Richard Pyle - Exploring Life on the Edge of Darkness Speaker

Exploring Life on the Edge of Darkness Speaker February 11, 2009

Richard Pyle lecture from the Looking for Life: Adventures and Misadventures in Species Exploration Symposium presented as part of the Darwin Distinguished Lecture Series. This symposium series is sponsored by the Arizona State University International Institute for Species Exploration, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the School of Life Sciences.

Transcript

Robert Krulwich: [0:00] The next talk, from Richard Pyle, is "Exploring Life on the Edge of Darkness." I have no idea where this will take us, but OK.

Richard Pyle: [0:09] I'm looking forward to this talk. I spent last year traveling all over the world, not doing what I'm going to talk to you about, but giving talks at scientific meetings and database nerd meetings and whatnot. When I got the invitation to come to this one, I thought, "Oh, this is going to be fun." [0:22] The edge of darkness, as I'll explain in a few minutes, is underwater. It's a catchy little word. I'll explain how I ended up with that term.

[0:29] What I do is I study on coral reefs, and particularly I study coral fishes. When you think of a , this is what most people think of as a coral reef. Lots of corals, lots of pretty fishes, particularly these big shelf-like corals dominated by these stony outcrops and whatnot.

[0:43] We know a lot about coral reefs, and the reason we know about these kinds of coral reefs is because we have this wonderful technology called scuba, which has allowed people for the last 50 or 60 years to go down and explore those zones.

[0:55] But if you'll notice, deliberately on this slide, it's really only the upper portion of reefs that scuba allows us to get to because of certain physiological quirks of air, which is what we're all breathing now. Breathing it under , which is what you're exposed to under water, you run into trouble when you start going much deeper than that.

[1:13] I don't know when I became a taxonomist. It was in the first few months of my life, I think. I was born in Hawaii and my older brothers had a saltwater aquarium in the living room. According to my mom, whenever I got fussy, she'd prop me up in front of the aquarium, and I would shut up and just stare.

[1:28] So I guess that's where it began. It's consistent with my own recollections, the earliest of which all have to do with being interested in fishes. It goes back that far. It's always been the rare fishes that have fascinated me.

[1:40] The rarest of the rare are the undescribed new species, so it's always been my interest in going to places and finding things that are new.

[1:46] Now this is a very special photograph for me. It was taken in 1986, 22 years ago. It was taken by Jack Randall, who ended up being my PhD advisor. He has described more species of fishes than anyone alive today, more species of coral reef fishes than anyone in history, at least among valid species.

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[2:04] This photograph was taken two days before I was quadriplegic. In my young, naive, 19-year-old enthusiasm to go find new species to show to this guy Jack Randall, I had a bad experience. I went down deeper and deeper every time I went on a dive, came back and showed Jack some fish I'd never seen before.

[2:23] "Oh, yes, I know that fish. I named it in 1965." So on and so forth. I just had to keep going deeper and deeper and deeper. Then, on the last day of the trip, I ended up 250 feet, seeing a fish with black and white stripes in a family that doesn't normally have black and white stripes, so I said, "I've got to get that."

[2:39] I spent a little too much time. I had a pressure gauge malfunction, I guess the scuba equivalent of a wardrobe malfunction. It lied to me about how much air I had left and I barely made it to the surface alive. When Kip talks about never breathing a breath so sweet, I know exactly what he's talking about.

[2:55] Anyway, my first thought upon reaching the surface was to show Jack my new fish. I showed him the new fish, "Oh, yes. I named that one Pseudanthias lori after my daughter. I discovered it on her birthday in 1960-whatever."

[3:07] So, I'd been robbed of a new species, and shortly thereafter, I started feeling pain in my joints. A long saga later, I was quadriplegic and flown back to Hawaii. I took a month to recover, to get out of bed basically, and about a year to walk normally again.

[3:21] That was a pretty harrowing experience, but the one take-home lesson was scuba is not the way to get to these depths. So what is the way? Well, everyone thinks of submarines. Submarines are really wonderful devices, but, unfortunately, they're $40, 000 a day to use one of these things. As a 19-year-old student, you don't generally have access to that kind of funding.

[3:39] So, one of the big limitations of submarines is that they're very expensive to use. As a consequence, when people have that kind of funding, they don't mess around in shallow depths. They go thousands and thousands of feet deep. If you're spending $40, 000 to get inside a tin can that's capable of 3, 000 feet of depth, you're not going to waste your time in a few hundred feet. So you zip on down.

[3:58] Turns out the vast majority of research using submersibles are many thousands of feet deep, so you can start to see a little pattern emerging here. Before I go further, I'll just point out that this zone in between is still a coral reef environment. I've shown it this way because that's the way it is. There's caves and outcroppings and rocks.

[4:14] One of the other problems with submarines is that you are trapped inside this tin can. Basically, what you've got is your little peephole through the window, trying to absorb all the diversity of life. On a complex coral reef, that's just not enough. You really need to be there in person.

[4:30] So my interest has been, ever since I was 19, to try to fill in these gaps. Now, my doctors, who brought me back my ability to walk, spent most of the time persuading me to never go diving again. That just simply wasn't an option. So I need to come up with a way that didn't cost $40, 000 a day to get down there.

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[4:47] I turned to high technology scuba. First of all, before I get to that, I used to call it the "twilight zone" because that sounded interesting and sexy and exciting, but then other biologists have defined that term to mean deeper depths out in the middle of the ocean. They complained I shouldn't use that term.

[5:02] So I started calling it "deep coral reefs." That didn't work because they found these reefs that are thousands of feet deep, and so I had to get further qualified and call these deeper portions of typical shallow tropical coral reefs. That's a bit of a mouthful.

[5:15] NOAA came up with their term called "mesophotic coral ecosystems." If twilight zone's at end of the sex appeal, mesophotic coral reef ecosystems is at the other, so I'm not sure I like that term, either.

[5:27] So I don't honestly know what to call it. For the title of this talk, I thought "edge of darkness" was appropriate. The significant aspect of this is it's on the boundary between the brightly light shallow coral reefs and the perpetually dark abyssal depths.

[5:39] Here's my high tech scuba. At least this is where we began, two tanks lassoed together. As ugly as this thing looks like on the outside, what really matters is what's on the inside of these tanks, and it's not air.

[5:49] The high tech aspect of diving, at least for the most part, and at least in my introduction to it, didn't involve anything fancy other than mixing different gases besides air.

[5:58] For lots of complicated reasons, it turns out helium is one the better gas mixtures to use to go these depths. Besides making you talk like Donald Duck, it also allows you to have a clear head.

[6:08] Now, one of the big problems with breathing air underwater is the deeper you go, the nitrogen that's in air - air is 80 percent nitrogen - gets into your bloodstream, gets into your brain, and gives you the exact same effect as being alcohol-inebriated.

[6:21] It's called . There's something called Martini's Law, which is for every 50 feet of depth you descend is like drinking one dry martini.

[6:28] So, at 50 feet, 100 feet, a couple of martinis, most people are OK. 200 feet, 300 feet, you start to get a little loopy, and just as you wouldn't want to drive while drunk, you don't want to dive while drunk. I've learned that the hard way. But putting the helium in there allows you to have a clear head at those depths.

[6:43] We got a little more sophisticated. We had this rig I designed, four scuba tanks, five regulators, different breathing mixtures. Tested it out in Hawaii; it seemed to work pretty well.

[6:53] Then in the late '80s we went to Rarotonga in the South Pacific. Here I am. The equipment on my back is heavier and larger than I am, but it allowed me to get down and spend a comfortable 10 minutes at 300 feet catching fish, which is what you see me doing down there.

[7:07] In those 11 days of diving with 10 minutes per dive, we came back with some incredible ichthyological treasures. This is just a small sampling of the new species we found down there.

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[7:18] The one in the middle with the pink polka dots, we didn't even know what family it was. So we called it the Dr. Seuss fish, because it looked like something out of a Dr. Seuss book with the pink polka dots and whatnot.

[7:27] The one in the upper left corner there with the red stripes, that one was named after an aquarium fish collector who first saw it, who I was diving with at the time, Chip Boyle. It's an ugly name for a beautiful fish, Centropyge boylei.

[7:40] But what's interesting is, being an aquarium fish collector, he caught a few of these alive and sent them to Japan and charged $500 apiece for two of them, and it helped offset the costs of the helium and whatnot. It turns out that the wholesaler turned around and sold them in Japan for $14, 000 apiece to the end aquarists.

[7:56] It's a little fish, and if you're working out the math, it works out to be about a half a million dollars a pound if you want to turn this into sashimi. It's not just interesting to taxonomists. There are other people who are interested in these kinds of fishes as well.

[8:08] The problem, of course, with that big heavy gear, as big and heavy as it was, it only allowed us to stay down about 10 minutes at those kinds of depths. We had to go to a higher technology.

[8:17] This is a prototype. It's called a . I won't go into details of how it works, but it involves computers and rebreathing the same gas. You're breathing the same breath over and over and over.

[8:26] They're really ideal for going to great depths. If you want to ask me about them later, I'll give you the full thing. But the bottom line is they let us stay underwater for quite a long time.

[8:34] One of the other nice things about them is because you're rebreathing the same breath over and over, you're not making bubbles like a scuba diver does. Therefore, you're not making noise, and when you do a dive with this equipment, you see the world that a scuba diver never gets to see.

[8:46] One great example, early on, to demonstrate this, one of my first test dives of this in Hawaii, I was out at dusk at one of the place I've been to many, many times before. I was kneeling out in the sand at about 80 feet deep near a big rock.

[8:59] It was dusk, and I was watching these fish spawning over the rock. These surgeonfish would all get together, and a group of about 12 of them would dash out over the sand to a big rock and spawn over the rock and dash back to the school.

[9:11] I thought, "That's interesting. I think what they're doing is they're going out to spawn over the rock because the has eddies and gyres around it, probably mixes their eggs and sperm very well."

[9:19] Just as I was working this out in my head, I looked up and a group of surgeonfish came up and boom! They spawned right in my hair because I looked like a rock to them. I wasn't moving; I wasn't making any noise. It's like, ew! Ew, ew, ew!

[9:30] [laughter]

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[9:33] So, there are some perils that you don't anticipate, like fish semen in your hair.

[9:38] We used these Papua, New Guinea. We went there in 1995. There we are. I'm the close one; the far one is my diving partner, John Earl. This is what we looked like when we're marching out to the reef to do this deep dive. Once again, lots and lots of new species of fishes. This is just a sampling.

[9:53] The one in the middle, the gray one, is actually quite interesting. It was first discovered by , the famous shark researcher. She found these giant rubble mounds down at 280, 300 feet in New Guinea. You can see there's a meter there. These mounds are two or three meters in diameter.

[10:08] This little itty-bitty fish builds these giant mounds, one pebble at a time. There's no way this fish lives long enough to build these mounds, so the same species must be using it, generation after generation after generation. But that was one of the new species we found, this mound-building tilefish.

[10:23] Another story I have to tell, because it involves Tony Gill, who's here today. It involves the fish in the upper right corner there with the blue on the tail, and also the fish on the bottom, the purple and yellow one there.

[10:33] I was doing a dive in New Guinea on this trip, and I was at 360 feet. I saw that fish on the top, the red one with the blue stripe on the tail. I said, "That's a new species." I had to get it, and I got it. It was a new species.

[10:43] I collected the specimens and put them in my bucket as I normally do. Then on way back up, I saw a little cave that had these gorgeous little tiny fish in them, yellow with a red stripe around the tail and two white dots. I thought, "Wow. They're a kind of goby in the genus Trimma." I knew it was a new species.

[10:59] But my nets were not the right kind of nets to catch this tiny little fish. So I managed, through a lot of effort, to actually catch one in my hand. I actually got it in my hand, this live little fish in my hand. I couldn't put it in my bucket because my bucket has holes in it, and I didn't want the fish to escape. So I just held it in my hand and continued my ascent.

[11:16] Then, on the way up, I found that purple and yellow fish and, with one hand, managed to get my net out and caught it. OK, now I've got no hands to get back to the surface, and I'm trying to control my rebreather with my elbows and my teeth and whatnot.

[11:29] This wasn't working out. So I decided that the purple and yellow one, which Tony ended up naming [inaudible 11:47], was big enough that I could put it in my bucket. I got one of my hands back.

[11:39] I knew I had plastic bags up in shallow water. I was going to put this trophy of mine in a plastic bag. I worked my way up, doing my , getting back towards the surface, and I couldn't find my plastic bags. It took me 90 minutes of swimming up and down the reef, trying to find my stash of plastic bags.

[11:56] I finally found it. My arm was aching and quivering. Trying to hold a fist for 90 minutes, it's not easy to do. So I finally got my hand in the bag, I [say] "Thank God." I opened my hand and there was nothing in there. Darwin Distinguished Lecture Series – page 5 - ASU School of Life Sciences Grass Roots Studio Richard Pyle - Exploring Life on the Edge of Darkness Speaker

[12:07] [laughter]

[12:08] The little guy had escaped, probably when I first collected it. I had been spending the whole time swimming around with a fist for no reason whatsoever. I vowed that if I ever found it again, I would name it Trimma Houdini, in honor of Henry Houdini for the escape artistry it had demonstrated.

[12:23] Then I worked with this company that we were using the prototypes with, to help develop the next generation of rebreathers. This is what we've been using the last 12 years or so. Started in Palau in 1997, it was our first expedition with them. Once again, lots and lots of new species.

[12:39] The interesting thing we're finding is that every time we go to one of these places, we're finding not just lots of new species, but a different set of new species every place we go. In fact, there seems to be higher rates of endemism on the deep coral reefs than there are on the shallow coral reefs.

[12:54] For example, between New Guinea and Palau, about 55 percent of the total set of species at both localities occur at both localities, whereas in the deep reefs, only five percent of the total pool of species occur at both localities. So these things seem to have restricted distributions. Everywhere you go, you find new things. That's the pattern we've certainly found.

[13:14] Fiji, I got to go there several times, 2001, 2002. Part of it was to make the IMAX film "Coral Reef Adventure, " which was a lot of fun. Fiji's a great place to spend lots of time underwater. Once again, lots and lots and lots of new species, different kinds of new species.

[13:29] In 2005, we went to Christmas Island. That was interesting. We got to dive from outrigger canoes with this high tech gear. It was a really interesting juxtaposition of these old clunky boats with these $50, 000 rebreathers. But that worked out really well. And, once again, lots and lots and lots of new species.

[13:47] Then we went to Vanuatu in 2006. We were part of a very large expedition down there. We found a lot of new species. You're starting to see the pattern again and again and again.

[13:55] But if you'll notice, one of these guys is yellow with red around the tail and two white dots. So there is Trimma Houdini. I finally was able, 10 years later, to get some specimens of this thing, so Rick Winterbottom and I are going to end up naming this guy eventually.

[14:08] That was one of those great triumphs of ichthyology where you see something, and you eventually come back and get it.

[14:14] The other thing that happened on this trip is the lead scientist was a guy named Philippe Bouchet, who is an invertebrate specialist, works on mollusks. He wanted me to go down to these depths and collect mollusks.

[14:24] One of the ways they do that is they have this big dredge system where they suck up everything using scuba tanks. They go through five scuba tanks in shallow water to do one of these dredges.

[14:35] Well, as it turns out, the deeper you go, the more pressure you go through. Each breath you take at 300 feet has 10 times as much gas in it as at the surface. We would have to go

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through 50 scuba tanks to try to use this dredge system. So, I built this electric vacuum cleaner with a little ROV motor. It worked really beautifully. It worked really well.

[14:53] But one of the things we did was that we sucked up some of the invertebrates down there and found all kinds of interesting new invertebrates. That's important because the point I make, I'm a fish nerd. I'm only looking at fishes all the time, but really the fishes are just a tiny fraction of the biodiversity at these deep reefs.

[15:08] This is 360, 380 feet deep, and you can see that it's crawling with corals and sponges and all kinds of other marine invertebrates. Invertebrates are a real key component to the reef down there, and there's this limitless supply of undiscovered species.

[15:23] The BBC sponsored a trip in 2007. It was a marvelous trip. We went all the way across the Pacific. It was a cast of thousands, but we got to do our . Not as well as we'd like to, but we did get a lot of new species, once again.

[15:34] I'm about to show you a video of the story behind the collection of this new species and another fish you don't see here. Also, in the same dive, we collected this new species. I'm going to show you a little bit about what we do.

[15:47] As you can imagine, using all of this high tech equipment in remote places, we have to be very serious about what we do. So, we're very disciplined and regimented. This video gives you a sense for how we actually work as field biologists doing what we do.

[16:03] Now, this was shot with two different cameramen. It's the same dive. That's a little bit loud, let me turn the volume down a little bit. That's me, down below. That's John Earl, up above.

[16:26] So, avii is a known species. That's the prognath you hear me talking about.

[16:33] I'm letting John film me.

[16:41] I'm going to catch the striped fish. That's the prognath. That's the new species. But avii is a very exciting thing, too. It's only known from one specimen before. This is the first time anybody's ever been able to get live ones.

[16:58] I'm trying to get the prognath, and I want the angelfish. Angelfish is the other.

[17:05] Bob, in the blue hair, he's the BBC cameraman. He's getting in on the commentary.

[17:31] Here comes Brian. He's our other guys' teammate. He's the youngest one.

[17:56] This is 400 feet deep in a very rare [inaudible 18:16] in the world. We only have a few minutes to work. We obviously don't enjoy our jobs very much.

[18:06] Now you see, I said, "I'm going to [cross talk] the angelfish."

[18:11] That was interesting. We found one new species and the two specimens of something that had only been known before from one thing. But then this is what the discovery process is really about. You're swimming along and you see, out of the corner of your eye, something sticking its nose out of a hole like that. You go, "What was that?"

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[18:28] This is John Earl filming, right here. This is an example of a brand new species of fish. This turns out to be a fairly special one. What you see me catching right now is what had ended up being the holotype of this new species of damselfish. After this video, in a few seconds here, I'll show you where this fish ended up and where its place in history is now.

[18:54] It's an unusual circumstance, that I actually got on film the actual capture - here's a shot from the background, there - the actual capture of the holotype. So it's a nice little story here.

[19:04] What you just saw, all of that stuff you just saw, is an excerpt from a 15 minute part of a dive. What's beginning now is the six or seven hour part of the same dive, which is the very long, laborious task of getting back to the surface again.

[19:18] Now, the fish need to be tended to, to get them up alive. We like to get them up alive; they keep their colors better. So we have to stick a hypodermic needle inside their swim bladder so they don't explode on the way up. There's venting the gas out of the swim bladder of that holotype, what ends up being the holotype of that new damselfish.

[19:36] This is what it looks like. We're up at our decompression station. This is deep for a normal scuba diver, but it's quite shallow for us. We have all these emergency tanks we take down with us. We can send those up to the surface now. We're done with them. Then we just spend the next several hours gradually working our way back to the surface.

[19:51] If we don't, you get that problem I had when I was 19, which is or the bends. That's not a good thing to have.

[20:02] I'll just finish the story on that particular fish that I caught there at the end. Here is that specimen prepared and photographed all nicely. As taxonomists, we have various tools. We count all the external characters as best as we can. We have X-rays. We can take X-rays of the fish and look at what they look like on the inside.

[20:19] One of the new technologies that's emerging, it's too expensive for normal taxonomic use but we did it for this fish because it's kind of a special fish, is that you can get high-resolution CAT scans of these things. So we can effectively dissect the entire fish without harming any of its tissue in the process.

[20:36] We have this high-res imagery of it in 3-D of its internal skeleton, which we can use to virtually dissect the fish and take a look at its insides. We can do various slices. This is just showing you an example of what you can do when you have all this information, take cross-sectional slices and things like that, take a look at what the morphology is.

[20:54] The other thing that's special about this fish - well, one of them - is it's one of the selected premier species from the Encyclopedia of Life initiative. They picked this one. One of the things we did when we described it - it's the one on the upper right of the row of pictures there.

[21:07] Basically, the paper was published on January 1, 2008. The reason that date is significant is that it's exactly 250 years to the day after the start of zoological taxonomy. That's the date that the ICZN code fixes as the start of all official scientific names for animals through Carl Linnaeus' book, "Systema Naturae."

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[21:27] We wanted to honor that, so exactly on the same day we published this paper describing these new species, these five new damselfishes. But what's interesting about this publication is it's got almost 200 hyperlinks built into it.

[21:39] When you get the PDF of this, normally you would see a citation of a museum specimen. You'd have to go online to find it or write the museum curator and ask for a photo or whatever.

[21:48] Everything's hyperlinked directly from the original scientific publication. So you just click on a hyperlink and it takes you right to the museum specimen. It takes you right to the high resolution image and all of that. It was intended as a demonstration of what the next 250 years of taxonomy might be like, if you could harness the power of technology.

[22:06] I just want to end with just putting it in a little bit of context in the world of fishes. We don't have as many fish as there are insects in the world, but this is just for the expeditions I talked about that we have good data for. That's the number of new species we found on each expedition.

[22:20] This is the number of exploration time we actually did. A lot of preparation, a lot of decompression, a lot of work, for only a few hours of actual exploration time.

[22:27] So our new species per unit effort figures are pretty impressive. By the time we got to Fiji in 2002, the most recent expedition we have these numbers for, we're up to over 11 new species per hour of collecting time, which is pretty remarkable.

[22:40] That doesn't seem to be going down. That Fiji expedition was all done at the exact same spot, day after day after day after day, and that spot just kept yielding new species after new species after new species.

[22:51] I guess the big point here is that there's almost no end to the job of a taxonomist. Besides being a very diverse job, you get to be a librarian, an historian, a technologist, an informatician, all sorts of really fascinating things. You know that's it's going to be a long time before we run out of new species to find.

[23:08] So I guess that's all I have to say. Thanks very much. I appreciate it.

[23:11] [applause]

Announcer: [23:12] This lecture is part of the Arizona State University Darwinfest, and is sponsored by the Institute for Species Exploration, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the School of Life Sciences, and is a production of Grass Roots Studio. [23:28]

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