering team has only hours

Figure 14: Still capture of David Murphys fluid mechanics video

116 University of South Florida. “Murphy Fluids Lab | Press & Outreach,” Murphy Fluids Lab, www.murphyfluidslab.com/press-outreach (accessed November 11, 2018). 117 Lindsay Kratochwill. “This Tiny Sea Snail ‘Flies’ Through The Water Like An Insect.” Popular Science. www.popsci.com/this-tiny-sea-snail-flies-through-water-like-an-insect (February 19, 2016). 118 Sandrine Ceurstemont. “Sea Butterflies Fly Underwater Just like Insects Do in the Air,” New Scientist. www.newscientist.com/article/2078092-sea-butterflies-fly-underwater-just-like- insects-do-in-the-air/ (February 17, 2016).

50 to work with them in captivity before they die; their mortality rates in lab settings are very high.

It took extreme effort to interrogate pteropods this way. Murphy sometimes spent days setting up and calibrating equipment before a trip to sea would bring him viable specimens. During two weeks at BIOS, Murphy may only work with pteropods two or three times. In those instances, the pteropods have to swim within a very narrow frame of focus and be flapping its wings. The odds of getting good images was astronomical, but in the process of doing this several times

Murphy was able to record information about several species of pteropod (and heteropod). Years of experience, months of planning, days of sitting and waiting, with a massive amount of money and intellect invested, would come together for one minute of video, if that. The bio-inspiration work was just beginning. It is not clear though if this process of ecological inference, using emerging technology, combined with shifts in popular representation, might change perceptions of pteropods or the value assigned to them.

Chapter Two Summary

In 1957, Thomas Hida, a fisheries oceanographer, hypothesized that pteropods might help identify fish habitat.

“Indicator organisms have been used to identify water types in various parts of the world where the physical and chemical properties were not sufficiently definitive. The organisms must be readily identifiable and sufficiently abundant to be sampled in fair numbers. The chaetognaths and pteropods in the North Pacific fulfill these requirements.”119

119 Thomas S. Hida, Chaetognaths and Pteropods as Biological Indicators in the North Pacific Ocean, Special Scientific Report--Fisheries ; No. 215 (Washington, D.C.: USDepartment of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service, 1957).

51 He concluded that the North Pacific pteropods were not good indicators for finding potential tuna fisheries, as the albacore associated more with surface isotherms than salinity and temperature.

In the process of his research, he unintentionally recorded that pteropod (and chaetognath) species compositions indicated water salinity and temperature, creating faunal zones. The pteropods could be used to identify water column habitats. Pteropods would eventually be used for much more. Pteropod shells mirrored the ocean they lived in, communicating chemical states and changes over time. Additionally, a previously little known group of animals was introduced to the general public. How the public handled pteropods reflected the value assigned to them through ecological inference, specifically in regards to OA.

Returning to Rubey’s projections about the role of biology in the chemistry of seawater— in the 2001 article commonly attributed to introducing the term ‘ocean acidification,’ Wallace

Broecker and Elizabeth Clark use three planktonic species common in ocean sediment cores to found their claims about an ancient dissolution event that occurred in the eastern equatorial

Atlantic.120 In Rubey’s consideration of the information published before 1950, and of the data that even he even admits was “inadequate… and laden with many ‘ifs,’ Rubey predicted that the influx of excess atmospheric CO2 from “artificial combustion” would certainly have catastrophic effects on marine life.121 Catastrophic effects have been recorded and impacted coastal communities, as evidenced by the Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery crisis. But, it was pteropods, not oysters, that subsequently embodied the concept of oceans in crisis.

120 Wallace Broecker and Elizabeth Clark, “A Dramatic Atlantic Dissolution Event at the Onset of the Last Glaciation,” Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems 2, no. 11 (November 1, 2001): 1065. 121 Rubey, “Geologic History Of Sea Water,” 1128.

52 As recently as 1993, oceanographers, including Peter Brewer and Charles Keeling, contended that the perturbations caused by human consumption could not be properly predicted, much less fully understood, until we had more information on natural chemical cycles and the distributions of chemical components in the ocean. Their analytical chemistry report was a plea for both the government and fellow scientists to concentrate their resources and efforts on the ocean’s carbon pump.122 Pteropods became part of the concerted institutional effort that followed, but there was not scientific consensus on the reality of pteropod peril, or the extent of pteropod resilience. Although, outside of scientific research, the media represented pteropods as solidly at risk by an evil threat, a quickly acidifying sea. In turn, public awareness of the other

CO2 problem grew alongside institutional support and financial investment for OA research. But as new technological methods and lines of inquiry engaged with pteropods, the role of pteropods shifted.

Maas, now a member of the Ocean Carbon and Biogeochemistry Scientific Steering

Committee, is still studying the physiology and ecology of pteropods and other zooplankton. She continues to work with engineers like Murphy, and has expanded to collaborating with materials chemists as well—who see pteropods as inspiring, not indicative of oceans in crisis. But as the perceived urgency of OA shifts, indicated by lack of scientific consensus, so too does funding for a creature historically valued only in the context of OA. Maas has felt the pressure to diversify the application of her expertise. She says the way to do that is through biogeochemistry, which is receiving increased funding from the NSF. Maas has also started working with NASA’s EXports project (Export Processes in the Ocean from Remote Sensing), a global initiative to gather data

122 National Research Council (U.S.), Applications of Analytical Chemistry to Oceanic Carbon Cycle Studies.

53 on carbon flux. She is doing respiration experiments, taking zooplankton out of the oxygen minimum zone, figuring out where they live in relationship to their environmental variables, and how that relates to how much carbon they are moving through the system—making zooplankton breathe and pee.

Scientific research assigned an instrumental value to pteropods that carried through to popular representation, introducing pteropods to the world as a tool for Science and communicating that science, further influencing institutional support and financial investment. In their emerging bio-inspiration role, the value of pteropods might be considered relational, rather than instrumental. They have been a mediary, a creature that facilitated how society understood the ocean, and our relationship to it. Perspectives of pteropods were not shaped by what was known about them, or even OA in general. Instead, how scientists worked with them, within the process of ecological inference, and the technology that made them visible, shaped their value in contemporary thought.

54 Chapter Three: Groundfish Realized

The Measurement and Management of Fish: An Interdisciplinary Approach

When Waldo Wakefield and Lorenzo Ciannelli were young boys, even though they grew up oceans away from one another, they both stared down from fishing boats, beyond the surface of the waves, and wondered how life played out below. They would eventually come to know one another while working as researchers in Oregon decades later, and would work together on a project doing what they have been doing their whole lives—contemplating fish.

“the thing that emerged was built under the premises of hypoxia, but eventually developed into more integrated ways of looking at the system and many, many more collaborations…like a snowball effect…and now it’s growing and growing, but it could collapse at any time.”123

This is how Ciannelli described a project that started specifically to understand how flatfish reacted to hypoxia, but then grew into a network of study into flatfish lifecycles, habitats, and demersal fish communities in Oregon’s near shore. Wakefield and Ciannelli started this project, the beam trawl video surveys, in 2008 and they continue today. By adding a video component to the data and surveying flatfish in their nursery habitat (the nearshore), they hoped to learn more about flatfish resiliency in changing oceans, their life cycle, their habitat, and there was also a hope that video data could help to reduce the uncertainties present in more traditional sampling methods. A visual component allowed them to compare what was caught in the beam trawl net to what was observed in the accompanying videos. Their beam trawl surveys have not been directly tied to management, but both Wakefield and Ciannelli are fisheries scientists suggesting that this information would be of use, in some capacity, to fisheries management

(Wakefield worked for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA)

123 Lorenzo Cianelli. Interviewed by Samm Newton. Oct. 15, 2017.

55 Northwest Fisheries Science Center, and the project was at one point partially funded through

NOAA).124

The current chapter considers the history of groundfish science and management. It looks critically at iterative cycles involving emerging video and machine learning technology, fisheries data handling and use, as well as the structure of fisheries science, and asks how that path dependency acted as a roadblock to robust, innovative fisheries science and management over time. Closer examination of how Eastern Pacific Groundfish populations have been measured and managed, including collaborations among Wakefield and Ciannelli, during recent history provides a platform in which to explore the capacity and influence of technology, data production, and knowledge generation at the intersection of environmental sciences, decision making, and changing ocean conditions. For example, the testimony of a flatfish, a species of demersal groundfish, exemplifies collaborations between the human and nonhuman, the biotic and abiotic. Groundfish would seem to exude far less charisma, and have therefore garnered less attention than fisheries like salmon or crab in the Pacific Northwest (and the world). The story of how humans came to know them is an opportunity to investigate how collectives are composed and articulated (i.e. how we know the world and make decisions about it).125

In Carmel Finley’s, All the Fish in the Sea, Finley explores the “shape of science” involved in fisheries management.126 She argues that policy implications paralyzed scientists and created roadblocks to both scientific progress and new paths of knowledge generation about the

124 According to the Food and Agriculture Organization a fishery is defined as the "people involved, species or type of fish, area of water or seabed, method of fishing, class of boats, purpose of the activities or a combination of the foregoing features."

125 Latour, Reassembling the Social. 126 Finley, All the Fish in the Sea.

56 understanding and management of marine fishes. But, politics and economics have not acted alone or as linear factors in the environmental decision making framework. In the same way that policy and economy acted as constraining factors, so too have the complex relationships between scientific inquiry, technological choice, and data within the traditional ecological inference paradigm. The datasets needed to move the predictive power of the sciences forward was not available, so they had no incentive to develop them further. In turn, if management could not incorporate new datasets (like the ones collected nearshore, or with video), there was no incentive to make new, possibly better datasets available. This caused an iterative process of mutual stagnation between ecological inference and environmental decision making.

The Value of Northeastern Pacific Groundfish in Oregon

Eastern Pacific Grounfish had value in Oregon, and the world, as a wild food source that required management. The Eastern Pacific groundfish fishery off the coast of California, Oregon, and Washington includes a large, diverse grouping of fishes that did not become heavily harvested until around World War II.127 This makes the multispecies groundfish fishery a comparatively young fishery in America. With over 90 different species to consider, this grouping of fish is incredibly intricate and important to the Oregon economy. Between the

1920’s and 1980’s groundfish harvest landing levels grew exponentially from around 9,000 metric tons to 90,000 metric tons.128 Despite the youth of the groundfish fishery, it became one

127 Susan Hannah, “History of Groundfish in the Pacific Northwest” (Lecture Series, 1998). 128 Pacific Coast Groundfish Plan (CA,OR,WA) :Environmental Impact Statement., 1982.

57 of the largest, by volume, and most lucrative fisheries in Oregon—with a 2016 harvest value of approximately $48 million, exceeded only by the Dungeness crab fishery.129

There have been many different stakeholder groups involved in studying, eating, saving, and managing groundfish (Figure 15), each with their own goals, values, and perspectives.130

Currently, groundfish are federally managed by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and the Pacific Fisheries Management Council (PFMC) because groundfish reside within state and federal waters, as well as beyond into the high seas.131 The primary law governing groundfish management is the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act

Figure 15: Unidentified Flatfish (2018). Samm Newton. Oil on acrylic. 12" x 6"

129 The Research Group, LLC, “Oregon Commercial Fishing Industry Year 2016 Economic Activity Summary,” Economic Impact, Oregon’s Commerical Fishing Industry (Corvallis, OR: Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife, Marine Resource Program, April 2017). 130 Pacific Fishery Management Council. “Who We Are and What We Do.” www.pcouncil.org/ (Accessed February 17, 2018).

131 Pacific Fisheries Management Council. “Background.” https://www.pcouncil.org/groundfish/background/ (Accessed August 31, 2018).

58 (MSA), which was first passed in 1976.132 The MSA also established a network of regional fisheries management councils, of which the PFMC is a part. The PFMC and NMFS have managed the groundfish fishery by developing and implementing (respectively) the rules and regulations laid out in the Pacific Coast Groundfish Fishery Management Plans (FMPs).133,134

FMPs consider multiple perspectives of how to manage groundfish, but the best scientific information available plays an important role in regulations that lead to area closures, fishing quotas, time/season rules, and habitat protection. This makes the sciences a strong intermediary in how nature, in this case fish populations, is made knowable; that knowledge guides the FMPs.

The councils were mandated to develop an FMP for all fish species that they deemed in need of management and regulation135. Their discretionary authority led to the first FMP for Salmon being implemented in 1977.136 Pacific salmon, as well as groundfish, have a history riddled with population vacillations—successes, and failures. But salmon received more attention, which equaled institutional support (from the PFMC, and both conservation and fishing industries), and financial investment (as evidenced from university funding).137,138 There was not even an official

FMP drafted for Pacific groundfish until 1982, after peak landings of the most popular species,

132 “Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976,” Pub. L. No. 94–265, 331 (1976). 133 PFMC, “Pacific Coast Groundfish Fishery Management Plan” (Portland, OR: Pacific Fishery Management Council, August 2016). 134 “Fishery Management Plan and Amendments | Pacific Fishery Management Council,” February 21, 2018, https://www.pcouncil.org/groundfish/fishery-management-plan/. 135 “Magnuson-Stevens Act Provisions; National Standard 2-Scientific Information,” Federal Register, July 19, 2013, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2013/07/19/2013- 17422/magnuson-stevens-act-provisions-national-standard-2-scientific-information. 136 Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC), “Pacific Coast Salmon Fishery Management Plan for Commercial and Recreational Salmon Fisheries off the Coasts of WA, OR, and CA as Revised through Amendment 19” (Portland, OR: PFMC, n.d.). 137 Susan Hannah, “Hist. of PNW Groundfish.” 138 “Research and Accounting Office Records, 1935 - 2010, RG026. Special Collections and Archives, Oregon State University.” (n.d.), Research and Accounting Office Records, 1935 - 2010, Special collections and Archives.

59 and over exploitation had already become painfully apparent. Despite standardized surveys and

FMPs, the groundfish population continued to decline for the next twenty years139.

“By 2000, Oregon’s catch of groundfish had dropped from a 20-year average of 74,000 tons to just 27,000 tons. In 2002, the PFMC declared nine species of groundfish overfished. Faced with an extremely slow growth rate and a high degree of scientific uncertainty, the PFMC decided to close the entire continental shelf to bottom trawling.” 140

In 2018, seven of those nine stocks were still in the process of being rebuilt.141 It was an ecological and socioeconomic disaster. In the case of the groundfish crash, four types of uncertainty were present: science lacked information on the life history of groundfish, the science concerning groundfish populations was relatively new, there had been several unforeseen

El Nino events, and there was a history of variability in population sampling.142 The stocks were reduced to a fraction of their original estimates and have been slow to recover. They have been, and still are, ecologically and socioeconomically important to the Pacific Northwest. They are at risk and their future is uncertain. Additionally, the future of every fishery is uncertain, as nationwide stocks have been on the decline.143 According to Hilborn et. al., in a 2001 paper,

“60% of the world's major fish stocks are now overexploited, in the sense that stock sizes have been driven to lower levels than would produce the largest annual biological surplus or net

139 Wesley Shaw and Flaxen Conway, “Responses to the West Coast Groundfish Disaster: Lessons Learned for Communities and Decision Makers,” 2007. 140 Ibid. 141 “Background | Pacific Fishery Management Council.” 142 Shaw and Conway, “Responses to the West Coast Groundfish Disaster: Lessons Learned for Communities and Decision Makers.” 143 National Research Council (U.S.), ed., Science and Its Role in the National Marine Fisheries Service, Compass Series (Washington, D.C: National Academy Press, 2002).

60 economic value. The 60% is a very rough guess.”144 Why then, have some fisheries, like the groundfish fishery, lacked institutional support and financial investment? To be clear, financial investment is a byproduct of institutional support. And while the terms are used here broadly, it means that, for example, if the PFMC deems video analytics a frontier worth exploring, scientists will write grants that will get funded, because at an institutional level there is consensus that it is worth investing in. This happened in the case of Essential Fish Habitat (EFH). EFH was added into the 1996 MSA, the PFMC identified it in 1998. EFH was further defined in the 2006 MSA, and the PFMC established a groundfish habitat advisory committee, of which Wakefield was a part.145 And yes, his habitat work was funded based on a need to know habitats. But he has not been as successful in funding the analysis of the video data. In work like the beam trawl video surveys of Wakefield and Ciannelli, a high level of financial investment was required, as is with most new technologies. They brought different disciplines together and worked to bring video data analysis out of its rudimentary phases to the ranks of best science by incorporating computer vision. That process has had patchy support. For example, in 2014 NOAA sponsored an NRC workshop that brought researches from diverse fields together—fisheries scientists and computer vision engineers—with the goal of moving data analytics forward.146 Although, when speaking with Wakefield about why he had not tried to get more computer vision projects funded, he responded that he had written grants, but that none of them had been funded.147

144 Raymond Hilborn and Carl J. Walters, “Role of Stock Assessment in Fisheries Management,” in Quantitative Fisheries Stock Assessment: Choice, Dynamics and Uncertainty (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), 3–21. 145 “Habitat | Pacific Fishery Management Council,” accessed October 17, 2018, https://www.pcouncil.org/habitat-and-communities/habitat/. 146 Maureen Mellody, Robust Methods for the Analysis of Images and Videos for Fisheries Stock Assessment: Summary of a Workshop (Washington, D.C: The National Academies Press, 2014). 147 Waldo Wakefield. Interviewed by Samm Newton. February 2018.

61 There are surely many reasons and ways that certain species of animal or areas of interest do or do not garner the attention of institutional bodies. One reason could be the influence of perceived risk. Even though the experiences of different fisheries have essentially been the same, they are looked at differently and therefore have different influence in management and decision making—usually because of socio-cultural factors.148 Salmon have had a perceived value and place in society that perhaps groundfish have not. They were visible, easily accessible, arguably more beautiful, and continue to be a historical and cultural icon of the Pacific northwest.149

Additionally, salmon are an anadromous species that can be seen and caught in rivers so they have had a greater presence in non-coastal areas as well. Discourse that even considers the cultural and historical place of groundfish, particularly flatfish, is sparse. Although, in his 2002 dissertation R. Scott Byram compiled unpublished oral histories from local tribes and there was mention of perch and flounder (a type of flatfish) fishing in the coastal estuaries.150 He also found that flounder populations were far less abundant during that time compared to the oral interviews of Native elders. Flounder were hunted mostly with spears, and were an important food source for the early people of the central and northern Oregon Coast. Byram believes that these food sources were not only important culturally, but that these Native interviews are data worthy of consideration by fisheries scientists. In any case, groundfish have certainly been an important species over time, just without cultural standing of other fish like salmon.

Another risk perception issue could be in the concept of an identifiable victim effect, or when people are more connected to the well-being of an individual versus a vague group with

148 Slovic, P., “Perception of Risk,” Science, no. 236 (April 17, 1987): 280–85. 149 National Research Council (U.S.), ed., Upstream: Salmon and Society in the Pacific Northwest (Washington, D.C: National Academy Press, 1996). 150 Scott Byram, “Brush Fences and Basket Traps: The Archaeology and Ethnohistory of Tidewater Weir Fishing on the Oregon Coast” (Dissertation, 2002).

62 similar needs. The salmon fishery is composed of five fish, while the groundfish fishery has several different types of fish and over ninety different species.151 And this comparison is not specific to salmon, it refers to the way fisheries have been valued and prioritized in general, due to perception gaps. The NMFS has prided itself on innovation.152 Yet, for innovative science to rise to the standard of being the best available, and to be incorporated into the management framework, it would need institutional support and financial investment. Adjusting for the role of risk perception, and cultural valuation, could have removed some roadblocks to incorporating emerging sciences and technologies.

Generally, scientific inquiry relies on technology for data, it is the raw material of ecological inference. In Latin, the word data means “to give” or a “(given) thing.” But data has been far from given. It was collected, gathered, taken. It was acquired by scientists through great effort, and in the case of Pacific groundfish, it has taken several forms. The ways in which scientists have compiled data on Pacific groundfish has not been straightforward. At least one, and sometimes several, groundfish surveys and data collections processes have been in place in some form or fashion since 1956 (either through government agencies or research institutions), but surveys were not as well documented or organized until 1977, just after the implementation of the original version of the Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 (MSA).153,154

151 Karen Jenni And George Loewenstein, “Explaining the Identifiable Victim Effect,” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 14, no. 3 (May 1, 1997): 235–57. 152 National Research Council (U.S.), Science and Its Role in the National Marine Fisheries Service. 153 Susan Hannah, “Hist. of PNW Groundfish.” 154 Keller, A. A., J. R. Wallace, and R. D. Methot, “The Northwest Fisheries Science Center’s West Coast Groundfish Bottom Trawl Survey: History, Design, and Description. U.S. Department of Commerce, NOAA Technical Memorandum NMFS-NWFSC-136. DOI: 10.7289/V5/TM-NWFSC-136.,” 2017.

63 Measuring Groundfish (Part I): Institutions

In 1988, J.A. Gulland published the second edition of Fish Population Dynamics, a book concerned with what kinds of knowledge fisheries scientists had, and could provide to fisheries managers. Gulland’s work, as well as other fisheries research, was an important influence in the growing relationship between science and management, and contributed to the science-informed fisheries management framework that reflected the needs of a growing economy. Two chapters of Gulland’s book were dedicated to the challenges and opportunities of basic fisheries data. In one of them, John G. Pope, a British quantitative fisheries scientist and consultant, wrote that

“every important dataset should have someone to love and cherish it.”155 Pope believed that researcher’s attitudes towards data collection and analysis influenced how useful and accurate data could be. He had examined existing sources of fisheries data and tried to answer “how

[data] should be collected and how good [data] should be.” His work—both in Gulland’s 1988 book and later in the 2000 federally mandated report, Improving the Collection Management and

Use of Marine Fisheries Data—focused on the role of various sources data along with the methods of collecting it, analyzing it effectively, and understanding how imperfect it could be.156

It is hard to determine what researcher’s attitudes towards groundfish were a hundred years ago, but catch and effort data, as well scientific survey data, for groundfish in the 1900’s was largely inconsistent, scattered, lost, damaged, orphaned, or erroneous and it was not used for insights into historical populations of groundfish.157 The science driving FMPs for Pacific groundfish has

155 J. A. Gulland, ed., Fish Population Dynamics: The Implications for Management, 2nd ed (Chichester [England] ; New York: Wiley, 1988). 156 National Research Council (U.S.), ed., Improving the Collection, Management, and Use of Marine Fisheries Data (Washington, D.C: National Academy Press, 2000). 157 David B. Sampson, Paul R. Crone, and Northwest Fisheries Science Center U. S, Commercial Fisheries Data Collection Procedures for U.S. Pacific Coast Groundfish, NOAA Technical

64 come in great part from bottom trawl survey datasets compiled by the regional fisheries science center of the NMFS.158 Bottom trawls, used to sample groundfish populations by the NMFS, are fishing apparatus based on techniques that have been in use since the 1300’s. They were originally designed within the fishing industry to drag large open nets along the seafloor and could capture an unprecedented amount of fish. Even at the time of their inception centuries ago, beam trawls were contentious pieces of machinery that caused controversy among fishermen.

For example, a petition from 1376 reflects an understanding that these wondyrechauns, as they were called, allowed fisherman to abuse common resources, promoted overfishing, destroyed habitat, and resulted in auxiliary loss of life.159 Trawling endured as a fishing practice and arrived in the U.S. with early European Atlantic settlers. Groundfish fishing using beam trawls was introduced in the West during the 1870’s and 80’s as fishing vessels transitioned from sail to steam power. Although it was not until the 1920’s, when diesel became available, that the groundfish fishery was made much more accessible to US fishers. Diesel also made otter trawls possible, as they had the power to pull the larger nets with wider openings through the sediment; this method became more popular than the standard beam trawl.160 Otter trawls have boards, or doors attached to the fish net that dig into the sediment scooping and scaring fish into the net.

Memorandum NMFS-NWFSC ; 31 (Seattle, Wash.] : [Springfield, Va.]: USDeptof Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Marine Fisheries Service, Northwest Fisheries Science Center ; Available from National Technical Information Service, 1997). 158 There have been different fisheries science centers involved in these surveys, regional centers have split, and merged and I do not want to get into all that right now (although that could possibly be another reason everything was so fragmented before the establishment of the Northwest Fisheries Science Center). In any case, I am referring to all the groundfish surveys in general as being done by the NMFS, which is a broad statement, as they are the umbrella arm that has encompassed all the iterations of the regional centers. 159 W. Jeffrey Bolster, The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail, 2014. 160 Pacific Coast Groundfish Plan (CA,OR,WA).

65 The NMFS services has chosen to use a type of otter trawl because that is what fishers use, this allows for their data to pair well with catch and effort data, as well as with other historical data on fish landings. In 1984 an annual slope survey, with an adjusted trawl system, was added to the overall groundfish sampling on top of the ongoing triennial surveys that had started in ’77. But, the annual survey, like the surveys before it, had variable sampling methods until the early

2000’s (i.e. variable parameter estimates).161 Although bottom trawls have evolved, each with different adjustments to improve their fish harvesting/measuring abilities, when it comes to demersal fish, a trawl of some kind has remained the preferred method of acquiring data for scientists.

Much of the knowledge about groundfish fishery pre-1977 was gleaned from analyzing commercial fishing landings, or catch and effort data, using what is called fisheries-dependent datasets.162 Even then, most of that catch and effort data came from Washington, as California and Oregon’s catch and effort data did not become available until 1976.163 Fisheries-independent surveys were designed and carried out by scientists associated with the NMFS. Although there were localized and descriptive studies of flatfish life history as early as 1900, at sea flatfish tagging cruises did not begin until the 1950’s with the NMFS vessel John N. Cobb.164 Broadened fisheries-independent surveys did not begin until the late 70’s and were geared towards more efficient harvest, as the original MSA mandated that the abundance of the sea be harnessed as

161 Keller, A. A., J. R. Wallace, and R. D. Methot, “The Northwest Fisheries Science Center’s West Coast Groundfish Bottom Trawl Survey: History, Design, and Description. U.S. Department of Commerce, NOAA Technical Memorandum NMFS-NWFSC-136. DOI: 10.7289/V5/TM-NWFSC-136.” 162 J. A. Gulland, ed., Fish Population Dynamics (London ; New York: Wiley, 1977). 163 Pacific Coast Groundfish Plan (CA,OR,WA). 164 Ibid.

66 effectively as possible.165 These early fishery-independent surveys were conducted every three years (the triennial surveys) and did not follow any standardized sampling methods, temporally, geo-spatially, species, or depth-wise. But, they did all use the same bottom trawl mechanism, and contracted with commercial fisherman for use of their trawls and vessels.166 The consistent sampling mechanism, bottom trawling, was the only thing connecting the years of patchy data collected over that time-period. Meaningful data for predicting and/or assessing stocks was lacking. Questions about the stocks were asked of the data that it could not provide due to its inconsistent nature.167 The groundfish datasets gathered from the beginning of the 1970’s through to the 90’s were reflective of national and economic desires of the late nineteenth century to find new populations to put into the market and more efficiently commodify the ones that existed.168

Measuring Fish (Part II): Individuals

Financially supported through the complex science-informed management framework, individual scientists perpetuated iterative relationships among science, technology, data sets, and knowledge generation at the intersection of environmental decision making. Their technological choices had direct and reflexive consequences in the contexts of gathering groundfish data, how to ask questions of that data, and the broader implications in which that data could be utilized.

165 Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976. 166 Aimee A. Keller, Wallace, John R. (John Robert), 1959-, and Methot, Richard Donald, 1953-, “The Northwest Fisheries Science Center’s West Coast Groundfish Bottom Trawl Survey : History, Design, and Description” (U.S. Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Marine Fisheries Service, Northwest Fisheries Science Center, 20). 167 Susan Hannah, “Hist. of PNW Groundfish.” 168 Pacific Coast Groundfish Plan (CA,OR,WA).

67 Looking back at the recent history flatfish research on the Newport Hydrographic (NH) Line, beginning with William Pearcy and Waldo Wakefield, offers some insight into this claim. They were both fisheries scientists and alumni of Oregon State University who worked together closely over their careers, at OSU and when they were at other institutions or agencies.169 The sampling Pearcy began in the 70’s and 80’s laid the groundwork for the NH Line—which became the most sampled area off the Oregon Coast.170,171 This invisible transect of water that emerges from Newport, Oregon was sampled east to west and near the shore, as opposed to north to south and in deeper water (like most of the previous data from early NMFS surveys of the time). Sampling in nurseries, where fish grow up, is different than sampling for adults, and therefore data about these nearshore flatfish was set up differently than that of earlier flatfish studies. It was also not the overt federal charge of the public research institutions to do work that would directly contribute to stock assessments and management (as there was with NMFS scientists), so there was no imperative to make their research fit into management frameworks of the time. Pearcy’s work on juvenile flatfish was collected and analyzed using a different yardstick (per say) than the NMFS research. Incorporating the type of data that Pearcy gathered was complicated. Nearshore nurseries for the groundfish fishery were not represented through fisheries-dependent or independent datasets.

University studies of groundfish abundance, habitat, and more complex biological interactions continued to become more prevalent beginning in the 80’s and 90’s, as evidenced by

169 Waldo Wakefield. Interviewed by Samm Newton. February 10, 2018. 170 W. Pearcy, Mj Hosie, and S. Richardson, “Distribution and Duration of Pelagic Life of Larvae of Dover Sole, Microstomus Pacificus; Rex Sole, Glyptocephalus Zachirus; and Petrale Sole, Eopsetta Jordani, in Waters off Oregon.,” Fish. Bull. NMFS/NOAA 75, no. 1 (1977): 173– 183. 171 S. Richardson and W. Pearcy, “Coastal and Oceanic Fish Larvae in an Area of Upwelling off Yaquina Bay, Oregon.,” Fish. Bull. NMFS/NOAA 75, no. 1 (1977): 125–145.

68 additional funded proposals at OSU.172 During that time, there was also what has been described as a turn inward leading up to the turn of the century; an attempt to better understand the life history and ecological connections of fish populations.173 In 1996, Essential Fish Habitat (EFH) was inserted into the reauthorization of the MSA as well, making it more important to understand the complex relationships present in groundfish ecosystems.174 EFH was further defined in the

2006 MSA reauthorization as “those waters and substrate necessary to fish for spawning, breeding, feeding or growth to maturity.”175 It was also around this time between 2006 and 2008 when OSU posted their first official position for a fisheries oceanographer within the college of oceanography—this is when they hired Lorenzo Ciannelli.176

Wakefield, who had worked with Pearcy, has always been interested in fish habitat of all varieties. So, when Lorenzo Ciannelli approached him in 2008 about a study of flatfish and hypoxia he knew the best way to design the study. Hypoxia had become a growing concern in

Oregon coastal areas, which is why Ciannelli was interested in studying it and also why Oregon

Sea Grant funded it. Since Pearcy had already done work on juvenile flatfish in the 70’s and

80’s, Wakefield and Ciannelli modeled their data collection methods to mimic Pearcy’s sampling. If they could build a consistent dataset, they may be able to incorporate past data and expect more predictive results. Pearcy’s earlier studies used that familiar medieval piece of machinery mentioned earlier—the beam trawl. As Ciannelli has said, “the beam trawl truly was the best tool for the job,” and they used the exact same one for their work because it was what

172 “Research and Accounting Office Records, 1935 - 2010, RG026. Special Collections and Archives, Oregon State University.” 173 Susan Hannah, “Hist. of PNW Groundfish.” 174 “Sustainable Fisheries Act,” Pub. L. No. 104–297 (1996). 175 “Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Reauthorization Act of 2006,” Pub. L. No. 109–479 (n.d.). 176 Lorenzo Cianelli. Interviewed by Samm Newton. Oct. 15, 2017

69 Pearcy and Waldo had used earlier.177 Studies of juvenile flatfish in sandy sediment were conducted many times using that beam trawl and Pearcy had published several papers with the subsequent data set.178 Wakefield and Ciannelli’s research expanded Pearcy’s earlier data set dramatically, although a couple small adjustments were made to the classic beam trawl.

Wakefield added a tickler chain, to encourage movement. And, he chose to add a video camera.

There were several reasons that Wakefield chose to include emerging technology, in that case underwater video. He was not only a seasoned ichthyologist, he had also spent a considerable portion of his career working for NOAA’s Underwater Research Program (NURP), which taught researchers how to use emerging marine science technologies. He had also done early work using video to better understand habitat off the coast of California.179 He brought to the equation a relationship with technology, an emerging ocean sampling method, that was not well represented off the Oregon coast. His work in California was similar, but used a camera sled that did not produce the amount of dust that the added tickler chain did in the Oregon studies.

The NH Line videos were not great quality, and the water was not very clear.

The use of video by Ciannelli and Wakefield marked an attempt to depart from sampling techniques that depended on counting physical fish in a net. It also added new members to their collaborative, like novel types of survey data. Video contributed multiple dimensions to the data that was collected and subsequently the kinds of ecological questions and inferences that could be developed. By adding a visual element to their research, they, and other interested scientists

177 Personal Communication, Oct. 31, 2018. 178 William G. Pearcy, “Distribution and Abundance of Small Flatfishes and Other Demersal Fishes in a Region of Diverse Sediments and Bathymetry off Oregon,” 1978;; E. E. Krygier and W. Pearcy, “The Role of Estuarine and Offshore Nursery Areas for Young English Sole, Parophrys Vetulus Girard, of Oregon.,” Fishery Bulletin 84, no. 1 (1986): 119–132. 179 Waldo Wakefield. Interviewed by Samm Newton. February 10, 2018.

70 could ask questions of juvenile flatfish that they were not able to ask before. For example, in

2010 Hatfield Marine Science Center researcher Sarah Henkel joined Wakefield and Ciannelli.

She was looking to build a baseline dataset on the potential impacts of marine renewable energy devices along the coast that could inform wave energy development for the The Oregon Wave

Energy Trust (OWET (now Pacific Ocean Energy Trust)).180,181 She needed a beam trawl in the same area, and they happened to have one. Since she was looking at species-habitat relationships, her work lined up with that of Wakefield and Ciannelli and they were able to continue their work through Henkel’s funding, and their dataset expanded as well.182 While the focus of Ciannelli and Wakefield was on fish (because as Ciannelli states they were “fishheads”),

Henkel was focused on all benthic assemblages, mostly invertebrates. In 2012 the North Energy

Test Site (now PacWave-North) was approved so OWET no longer needed Henekel’s site characterization data, and funding for the project ended. Since Wakefield and Ciannelli were able to continue their beam trawl video work through new funding from the NOAA, Henkel became only tangentially involved. Wakefield continued to collect invertebrates for Henkel, but without funding specific to the invertebrate assemblages, that data piled up.183

The original 2008 beam trawl video surveys focused on hypoxia (research timeline shown in Figure 16), so they only sampled during the summer when hypoxia (low dissolved oxygen levels) could be observed. The 2012 NOAA funding expanded their quantity of data

180 Sarah K. Henkel, Robert M. Suryan, and Barbara A. Lagerquist, “Marine Renewable Energy and Environmental Interactions: Baseline Assessments of Seabirds, Marine Mammals, Sea Turtles and Benthic Communities on the Oregon Shelf,” in Marine Renewable Energy Technology and Environmental Interactions, ed. Mark A. Shields and Andrew I.L. Payne (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2014), 93–110. 181 Sarah Henkel, “Benthic Habitat Surveys for Informing Renewable Energy Development in the Pacific Northwest,” (n.d.). 182 Lorenzo Cianelli. Interviewed by Samm Newton. October 15, 2017. 183 Personal Communication. Sarah Henkel. November 2018.

Figure 16: Beam trawl research timeline sketch, by Lorenzo Ciannelli even further, and since Wakefield was employed by NOAA, he became lead PI of the project.

On top of expanded funding that took them sampling every month year round, Waldo was also able to upgrade the beam trawl camera to a digital camcorder providing higher resolution and an

SD card. The previous camera had used black and white film and tapes to record the ocean floor.

At this point the direction of the sampling shifted as well. The support of NOAA, which allowed them to go out every month, shifted their gaze to succession within a fish community throughout the year. They were able to better understand the life cycles of flatfish, like English and Dover

Sole, and Speckled and Pacific Halibut, and others. In 2014 the beam trawl research got combined with that of Bill Peterson, who was interested in zooplankton on the NH Line. Once they were involved with the Peterson group, the project was injected with increased man power, and they went out doing quarterly cruises together with the aim of characterizing the transition of planktonic flatfish larva to juvenile settlement. The data collected on community ecology was important from a general scientific standpoint, but also had implications for management of the

72 species as well. Baseline data about settlement time, size distribution, and habitat could help coastal managers plan state activities, for example like marine renewable energy. It could also help fisheries regulators by providing a more holistic image of flatfish populations; a window into what affects their abundance and distribution.

Spatially correlating fish catch to certain types of habitat seemed possible through the beam trawl video surveys. Scientists might also be able to classify the microhabitats that make up nearshore groundfish nurseries. The possibilities initially seemed endless, but they eventually became less clear. The tickler chain was added to encourage the movement of fish, but the cloud of dust it created in the video greatly complicated efforts to analyze the data using any type of automated method, like computer vision technology. The movement of the net and the ship also made analysis difficult. Going through the video frame by frame was incredibly labor and staff intensive. From five years of beam trawl video data collected, one paper was published, and the data had all been sorted manually, covering only about 1% of the available footage.184 The cumbersome nature and the sheer quantity of data, paired with the challenging visual composition of the video had not been anticipated. The result was thousands of hours of data ripe for analysis, but without any clear direction as to what or how information could be gleaned from the video.

The technical challenges posed by the beam trawl videos created a problem that was further explored by the machine learning community. In 2017 Ciannelli was funded through the

National Science Foundation (NSF) National Research Graduate Training program to work with graduate students and the beam trawl video research (of which this author was involved). The

184 Amy Stinton et al., “Using In Situ Video Analysis To Assess Juvenile Flatfish Behavior Along The Oregon Central Coast,” Reports of California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations 55 (2014): 158–168.

73 team chose to investigate concepts within the framework of emerging technologies and fisheries science. Emerging technologies are those dealing with big data, since it has been a relatively new area of study, and they specifically focused on adding components of computer vision within a machine learning context to the analysis of the beam trawl video data, and how knowledge gleaned from that data might be used by environmental regulators and managers. In addition to being key components in the technical performance of machine learning algorithms, datasets also have had deeper, more profound impacts on shaping the sorts of problems that the machine learning community has worked on. There has been a fundamental interplay between datasets and technological innovation. Once a dataset is established, it becomes a benchmark that future algorithms are evaluated against, and focuses research efforts onto the problem(s) posed by those datasets. One of the most successful examples of this was ImageNet, which arguably launched the deep learning era, and presided over multiple consecutive and substantive gains in computer vision. Datasets also offered an opportunity for establishing standardized benchmarks for comparing new methods to, and there are often leaderboards associated with different datasets that offer “objective measures of performance and therefore are important guides for research.”185

The beam trawl video surveys, even in the context of computer vision, still required human mediaries to label data and write machine learning algorithms which posed additional complications. Implicit biases enshrined in datasets have been an issue of contention since the birth of deep learning. For example, there have been highly visible mistakes in recent years, such

185 Laura Leal-Taixé et al., “Tracking the Trackers: An Analysis of the State of the Art in Multiple Object Tracking,”

74 as Google’s racist face recognition and Uber’s self-driving car death.186,187 There are also concerns regarding less visible algorithmic decision making, such as credit decisions, or

COMPAS (predictive software used to decide which prisoners are eligible for early release) that may have built-in biases, but which are not available to be audited or examined due to intellectual property constraints. This raises ethical concerns around proprietary and/or automated algorithms that make decisions with minimal oversight. It also highlights the profound importance of datasets in the creation of valid models.

The computer vision and machine learning aspect of interrogating the beam trawl data was added in hopes that it would offer a deeper understanding of flatfish as well as more data about their behavior and possible responses to changing oceans.188 But, if these massive visual datasets were to be used to predict fish abundance, they would need to be applicable in the context of environmental decision making, not just environmental science. To incorporate automated video surveillance into the current management framework, it would first need to be considered best available science.

Managing Fish (Part I): Best Scientific Information Available

This term “best available science” (also known as “best scientific information available” and referred to throughout the following as BSIA) is mentioned in multiple pieces of United

186 “Google Photos Labels Black People as ‘gorillas’ - Telegraph,” accessed August 31, 2018, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/11710136/Google-Photos-assigns-gorilla-tag-to- photos-of-black-people.html. 187 Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Self-Driving Uber Car Kills Pedestrian in Arizona, Where Robots Roam,” The New York Times, July 30, 2018, sec. Technology, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/uber-driverless-fatality.html. 188 Waldo Wakefield. Interviewed by Samm Newton. February 10, 2018.

75 States legislation. It first appeared in the Endangered Species Conservation Act of 1969, and it was brought over to the current Endangered Species Act in 1973.189 Since then, it has been seen in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Water Act of 1997, and in the MSA reauthorizations of 1996 and 2007.190 Despite this term having been in use since 1969, it is still difficult to determine what is considered “best.”191 It is probably safe to say that the datasets pieced together from the 50’s through the 90’s of both fishery-dependent and independent surveys was not necessarily the best. But it was the data available when the groundfish fishery became the gaze of a newly established PFMC. There were preliminary management plans from

1978 to 1980, but the first official FMP was not implemented until 1982.192 The 1982 FMP even stated that “historical data do not meet the needs of today.”193 Furthermore, best science requirements did not get added to the language of fisheries management until the 1990’s. It was the 1996 MSA reauthorization that first called for the use of BSIA in the fisheries context, specifically to better inform the setting and enforcing of maximum sustainable yield (MSY), as

189 Elizabeth Kuhn, “Science And Deference: The ‘Best Available Science’ Mandate Is A Fiction in the Ninth Circuit,” Environmental Law Review - Lewis & Clack Law, Environmental Law Review Syndicate (blog), October 20, 2016, http://elawreview.org/environmental-law-review- syndicate/science-and-deference-the-best-available-science-mandate-is-a-fiction-in-the-ninth- circuit/; “Endangered Species Conservation Act of 1969,” Pub. L. No. 91–135, § 1-5, 83 Stat. 275 (1969). 190 P. Sullivan et al., “Defining and Implementing Best Available Science for Fisheries and Environmental Science, Policy, and Management,” American Fisheries Society 31, no. 9 (September 1, 2006): 460–460; Eric Schwaab, “Taking Stock: The Magnuson-Stevens Act Revisited: The Magnuson Act Thirty-Five Years Later,” Roger Williams University Law Review 17, no. 1 (2012): 14–20. 191 Sullivan et al., “Defining and Implementing Best Available Science for Fisheries and Environmental Science, Policy, and Management;” Schwaab, “The Magnuson Act Thirty-Five Years Later.” 192 Pacific Coast Groundfish Plan (CA,OR,WA). 193 Ibid.

76 well as to focus on essential fish habitat (EFH), and cooperative research.194 BSIA appears in

National Standard 2, one of the ten National Standards established in the 1996 reauthorization, which states “[fishery] conservation and management measures shall be based upon the best scientific information available.”195

According to the National Research Council (NRC) report from the National Academy of

Science (NAS), the “best scientific information available” needed to be relevant, inclusive, objective, transparent, open, timely, and peer-reviewed.196 The 2004 report was mandated by the

2002 MSA reauthorization.197 It stressed the need to improve scientific information and reduce uncertainty, but ultimately recommended that a universal definition or application of BSIA was impossible and problematic.198 Still, the 2006 MSA reauthorization called for better, best science, once again.199

Once science becomes the best available, how then is it transformed from ecological inferences, to agreed upon understandings of the world that should be considered when managing fish as a natural resource? The concept of BSIA has been an evolving one, not a static definition that can be painted broadly over the fisheries councils and the scientists they work with. Due to the vague and ambiguous characteristics of BSIA, National Standard 2 was revised

194 Donald C. Baur et al., Ocean and Coastal Law and Policy, Second edition. (Chicago, Illinois: American Bar Association, Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources, 2015). 195 “National Standards for Fishery Conservation and Management,” 16 U.S. Code § 1851 (a) (2007). 196 Committee on Defining the Best Scientific Information Available for Fisheries Management et al., Improving the Use of the “Best Scientific Information Available” Standard in Fisheries Management (Washington, UNITED STATES: National Academies Press, 2004). 197 National Research Council, Improving the Use of the “Best Scientific Information Available” Standard in Fisheries Management (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2004). 198 Committee on Defining the Best Scientific Information Available for Fisheries Management et al., Improving the Use of the “Best Scientific Information Available” Standard in Fisheries Management. 199 Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Reauthorization Act of 2006.

77 in 2013 to better define what BSIA meant in the context of conservation and management for federal fisheries and Fishery Management Plans (FMPs).200 Since science is dynamic and the amount and availability of quality data varies, the revised National Standard 2 did not give a prescriptive definition of BSIA. Instead, the revised National Standard 2 stated that BSIA should follow a credible scientific method process and be evaluated according to: relevance, inclusiveness, objectivity, transparency and openness, timeliness, verification and validation, and peer review.201 Each of these terms were also further defined within the revision. It was also stated that the role of peer review is to evaluate the quality and credibility of the scientific information and not to provide advice to the regional fisheries councils since that is the role of the PFMC Scientific and Statistical Committee (SSC).202

To understand the role of BSIA in science-informed management, one must understand the framework of the management system. Since the early 1900’s groundfish stocks had been monitored by state agencies. In those early years, the states enforced things like area closures, time restraints, gear restrictions, and net mesh size, although some of these regulations were voluntary.203 The Pacific Marine Fisheries Commission, which was not a regulatory entity but a coordination effort, first began managing groundfish via an interstate compact beginning in

1947. Thirty years later, the PFMC, one of eight regional fishery management councils, was established by the original MSA.204 The Pacific groundfish fishery has now been managed by the

200 “Magnuson-Stevens Act Provisions; National Standard 2-Scientific Information.” 201 “Magnuson-Stevens Act Provisions; National Standard 2-Scientific Information”; National Research Council, Improving the Use of the “Best Scientific Information Available” Standard in Fisheries Management. 202 “Magnuson-Stevens Act Provisions; National Standard 2-Scientific Information.” 203 Pacific Coast Groundfish Plan (CA,OR,WA). 204 PFMC, “Pacific Coast Groundfish Fishery Management Plan.”

78 NMFS and the PFMC since the first council meeting in October of 1976.205 The region that the

PFMC has overseen includes the U.S. exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of Washington, Oregon, and California, which spans up to 200 nautical miles offshore. Each council has been made of both voting and non-voting members.206 Voting members have usually been state representatives, state obligatory members, at-large members, a tribal representative, and a NMFS representative.207 The obligatory, at-large, and tribal members are always appointed by the U.S.

Secretary of Commerce, while the remaining members are appointed by their respective agencies. The current non-voting members represent the state of Alaska, the Pacific States

Marine Fisheries Commission, the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the U.S. Coast Guard.208,209 The NMFS regional general council has also provided legal advice to the PFMC when needed. The MSA tasked he PFMC with developing four fisheries management plans, or updating old ones. Those plans now cover over 120 different fish species

(90 of them in the groundfish fishery) and 8 krill species, encompassing 13 fish families under their management, and they make all these decisions based on majority vote.210 FMPs are then sent to the NMFS Regional Administrator and NMFS Headquarters whom must approve, partially approve, or disapprove them.211 If approved, the Secretary of Commerce promulgates

205 “Minutes: Pacific Fishery Management Council,” Open Session Meeting Minutes, 2000 1976, Minutes pre-2000, Pacific Fisheries Management Council FTP. 206 This information was gleaned from looking at various meeting minutes from 1976 to 2018. 207 Pacific Fisheries Management Council. “Council Staff. www.pcouncil.org/council- operations/meet-the-council-staff/ (Accessed February 6, 2018). 208 Ibid. 209 Josh Eagle, Monica Goldberg, and Jack Sterne, “Domestic Fishery Management,” in Ocean and Coastal Law and Policy, Second edition (Chicago, Illinois: American Bar Association, Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources, 2015), 305–29. 210 Pacific Fishery Management Council. “Who We Are and What We Do.” 211 Eagle, Goldberg, and Sterne, “Domestic Fishery Management.”

79 the fishery management plan or the amendment, and then NMFS is responsible for implementing, administering, and enforcing these newly established plans.212

In addition to the voting and non-voting members on the council, there have also been various advisory groups and special project committees that help inform the council on current issues. For example, in the case of Northeastern Pacific groundfish, these advisory bodies have included: Advisory Subpanels, Enforcement Consultants, a Habitat Committee, a Groundfish

Allocation Committee, the Scientific and Statistical Committee, as well as various Plan

Development, Technical, and Management Teams. Advisory Subpanels are stakeholder representatives such as commercial and recreational fishing industry members, tribal members, conservation groups, and the public. The Enforcement Consultants represent the Coast Guard, state fish and wildlife agencies, state police agencies, and the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The Habitat Committee is composed of representatives from state and federal management agencies, tribes, conservation groups, and fishing industries The Groundfish Allocation

Committee is composed of representatives from state management agencies, the National Marine

Fisheries Service, and the council. It is also provided legal advice by NOAA’s regional office since it oversees allocating groundfish surpluses among the fishing industry. Finally, the

Scientific and Statistical Committee is composed of agency and academic scientists, and they are tasked with reviewing the scientific content of the council and other advisory bodies to confirm that management decisions are based on BSIA according to the MSA. The Scientific and

Statistical Committee must approve any new scientific methodologies, technology, or general innovation to maintain the robustness of the Fisheries Management Plans.213

212 “Regional Operating Agreement between the PFMC and NMFS” (Pacific Fishery Management Council, 2017). 213 Pacific Fishery Management Council. “Who We Are and What We Do.

80 Nearshore data covering the life history of flatfish, their community compositions, ecology, and habitat did not fit into current stock assessment models, survey methodologies, or understandings of flatfish populations, even though, as mentioned previously, that type of information would allow for more in depth understandings of fish populations. The indoctrination of BSIA has halted innovation and made it difficult for decision makers to consider all the data available, take in to account emerging information, or consider data that does not fit into current stock assessment methods and models.

Managing Fish (Part II): Fish Under Risk

The dependency of predictive models on consistent methods and datasets has validity, but has also been limiting. Fish stock assessments and model algorithms have been based on the idea that data can predict the future, or even assume the present, considering past data inputs.

They assume that present datasets are reflective of reality and they also assume that the future will resemble the past. These assumptions have hindered the ability of science to accurately reflect the reality of Pacific groundfish. The early, disparate survey datasets lacked predictive power, meaning that the data could not fit well into stock assessment models because it was not standardized. The more standardized data available, the more accurate, or reflective of reality, models could claim to be. In the 80’s and 90’s the process of trying to build better model algorithms using improved datasets began expanding. For example, at Oregon State University, multiple proposals about groundfish population modeling were funded through different arms of

81 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) including the Sea Grant college program, the NMFS, and the NOAA Underwater Research Program (NURP).214

Additionally, in 1995 the trawl survey started to become more formalized in conjunction with the establishment of the Fishery Resource Analysis and Monitoring Division (FRAM) of the Northwest Fisheries Science Center.215 This also coincided with the 1996 reauthorization of the MSA and incorporation of the Sustainable Fisheries Act. Because best available science meant different things to different people in different fisheries and regions, it has often meant more science. The standardization of the West Coast Groundfish Bottom Trawl Survey

(WCGBTS) could be interpreted as an attempt to provide more quantity and quality datasets to analyze. Since more research went into modeling in the early 90’s, it is possibly what influenced investment into assembling better datasets around the same time.

Soon after, improved modeling impacted management. By 1997 there were changes made to the stock assessments alongside large cuts in groundfish quotas. NMFS seemed to shift in earnest to improving the predictive power of stock assessments models, wich meant making advancements in the acquisition of data.216 A transition into more comprehensive and standardized single survey that cobbled together the disparate sampling methods from the previous thirty or so years began. This move to standardization was an effort to create consistency and certainty over time and became the foundation for the main groundfish data survey, known today as the WCGBTS.217

214 “Research and Accounting Office Records, 1935 - 2010, RG026. Special Collections and Archives, Oregon State University.” 215 Keller, Wallace, John R. (John Robert), 1959-, and Methot, Richard Donald, 1953-, “The Northwest Fisheries Science Center’s West Coast Groundfish Bottom Trawl Survey.” 216 Susan Hannah, “Hist. of PNW Groundfish.” 217 Keller, Wallace, John R. (John Robert), 1959-, and Methot, Richard Donald, 1953-, “The Northwest Fisheries Science Center’s West Coast Groundfish Bottom Trawl Survey.”

82 The most recent FMP also included an imperative to develop stock assessment models.218

These models were made using information from multiple sources including landing records, hook-and-line surveys, and bottom trawl surveys.219,220 Even though stock assessments have used multiple data inputs, there has still been inherent uncertainty associated with measuring fish abundance. If a fish population is underestimated, fishing regulations could become stricter than necessary, thus harming the fishing industry and, ultimately, seafood consumers. However, if a fish population is overestimated, then the fishing regulations could be too lenient resulting in overfishing or fishery collapse.221 Local stakeholders, some of whom have relied on the groundfish fishery for generations, have been uniquely impacted by the ability of stock assessment surveys and models to accurately inform appropriate fishing regulations. Some stakeholders have felt that regulations tend to be overly cautious—compensating for the large amount of uncertainty involved with managing a fishery and measuring fish abundance.222,223

218 Keller, A. A., J. R. Wallace, and R. D. Methot, “The Northwest Fisheries Science Center’s West Coast Groundfish Bottom Trawl Survey: History, Design, and Description. U.S. Department of Commerce, NOAA Technical Memorandum NMFS-NWFSC-136. 219 Pacific Fishery Management Council. “Who We Are and What We Do.” 220 “Fishery Resource Analysis and Monitoring Division - Northwest Fisheries Science Center,” February 7, 2018, https://www.nwfsc.noaa.gov/research/divisions/fram/index.cfm. 221 Anthony T Charles, “Living with Uncertainty in Fisheries: Analytical Methods, Management Priorities and the Canadian Groundfishery Experience,” Fisheries Research 37, no. 1 (August 1, 1998): 37–50. 222 American Fisheries Society 425 Barlow Place Bethesda and Md 20814897-8616, “House Natural Resources Subcommittee Holds Hearing on Magnuson-Stevens Act,” American Fisheries Society, July 28, 2017, https://fisheries.org/2017/07/house-natural-resources- subcommittee-holds-hearing-on-magnuson-stevens-act/. 223 Webmaster, “Debate Continues Over Magnuson-Stevens Act Reauthorization | Ocean Leadership,” Consortium for Ocean Leadership, October 2, 2017, http://oceanleadership.org/debate-continues-magnuson-stevens-act-reauthorization/.

83 Chapter Three Summary

The inability of the management system to accommodate changing structures of ecological inference and new varieties of data obtained through emerging technologies has limited understandings of fish populations before, during, and after they were considered under risk. Datasets have also been a part of the changing structures of ecological inference, both within the advancement of data extraction and processing technology, and scientific inquiry.

However, datasets have not existed in a vacuum, and generally, datasets have been created around problems that people found relevant. Technological choice has also played a key role in what data was acquired and how it was assembled and analyzed. The datasets that technology has provided in this way became powerful drivers behind institutional understandings of how fish populations have been measured and subsequently managed. These cyclical relationships between datasets, technological choice, and scientific inquiry have constructed a reflexive and iterative ecological inference framework. The whirling of these relationships within the paradigm of ecological inference is what weakened the ability of environmental decision making frameworks to accommodate evolving modes of knowledge generation. Large, novel datasets have the potential to provide population abundance data that could be incorporated into existing management methods, or used to develop more predictive models before another fisheries disaster—not in reaction to one. Additionally, the future of automated video surveillance becoming BSIA depends on institutional support and financial investment. Perhaps BSIA was just another string of words written in a policy meant to fool folks into thinking it was based on some type of achievable scientific standard. Instead, maybe best science was a cell built with expectations of certainty, when certainty doesn’t exist.

84 Technology acted as an intermediary between scientists and the fish they were studying.

But that has not always been a linear relationship, nor has technology been a passive actor in the quest to know nature. Yes, it has been humans that made technological choices, but technology acted upon them, and upon the world, as much as humans acted upon it.224 Technology was more than a set of tools in fisheries science, and its role in ecological inference was more complex than simply that of an implement at the mercy of scientific inquiry. In the case of Northeastern Pacific groundfish, the compound associations at play in how scientists interrogated flatfish, rather than the ecological inferences themselves, limited the environmental decision making framework that fisheries management was built upon.

This chapter was completed in partial fulfillment of the OSU NRT program in Risk and Uncertainty quantification in marine science and policy (author contributions Figure 17).

Figure 17: Visual representation of author contributions as required by the OSU NRT program. Green is text new to this chapter, yellow is original text contributed by the author to the original transdisciplinary report, light gray represents co-authored text from Katlyn Haven and/or Alrik Firl.

224 This concept of technology as actor is borrowed from Bruno Latour. He writes about it in several of his books and papers. It is an overarching interpretation/synthesis of his work on science and technology.

85 Chapter Four: Critical Ocean Studies

An Essay on Interdisciplinary and Amodern Approaches to Political Ecology

I pinned a note up to my studio wall declaring that “I must paint the pluriverse.” That

September I’d spent too much time with my mind on Bruno Latour (We Have Never Been

Modern, The Politics of Nature, The Pasteurization of France, and most recently, Facing Gaia.)

What was I searching for, a different way of knowing the world, of changing the world? I’d spent the previous year enmeshed in Oregon State University’s Department of Microbiology as a resident artist, and as that experience wrapped in the summer of 2017 I hit a wall, intellectually and creatively. I struggled with my role as an artist and the role of creative practice in my more traditional humanities scholarship. Was I pursuing two separate paths—one in a service role that provided visual images á la science communication, the other academically questioning how things like nature, sciences, culture, and politics impacted human relationships with the ocean?

In my mind these were not two separate endeavors; it was one. The ocean is a world composed of many mediums and indeed could be considered the greatest mixed media work ever imagined.

If I were to even attempt to dive into to it in any kind of novel way, I would have to not only accept its plurality, I would need to accept mine as well.

The marine systems that make up the saline parts of our planet are difficult to know.

Aside from the coastlines, the open ocean has no trail maps, no boundaries, no weekend permit passes. It is a place made knowable through the sciences, and scientists are a voice for an ocean made visible through innovative and ever expanding technologies. Still, the uncertain nature of ecological inference, coupled with its complex and reflexive relationship with human networks and inclinations, make the sciences far from overarching authorities for future seas. Furthermore,

86 that way of thinking divides us.225 I could not look to the sciences alone to figure out, or even communicate, the many risks facing Earth’s ocean from the increased burning of fossil fuels, and the subsequent disruptions that process poses on marine systems. Instead, I embraced Latour’s concept of the pluriverse to examine this blue marble, our humanity and the many beings with whom we are connected, including the non-human creatures, that bring us together in an ever evolving collective. Changing ocean conditions may be a term originally defined by scientists, but it was realized through a network of associations among material realities, institutions, technologies, skills, culture, representations, procedures, and mishaps.226 The actants involved in that network, and in our collectives, are part of a whirring play. It is a process that is constantly accounting and ordering new information, or propositions, while at the same time rejecting others.

“At any moment, something can happen to a collective. Time and time again, new entities knock on its door, offering a proposition asking (if not pressing) to become included. The appellant may be a virus, a new technology…a species that signals that it is threatened to become extinct… anything.”227

Latour hoped to better account for these the guests at the door, the ways we collaboratively compose our worlds (our collectives), and the ways in which we articulate and understand those collectives. He suggests the dissolution of the old bifurcation of nature (old bicameralism/modern constitution), and the application of a new bicameralism

(cosmopolitics/new constitution). Our world is not, as often discussed, separated easily into binaries such as nature/society, knowledge/power, fact/value, human/nonhuman (modernity).

Rather, the new bicameralism turns modernity on its side and proposes that collectives are

225 Latour, Facing Gaia. 226 Latour, Politics of Nature. 227 Vries, Bruno Latour.

87 instead created by how things are taken into account, and how they are put into order. The collective that has most interested me contains a muddled, poorly understood network involving sciences, technology, marine systems, environmental value, and resource government. So, I set out to paint the pluriverse, with brushes and phrases, ambitious to loosen, or at least understand, the tangled Gordian knot layered at the crux of human-ocean networks.

I am a builder in the construction of reality in equal measure to the relationships and propositions in the networks that I have studied. To tell a story is to put its characters on stage, to make the unseen movements between them visible. Just as I have revealed the compound associations at play in the stories of flatfish and pteropods, oceanographers and engineers, beam trawls and high-speed photography, making them real (as Latour would say), so too should I tell the story of how I came to know them. For example, experiences on interdisciplinary research projects, and the exploration of mixed methods in individual scholarship, provided unique opportunities to apply both traditional and non-traditional humanities methods to the study of political ecology, which has until recently been dominated by the field of geography.

The current chapter contains a brief meta-analysis that will set-up my approach in the following chapters, applying Latour’s concept of a new bicameralism and his science of associations within the context of how collectives are composed and articulated. It examines the nature of the human-ocean networks scrutinized in my research, and how those relational networks were constructed through the generation, description, and distillation of knowledge.

This chapter also analyzes my own process of knowledge generation and distillation as it is now part of the narrative surrounding how humans came to know and interact with the ocean.

Additionally, an account of personal experience working on interdisciplinary research teams, and of developing a hybrid scholarly method for individual research, provides an opportunity to

88 engage with questions of disciplinarity, academic gatekeeping, and novel approaches to knowledge generation in the face of changing ocean conditions.

Forming and Articulating Collectives

How could the environmental change that is tangled up in marine systems, sciences, technology, culture, and politics be processed in the context of a new bicameralism? How have they been associated, and who was involved? Pteropods knocked on the door. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when; maybe in 1675, maybe in 2003. They were knocking though, and the story of how they were taken into account and subsequently put into order sheds light on processes that create ocean collectives. Their story raises more questions than it answers, but such is the nature of knowledge inquiry. Similarly, groundfish knocked on the door. Or was it just one Dover Sole? Maybe it wasn’t a flatfish at all, maybe it was the choice to zip tie a camera to a beamtrawl. Maybe that choice requested consideration, maybe that video demanded our attention.

In a broad sense, tracing associations, from that first knock, to institutional acceptance, offers a way to understand that what we know about the ocean, and in turn how we interact with it, is rooted in how that knowledge comes to be known (a question at the center of my scholarship). Latour’s new constitution, which consists of two processes—that of accounting, and that of ordering—would see humans and the ocean (and more) as a collective, not as a direct or binary human/nonhuman relationship. To understand that collective, one must ask how sciences and technology have articulated it (or loaded it into discourse), which is what I have tried to do in the following chapters. In his earlier writing, like We Have Never Been Modern,

Latour differentiates between the two dichotomies (Figure 18). One dichotomy, also referred to

Figure 18: Latour's purification & translation from We Have Never Been Modern. as the modern constitution, consists of human culture worlds and nonhuman nature worlds separating facts and values, environment and society. Examining and perpetuating those binaries is the work of purification. In the same way, his second dichotomy differentiates between the work of purification and translation. Translation “creates mixtures between entirely new types of beings, hybrids of nature and culture.”228 Modernity exists only if translation and purification continue separately. But his proposition, in what he later calls the new constitution or cosmopolitics, demands consideration of purification and hybrid networks simultaneously. This amodern (nonmodern) approach to knowing the world reveals the ways in which facts and values become entangled. It allows one to move beyond the idea of the nature of the ocean on one side

228 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993), 10.

90 and human representations or attitudes towards the ocean on the other. He argues that we have always composed and articulated our worlds through the iterative and unbounded cyclical practices of translation and purification: “Each time one risks falling into fascination with nature, one has only to add the network of the scientific discipline that allows us to know nature.”229

Both dichotomies are an illusion. Latour’s new constitution is reminiscent old dualisms, although his bifurcation is not of the human/non-human, biotic/abiotic, knowledge/power, nature/culture or fact/value. Rather it is a way of understanding what we know (what has been collectively internalized/ instituted), what we don’t know (what lacks propositions from the sciences, or has been collectively rejected another way), and how to navigate the associations among the networks that comprise both scenarios. It is the study of collectives within the framework of cosmopolitics, that turns dualisms into tangled, Gordian knots. This work happens in the middle, the in-between spaces; it abandons extremes, it pushes away assumptions, and is neither this nor that—it is amodern.

Later, in both Politics of Nature and Facing Gaia, Latour expands on the two dichotomies described in We Have Never Been Modern, offering a more stable context in which to apply critical approach. He claims that no matter who (or what) knocks on the door, the collective must answer two questions.230 The first question is how should the appellant be properly accounted for. Accounting requires both perplexity (there are many propositions, and a presence that can no longer be ignored) and consultation (multiple voices come together, all collaborators are acknowledged). The second question, now that the appellant demonstrated both perplexity and consultation, asks how it should be inserted into the collective. This is done

229 Latour, Politics of Nature, 35. 230 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.

91 through hierarchization (how does the new appellant and its associated propositions relate to those already instituted) and institution (achieved when the appellant’s legitimacy can no longer be questioned). For example, in the case of “Pteropods Realized,” every stripe of ocean scientists was perplexed by changing ocean conditions which brought pteropods to the center of an emerging environmental risk. Scientists studied pteropods, and journalists communicated that science in popular representation, creating more and more research on OA and pteropods

(consultation), subsequently suggesting that the plight of pteropods was deserving of human attention (hierarchization). Measuring standards had to be implemented, and the physiology of pteropods needed to be better understood, researched, and published so that they could be a more reliable indicator of OA—the collective instituted understandings of pteropods and their role as a tool for studying and communicating OA.

Further knowledge work looped back around contesting the validity of the pteropods-in- peril dialogue, offering new ways of consultation through high speed video and engineering technology. So goes the process of composing common worlds with blurry boundaries.

Sometimes an appellant knocks again. Maybe it wasn’t pteropods knocking at the door at all, maybe it was a process knocking, the way in which we use bio-indicators, and the looping back was a demand to re-evaluate that process. In the case of “Groundfish Realized,” a similar perspective could be applied. Fisheries oceanographers in Oregon were perplexed by increased and unpredictable occurrences of hypoxia. Research of hypoxic conditions in nearshore flatfish nurseries revealed a use for new camera technology, and possible applications for better measuring a large, complex fishery. Combined with historically stochastic data collection and fisheries collapse, the use of this technology and how it might be used for management became something that was worth considering (consultation). How that information might be used did not fit easily into existing frameworks of environmental sciences and policy (hierarchization) and

92 therefore lacked consensus or acceptance (institution). Latour argues that under the modern constitution, perplexity and institution were based solely on legitimate objective facts that are separate from, and in no way related to, the value laden, subjective questions of consultation and hierarchization. That created a world where matters of concern were separate from matters of fact, as if those two distinctions existed outside one another; making some things disputable, and others not. It is the dissolution of the modern constitution, and the application of a new bicameralism, that makes ecology political to begin with, or as Latour might say, that makes nature contestable. It makes pteropods contestable and groundfish contestable. It makes technology, and Science, and decision making contestable. It makes value subject to scrutiny, opening a pathway to question how these actants are associated “at the very moment when scientists are multiplying the agencies in which they—and we—are more and more implicated every day.”231

In a 2018 article for The New York Times, Ava Kofman eloquently summarized the power of these associations and multiplications, writing that Latour “had seen how an apparently weak and isolated item—a scientific instrument, a scrap of paper, a photograph, a bacterial culture—could acquire enormous power because of the complicated network of other items…mobilized around it.”232 The Latourian approach to studying relationships may seem like a systematic or holistic way to view the world in which we take part, but he argues that you must

“follow the connections without being holistic.”233 One must take the anti-system perspective: as one thing, plus one thing, plus one thing does not lead to a supreme and final cause or outcome.

231 Latour, Facing Gaia, 51. 232 “Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher, Mounts a Defense of Science - The New York Times.” 233 Latour, Facing Gaia, 71.

93 Instead he argues that in the end, we have only a fine muddle, a mess, created by how actants shape, and are shaped by, one another. In The Pasteurization of France, Latour argues that

Pasteur’s discovery of microbes was not a one sided heroic scientific journey with a clear beginning and end; instead it was a collaboration between Pasteur, microbes, soil, and more.

Many characters (actants) worked together to generate knowledge in iterative ways. As he writes in Facing Gaia, “it was not so much the existence of microbes as it was the complex interactions of microbes with the terrain that they influenced and that influenced their development in return.”234 Similarly, scientists didn’t discover OA, or hypoxia, or overfishing, or even cutting edge swimming mechanics; these things are products of reflexive collaborations.235 For example,

OA became tangible, both for scientists and the public, through a collaboration involving the back and forth contributions of pteropods, cameras, ships, scientists, ecological inference frameworks, journalists, artists, the internet, and institutional funding (just to name a few).

Innovative new ways of interrogating pteropods, though the work of people like Amy Maas and

David Murphy might contribute to a new collaboration, shifting how pteropods and scientists have interacted. The movement of these collaborations creates a constant looping at the spaces between accounting and ordering, continually modifying the composition of the collective, and subsequently changing our understandings of, and attitudes towards, the members of those collaborations.

Another example of associations and multiplications can be seen in the collaborations that produced fisheries knowledge. Many actants came together—several species of fish, scientists, emerging technologies, management frameworks, ecological inference, historical

234 Ibid., 72. 235 Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988).

94 datasets, economic collapses, fishers, consumers—acting on one another in the construction of a common fisheries management framework. According to Latour, upon acceptance (or institution) of this framework, those collaborations have the potential to be forgotten, or black-boxed.236 The work of translation, in tracing associations and revealing the collaborations, is an effort to understand reality in a more robust, redundant way. It also sets a foundation for intervention;

Latour’s collectives, made possible through collaborations that support the plurality of external reality, are open to contingencies, innovation, and change.237 What we know about the world, to echo the Latin definition of data, is not given. It is produced in a sloppy process and the boundaries within that process are constantly being renegotiated.

Even if we deconstruct the modern constitution, and approach critical ocean studies in an amodern way, “the same question confronts all cosmologies: what does it mean for a people to measure, represent, and compose the form of the Earth to which they find themselves attached…Even if you want to explain, account for, or simplify, it always requires an addition and not a subtraction of agents.”238 This accounting takes place in both scientific literature and popular representation, in the halls of research institutions, on the congress floor, and in council meetings. It also happens in the open ocean, and in artificial tanks, on ships, expeditions, and forays to the other side of the isle. The process of accounting and ordering is proliferated, made possible, and made knowable, through not only the sciences, but the descriptions that arise from their propositions. For example, descriptions impose interpretations.

“I don’t know how things stand. I know neither who I am or what I want, but others say they know on my behalf, others who define me, link me up, make me speak, interpret what I say, and enroll me. Whether I am a storm, a rat, a rock, a lake, a lion, a child, a worker, a gene, a slave, the unconscious, or a virus, they whisper to

236 Latour, Politics of Nature. 237 Ibid. 238 Latour, Facing Gaia, 119.

95 me, they suggest, they impose an interpretation of what I am and what I could be.”239

How humans collectively understand the ocean—like pteropods, ocean acidification, and the value of marine systems, or flatfish, hypoxia, and fisheries management—is tangled up in the scientific and technological processes of ecological inference networks, and vice versa. If we continue to take Latour’s advice, instead of cutting the Gordian knot open to see what it is, or what it could be, we should instead untie the threads we can, and tie them back together in new ways. For example, to understand the history of pteropods and their role in human and ocean collectives, a new description of them was imposed, typed on paper, and put into the world. My knowledge work, my utterances, on pteropods has irrevocably altered what pteropods are, what they could be, and why they matter.

“This claim of descriptive neutrality made it possible to forget that one never plunges into description except in order to act, and that, before looking into what must be done, we must be impelled to action by a particular type of utterance that touches our hearts in order to set us in motion—yes, to move us. Astonishingly, this type of utterance now comes not only from poets, lovers, politicians, and prophets but also from geochemists, naturalists, modelers, and geologists.”240

Approaching the Gordian Knot (Part I): Together

Marcus Raskin and Herbert Berstein argue that “the world—that is the world we communicate about—is transformed by description of it. Knowledge workers shape the social organization in which our inquiries about nature take place. And our cognitive understandings of the world are manufactured.”241 They also, as early as 1987, suggested topic-based scholarship,

239 Latour, The Pasteurization of France. 240 Latour, Facing Gaia, 40. 241 Marcus G. Raskin, Herbert J. Bernstein, and Susan Buck-Morss, New Ways of Knowing: The Sciences, Society, and Reconstructive Knowledge (Totowa, N.J: Rowman & Littlefield, 1987).

96 as opposed to strict disciplinary inquiry, as a method of reconstructing how knowledge is generated. Their concepts proposed a move beyond classical, positivist science and saw the benefit of including questions of moral application and social reality in ecological inference. But given the fact that knowledge work manufactures understanding, could knowledge workers expand their descriptions, and subsequently, collective human understandings, in this case, of marine systems? To achieve such an ambitious goal would require small groups of people to interrogate different aspects of reality from multiple perspectives. The associations among sciences, technology, environmental thinking, and decision making create a tangled knot that exemplifies the inseparable realms of the natural and the social, the human and the nonhuman—a place where expanded attitudes toward, and understandings of, reality have significant social and ecological implications. Consequently, as Raskin, Bernstein, and others have suggested, cross- disciplinarity tends to be a robust approach to study the associations that have created such a complex world, or in Latourian terms, a Gordian knot. It is impossible to see how the threads are fastened, it is a puzzle that cannot be solved; one must think creatively to see it for what it is.242

This open and critical approach to expanding how knowledge is generated, and described, is contributed by individual scholars to research teams, but could also be embodied in one’s own praxis.

Cross-disciplinarity has become an increasingly prevalent method of knowledge inquiry and generation. Terms like ‘interdisciplinary’ and ‘transdisciplinary’ (forms of cross- disciplinarity) have frequently been used in funding calls and research proposals, especially in the study of marine systems. To broach complex issues like wicked environmental problems, these terms have also more recently looked to combine the humanities with the natural and social

242 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.

97 sciences. However, transdisciplinarity, like interdisciplinarity, lacks consensus in both meaning and execution. Why is cross-disciplinarity useful? How is trans-disciplinary work done? What are practical methods for incorporating interdisciplinarity and producing meaningful work, both in teams representing disparate disciplines, and within one’s own scholarship? In “A

Philosophical Framework for an Open and Critical Transdisciplinary Inquiry,” Jacqueline Y.

Russell argues in favor of a methodological shift to ethically oriented transdisciplinary inquiry that can better broach environmental issues, especially wicked problems. To do this, inquirers must embrace three aspects of knowledge generation: epistemological, ontological, and ethical.

The author adopts her own advice by framing her argument around how we come to know things

(epistemology), the limits of what we can know (ontology), and if this knowledge can offer some type of improvement in the world (ethical). She explores the reliability of knowledge, knowledge communities, and the influence of positivism on contemporary knowledge generation. G. R.

Midglely’s systemic interventionist account of knowledge, which Russell focuses on, provides a convincing example of how systems of inquiry that intervene can bring ontological, epistemological and ethical structures together. Russell also stresses how and why that novel composition allows for a more robust consideration of wicked problems, like the future of predicting fish populations. By being open (expanding knowledge of the world to include not just physical, but also social and cultural) and critical (accounting for the uncertainty of what we can know), knowledge generation organically becomes transdisciplinary and is better poised to improve understandings of associations among the sciences, the natures, and the politics.243

243 Valerie A. Brown, John A. Harris, and Jacqueline Russell, Tackling Wicked Problems: Through the Transdisciplinary Imagination, 1 edition (London ; Washington, DC: Routledge, 2010).

98 Russell also works with and repurposes Habermas’ theories, Habermas believed that scientific knowledge was not the only type of rational knowledge, and that methods from instrumental, ethical, and aesthetic knowledges could be integrated.244 Based on that, Russell argues that cross-disciplinary processes are successful when they value collaborations among individuals who approach knowledge generation differently, not who simply come from different disciplinary backgrounds. Much cross-disciplinary work might have researchers from different disciplines, but who still approach knowledge generation in similar ways. For example, a marine scientist and a social scientist might work together to interrogate different dimensions of the same topic, asking different questions, but they still ask them in similar ways; essentially, they both speak the language of the scientific method. Although the two interdisciplinary projects I was involved with worked together very differently, their composition reflected not just different disciplines, but different ways of understanding the world.

While working on Swimming in Sea Butterflies (hereafter referred to as the NAKFI research) each participating researcher approached the topic through a different lens. Fluid

Mechanics, Invertebrate Physiology and Ecology, and the Environmental Arts and Humanities are disparate disciplines that approach knowledge generation differently. We began the project in the multi-disciplinary mindset, helping each other on a common topic, but over time our spheres began to overlap more and more. Overall, we worked independently, but our individual work informed one another. The group spent a considerable amount of time apart. Amy Maas was in

Bermuda at Bermuda Institute of Ocean Science (BIOS), David Murphy was in Florida at USF, and I was in Oregon at OSU. Over the last year, we spent intensive sessions at BIOS together,

244 Habermas, J., Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979).

99 working in very tight quarters, and spending every moment together. During those times, we not

only worked in the same space, but also got to know one another on a personal level. For

example, Murphy set up his video lab in the BIOS environmental labs, where I also set up a

space for creative practice and research. Our paths crossed constantly and I would often

participate in his calibrations and observe and discuss his approach to fluid mechanics as well.

Similarly, Murphy would often question me about what I was working on, and where my lines of

inquiry were going. In the evenings, the boat would go out to catch pteropods and we would

often go out together and participate in the process of collecting specimens. Maas and I also

created visual work together as well (Figure 19).

Maas, Murphy, and I would place ourselves in the process of the other, seeing things how

they saw things, and took that experience with us to our own work. When the project started, I

was included in the grant primarily as an artist, but as Maas and Murphy became more

acquainted with my approach to knowledge and scholarship, they became more open to both my

Figure 19: Amy Maas and Samm Newton collaborating on the series Through Water (2018).

100 creative interpretations of their work and the types of questions I was asking about sciences, technology, and the value of the ocean. Maas and I sat down together one day and discussed the types of ideas we could approach together that we could not explore apart, and because much of our work was individual, what types of questions could I ask about pteropods that she could not.

We eventually landed on value, in that I could think about environmental value, and cultural understandings of pteropods, in ways that she and Murphy could not.

Pteropods have been traditionally studied for their role in OA, but Murphy, Maas, and I were able to see them in a different light. How we interact with pteropods, how we generate knowledge and interrogate them, impacts cultural perceptions of pteropods and subsequently could have ecological, societal, and political implications. We took a separate but collaborative approach, and in the process, became more open to the possibilities of interdisciplinary work.

The outcomes were mostly produced individually; Murphy has published papers, Maas has given presentations, I created a collection of visual work that has been in several shows, as well as the following thesis chapter, but we have presented our work together at conferences and meetings.

In contrast to my other projects, the NAKFI research was not as incorporated, or overlapping.

But, what is most notable about that project is that first, I was working with established scholars as a co-PI graduate student, and secondly, while the work started somewhat separated, a desire for something more cohesive emerged. Murphy recently applied for an NSF CAREER grant, which includes a small amount of funds for me, and Maas and I have plans to continue grant writing together.

While working on Emerging Technologies in Fisheries Science project (hereafter referred to as the NRT research), each participating researcher strove to be both open and critical. This was achieved first by maintaining a curious attitude about one another’s approaches to the world.

The group spent a considerable amount of time at the beginning of the project learning about

101 each other’s personal, professional, and academic backgrounds. Because of the time constraints posed on this project, it sometimes seemed like too much time was spent on that aspect, but it was a crucial step that built a foundation for being open and critical in the future. Taking the time to truly understand and build respect for each other’s disciplines and approaches to research was key. As the work progressed, the group continued to listen and seriously consider everyone’s perspectives. While on the surface this may sound like a straightforward and simple step, it can be challenging when you combine different ages, education, experience, and areas of knowledge.

Computer Science, Marine Resource Management, and the Environmental Arts and Humanities are disparate disciplines that do not approach research or academic work similarly nor do they intuitively fit together at first glance. But, the three areas of expertise represented strongly correlate with Russell’s theories combining physical, social, and cultural knowledge. This transdisciplinary inquiry allowed us to not only generate knowledge about the world but also to incorporate an understanding of how we know that world, and what we ought to do about it.

Even still, it took many hours of working, communicating, struggling, and socializing to make it work.

The NRT research contained individual understandings of marine biology, fisheries science, environmental decision making, resource management, computer science, machine learning, computer vision, environmental history, philosophy, science and technology studies, and the incorporation of art as method. Given this eclectic group, we had to move away from personal expertise and blur the lines between disciplines to find a question that we could ask together that we could not ask individually. At the same time, we had to constantly navigate the vacillating process that was letting go of personal expertise to foster that sense of openness, while at the same time contributing individual research and knowledge to remain critical.

102 Strong communication was an important method for this process. Communicating effectively and practicing positive interpersonal skills are what most theorists focus on when writing about how to do inter and trans disciplinary work. For example, influenced by critics such as Michael O’Rourke, Kendra Cheruvelil, Sanford Eigenbrode, and Patrick Hughes, all who advised on how to work together effectively, we stressed the importance of communication.245

What we found to work best, in practice, was the use of boundary objects, creating and translating language, discussing ambiguity, having personal conversation, and being kind and considerate of one another. For example, if we got lost or unsure of the direction of the research we would return to what brought the group together—our boundary object—which in the case of the NRT research was the flatfish survey videos. Also, because there were many technical semantics and concepts in the represented disciplines, defining terms and understanding the meaning behind everything discussed was also an important and regular task. The group would discuss and define ambiguity, explain concepts in detail, and sometimes create new terms or definitions to hold the group together. Being open with one another about things outside of our research also helped to foster mutual respect and understanding between group members. There were often jokes about forced friendship, but in the end even if we were not best friends, we did allow for backstage (not work related) conversations that allowed us to stay connected on a social as well as scholarly level.

245 Michael O′Rourke et al., eds., Enhancing Communication & Collaboration in Interdisciplinary Research, 1 edition (Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, Inc, 2013); Kendra S. Cheruvelil et al., “Creating and Maintaining High-Performing Collaborative Research Teams: The Importance of Diversity and Interpersonal Skills,” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 12, no. 1 (February 1, 2014): 31–38, https://doi.org/10.1890/130001; Sanford D. Eigenbrode et al., “Employing Philosophical Dialogue in Collaborative Science,” BioScience 57, no. 1 (January 1, 2007): 55–64, https://doi.org/10.1641/B570109; Patrick C. Hughes, Juan Sanchez Munoz, and Marcus N. Tanner, eds., Perspectives in Interdisciplinary and Integrative Studies (Lubbock, Texas: Texas Tech University Press, 2015).

103 Another important aspect of the NRT research was its focus on process, rather than product. So often the emphasis of scholarship in the institutional research setting is on immediate, tangible deliverables. We chose instead to focus on the novelty of the situation and to capitalize on the unique opportunity to create and present something different than we would be able to do through traditional disciplinary based scholarship. After much deliberation on the question “what can we ask together that we cannot ask alone,” it was decided that it would be best to approach our topic with a three-pronged approach that was based on the idea of dyads collaborating more efficiently than a triad. The group split into three pairs focused on different parts of our main topic, and that explored the topic in different ways. Firl and Haven looked at the feasibility of using machine learning to make ecological inferences; Haven and Newton looked at the intersections of ecological inference and environmental decision making; Newton and Firl looked at the influence of datasets on machine learning and ecological inference.

We live in an uncertain time of changing ocean conditions where the problems of measuring and managing fish have serious ecological, societal, and political implications.

Together we tackled this issue and questioned how big data and emerging technologies might influence and be incorporated into natural resource management, and ultimately the future of fisheries science. The outcome was a transdisciplinary report written in one united voice that was developed and executed based on the unique strengths and perspectives of each of its members; further confirming that there is no one recipe or toolbox that works for every group. Rather, transdisciplinary teams must frontload a foundation of respect for one another and develop unique methods and work plans that are specific to the composition and goals of their group.

104 Approaching the Gordian Knot (Part II): Individually

If all of culture and all of nature get churned up every day, and a promising way of understanding that is by breaking down disciplinary boundaries and working on teams, how can one untangle the knot alone? Latour suggests that it is not possible, he claims that “we must be comfortable with the mess, impossible to become disentangled.”246 I am interested in studying associations because I want to address the mess, not untangle it, because things are not simply reducible to dichotomies like the ocean and its social context. These modern dichotomies are embodied in traditional political ecology, defined as the “ecological and political dimensions of environmental issues,” making it almost impossible to approach the field under the new constitution.247 The modern constitution renders political ecology obsolete as long as it operates under the false assumption that ecological and political dimensions are in fact two separate things from environmental issues. This begs the question then, how can political ecology lead to any better understandings of, or solutions for, environmental issues? A Latourian, amodern approach (Figure 20) to political ecology insists that we slow down and “deal simultaneously with the sciences, with natures, and with politics, in the plural.”248 This plurality puts interdisciplinary research at an advantage when approaching wicked problems. But, how could I approach these pluralities alone? Latour suggests that the process of scientific production must be addressed within political ecology as a crucial step in understanding what the sciences, the natures, and the politics have to do with one another. Although, Latour is at times critical of historians of science, which do study scientific production. For example, he writes that “the

246 Latour, Facing Gaia. 247 Karl S. Zimmerer and Thomas J. Bassett, Political Ecology: An Integrative Approach to Geography and Environment-Development Studies (New York: Guilford Press, 2003). 1 248 Latour, Politics of Nature, 3.

105

Figure 20: Amodern approach to studying collectives via The Politics of Nature history of the sciences does not modify the distinction between nature and representations of nature in a lasting way: it blurs it only temporarily.”249 Because, under the modern constitution the history of science is limited to “the messy process of discovery, without having any effect whatsoever on the lasting solidity of knowledge.” Environmental history brings new nonhumans into the history of the collective. Thus, combining the history of science, in the context of environmental history, with science, technology, and society studies, offers a way to blur “the distinction between nature and society durably, so that we shall never have to go back to two distinct sets, with nature on one side and the representations that humans make of it on the other.”250 This is by no means an easy task. Latour has multiple books, papers, and recorded lectures devoted to how to study these associations and how to apply that subsequent knowledge to issues that arise due to rapid environmental change. Adding creative practice as a supplemental method of examining collectives offers a freeform, imaginative, and discipline

249 Ibid., 36. 250 Ibid., 36.

106 bending way of navigating the difficult collectives. While creative practice is not my only method of inquiry, it is the most novel in comparison to the more established ways of knowing that I employ (like Science and Technology Studies, Environmental History, and Critical

Theory), and it is less visible in the written research presented in this thesis. As Stefan Helmreich and Caroline Jones argue, artists are increasingly producing “forms of art that assert themselves as kinds of experimental and empirical knowledge production parallel to and in critical dialogue with science.”251 Therefore, the role of creative practice-led methods employed in my research is worth discussing in more detail.

Creative practice plays an important role in conceptualizing and contextualizing my research. From time spent in archives, to critically considering historical evidence, knowing through making gives rise to rich descriptions of complex associations. For example, Maarit

Mäkelä argues that “the knowledge and the skills of a practising artist form a central part of the research process, and this has produced a new way of doing research…In this process, the final products (the artefacts) can be seen as revealing their stories, i.e. the knowledge they embody.”252 Creative practice-led research is a relatively new field with little discourse on its challenges and opportunities. The leading publication on the topic, “Practice-led Research,

Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts,” explores not only how creative practice can reconstruct how knowledge is generated, but also how academic research can impact creative

251 Helmreich and Jones, “Science/Art/Culture Through an Oceanic Lens,” 97–115. 252 Maarit Mäkelä, “Knowing Through Making: The Role of the Artefact in Practice-Led Research,” Knowledge, Technology & Policy 20, no. 3 (October 1, 2007): 157–63.

107 practice.253 Hazel Smith and Roger T. Dean describe why creative practice-led research can be difficult to pin down.

“Attempts at definitions of research, creative work and innovation are all encircled by these fundamental problems—that knowledge can take many different forms and occur at various different levels of precision and stability, and that research carried out in conjunction with the creation of an artwork can be both similar to, and dissimilar from, basic research… an artwork embodies research findings which are symbolically expressed, even while not conveyed through numbers or words (which are themselves symbols).”254

Although practice-led research has many overlapping definitions, it can be summarized in that it usually has two outcomes, a creative one that, depending on the medium, results in some visual artefact produced during the research process, and written scholarly findings prepared for publishing and peer-review. My visual work is a practice in the imperfection of knowing, feeling, understanding and remembering. It examines the role of humans, nonhumans, sciences, technology, and society in the context of marine systems and how those worlds interact. It is a call to deepen curiosity and a method of research for complex problems in a convoluted world.

The imagery does not represent how the world is seen in real time, taking it out of the realm of traditional science communication. Instead it represents how the world is held in the mind—how nature is known and remembered. Guided by knowledge makers but positioned in social realities, it is not art in the service of disseminating knowledge. It is critical inquiry in the form of creative practice working alongside other methods to produce robust interpretations of the world. The work created during my interdisciplinary projects, and in the process of writing these thesis chapters, explores how technology can be a mediary between humans and marine systems

253 Hazel Smith and R. T. Dean, Practice-Led Research, Research-Led Practice in the Creative Arts, Research Methods for the Arts and Humanities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). 254 Smith and R. T. Dean.

108 through paintings that examine groundfish beam trawls video and pteropod swimming video. In the process of creating collections of work I was drawn to how nature is known rather than what nature is. Paintings are both representational and abstract, juxtaposing static ocean imagery with shape, movement, and minimalism.

Chapter Four Summary

Paintings, like collectives, are comprised of many layers, interfaces, connections, descriptions, and nuances that come together forming a full picture, like an envelope unfolding.

The process of creative practice is like Latour’s cosmopolitics as it is an endless endeavor.

Cycles of perplexity, consultation, and hierarchization to institution continue to change time and time again, so many times over—creating perpetual novelty if you look at them in a certain light.

Latour’s approach to engaging with these cycles doesn’t fit into one disciplinary field.

“As a consequence of his lack of respect for disciplinary boundaries, Latour's work is difficult to label…But first impressions are deceptive. What may appear as a hotchpotch of projects that lacks disciplinary rigor is driven by a clear intent, namely to describe science, law, politics, religion and other key institutions of the modern world in a new way.”255

At first glance my approach may seem undisciplined, but like Latour, my motivations to stretch disciplinary boundaries are deliberate, and necessary. I desire see the world in a new way. To see the process that ties the knot we must adopt new approaches to generating knowledge, and deconstructing it as well.

255 De Vries, Bruno Latour.

109 As a participant of two interdisciplinary research projects, Emerging Technologies in

Fisheries Science256 and Swimming in Sea Butterflies,257 I found that being open and critical, in addition to having a process-driven perspective, created successful team dynamics and overall research outcomes. Russel argues that transdisciplinarity is uniquely poised to ask what should be, what is, what could be, and what can be. In my interdisciplinary research experiences, we attempted to do bring together those questions and make our research about the topic, and less about discipline. Abandoning pure disciplinarity, which seeks unity of knowledge, and embracing deconstruction, which seeks coherence, allows for a novel style of hybrid scholarship that can study complex problems in a more robust way and offer expanded descriptions of marine systems.258 In both team experiences, our concerted efforts in understanding the world went far beyond scholarly products, but that success is less tangible now, and less deliverable.

Although, it does have the potential to shift dominant paradigms of what scholarship looks like, reconstructing how knowledge is generated in the future, and possibly changing how we measure research outcomes, especially when it comes to cross-disciplinary approaches to wicked problems. What can be argued is that we changed one another, our thought processes transformed as we continued to work together, and will most likely have lasting impacts on how we pursue individual knowledge work, and subsequently our descriptions of the world might also be expanded.

256 Funded through the National Science Foundation’s National Research Traineeship program (Risk and Uncertainty Quantification in Marine Science and Policy) 257 Funded through the National Academies’’ Keck Futures Initiative (Discovering the Deep Blue Sea) 258 Roderick J. Lawrence, “Deciphering Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Contributions,” Transdisciplinary Journal of Engineering & Science 1, no. 1 (December 2010): 125–30.

110 I also experimented with Latour’s methods regarding the science of associations outside of a theoretical context and in practical application. His concept of a new bicameralism offers a richer common sense than the old bifurcation of nature. As the ocean is made knowable through the sciences, studying the enigma of scientific production is critical to understanding the politics of nature. Political ecology, it turns out, has nothing to do with the environment separate from us, out there somewhere. Instead it engages with how the ocean is measured, represented, and composed; how it is taken into account, and put into order. Additionally, adopting a rigorous yet adaptive approach has the potential to provide the flexibility necessary to gain rich understandings of coupled natural human systems—of the pluriverse—and offers new perspectives to the growing discourse of critical ocean studies. After all, “what risk do we run…The world is young, the sciences are recent, history has barely begun, and as for ecology, it is barely in its infancy?”259

Some of this chapter was competed in partial fulfillment of the OSU NRT program in Risk and Uncertainty quantification in marine science and policy.

259 Latour, Politics of Nature.

111 Chapter Five: Conclusion

“The job of historical scholarship is to provide the richest possible contextual field within which to frame and discipline our analogies, not because we expect historical insight to give absolute answers—it won't—but because it is the best source we have for questions whose subtlety and complexity can mirror that of the world we wish to understand.”260

The Space Between

What can flatfish and pteropods tell us about human relationships with the ocean? Or about the tangled relationships that have built the ecological inference framework, specifically the complicated and reflexive relationship between how society knows nature and how it goes about valuing nature? These two marine creatures are connected to one another through a complex ocean food web and connected to humans through complex socioeconomic politics and networks of cultural and environmental value. The previous chapters isolate and develop snapshots of the human-ocean interface. The process of ecological inference in knowledge production was social because “it brought together a multitude of human and nonhuman entities and harnessed their collective power to act on and transform the world.”261 For example, the framework of ecological inference has been created by several iterative relationships involving scientific inquiry, technological choice, and datasets. Ecological inference has itself also been constrained by environmental decision making frameworks. In turn, governing nature has been limited by knowledge of the natural world. The environmental decision making framework needs fuel to move forward and the permission to embrace innovative approaches to measuring and managing fish. In the case of pteropods, a reflexive relationship unfolded between the use of

260 Cronon, Uncommon Ground. 261 “Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher, Mounts a Defense of Science - The New York Times.”

112 pteropods in the sciences, and their role in popular representation. Marine researchers assigned value to pteropods according to their research goals and the technologies available, which constrained the questions researchers asked about pteropods. That process of knowledge generation influenced the emergence of pteropods in popular representation. How the value of pteropods was represented in popular culture in turn influenced the very process of scientific inquiry that made pteropods real and valuable.

Critical Ocean Studies places this work at the center of an oceanic turn of diverse disciplinary interest in political ecology. There is an extensive discourse on what the ideal cross- disciplinary process might look like, but less on how it plays out in practice. So that chapter, while not the main aim of this thesis, provides personal reflection of experiences in attempting amodern approaches in political ecology and adds to the existing dialogue about interdisciplinarity. Matthew Gandy wrote that postmodern approaches to environmental problems were problematic because they relied on a simple dichotomy between modernism and postmodernism.262 An amodern approach, or one that acknowledges that we have never been modern at all, breaks down that dichotomy and does allow for a more common sense understanding of the human-ocean interface. Latour concedes that this is a difficult task and requires practice. If anything, studying ocean actors and the enigma of how they are known is practice for getting at the muddle, for addressing the mess.

This approach interrogates complex reflexive cycles. As Latour writes, “when we appeal to the blue planet, we can not help but go around in circles,” which seems to be the case in these

262 Matthew Gandy, “Crumbling Land: The Postmodernity Debate and the Analysis of Environmental Problems,” Progress in Human Geography 20, no. 1 (1996): 23–40.

113 two studies.263 Right now, society is poised to make the decisions that could ultimately change the trajectory of how humans interact with the ocean.

“Fifty years ago, we could not see limits to what we could put into the ocean, or what we could take out. Fifty years into the future, it will be too late to do what is possible right now. We are at an unprecedented, pivotal point in history when the decisions we make in the next ten years will determine the direction of the next 10,000.” 264

Contemporary history also marks a shift between traditional environmentalism, under the modern constitution, and radical ecology. Radical Ecology calls for a drastic change in human understandings of, and attitudes towards, reality (or nature, in this case the ocean).265 A hybrid scholarly approach to political ecology is poised to contribute to that drastic change. It reexamines who we are as humans and our place in collectives, and it acknowledges that we are only one aspect of many collectives among others. Historians are not psychics. They cannot possibly tell us what the future holds. But unlike other methods of inquiry, history can tell stories that act as guiding lights revealing how we got here and thus advise us on how we ought to make our way forward in the world. As William Cronon writes, “rather than make predictions about what will happen, we [historians] offer parables about how to interpret what may happen.”266

These modern-day parables—these stories—are timeless tools used to share wisdom across time and space. They help us to more carefully consider, and creatively solve, the problems we face each day. Stories connect our past experiences, with our current understandings of the physical world, and help to shape our attitudes and behaviors in that world. The collection of stories that

263 Latour, Facing Gaia, 98. 264 Sylvia Earle. “The Sweet Spot in Time. Why the Ocean Matters to Everyone, Everywhere.” Virginia Quarterly Review, Fall, 2012 pp. 54-75. 265 Carolyn Merchant, Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World, 2nd ed, Revolutionary Thought/Radical Movements (New York: Routledge, 2005). 266 William Cronon. "The Uses Of Environmental History." Environmental History Review 17, no. 3 (Fall, 1993): 17.

114 exist in our society created a dominate narrative that reflected the perceptions we hold of ourselves and the natural resources with which we interact and rely upon.

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Appendix

125 Acronym Glossary

BATS Bermuda Atlantic Time Series BIOS Bermuda Institute of Ocean Science BSIA Best Science or Best Scientific Information Available

CO2 Carbon Dioxide EEZ Exclusive Economic Zone EFH Essential Fish Habitat FMP Fisheries Management Plans FRAM Fishery Resource Analysis and Monitoring Division HOT Hawaiian Ocean Time IGY International Geophysical Year JGOFS Joint Global Ocean Flux Study MSA Some form of the 1976 Magnusson Stevens Act MSY Maximum Sustainable Yield NAS National Academy of Science NH Line Newport Hydrographic Line NMFS National Marine Fisheries Service NOAA National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration NRC Natural Resource Council NSF National Science Foundation NSF National Science Foundation OA Ocean Acidification OWET Oregon Wave Energy Trust PFMC Pacific Fisheries Management Council PMEL Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory SSC Science and Statistical Committee WCGBTS West Coast Groundfish Bottom Trawl Survey WHOI Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute