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 reef fishes. When you think of a coral reef, 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 breathing air, which is what we're all breathing now. Breathing it under pressure, 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. Darwin Distinguished Lecture Series – page 1 - ASU School of Life Sciences Grass Roots Studio Richard Pyle - Exploring Life on the Edge of Darkness Speaker [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. Darwin Distinguished Lecture Series – page 2 - ASU School of Life Sciences Grass Roots Studio Richard Pyle - Exploring Life on the Edge of Darkness Speaker [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.