The Life Aquatic

For me, like many others, I was introduced to the magic of the world’s oceans by Jacques-Yves Cousteau. On the Calypso, which he leased for a symbolic price of one French franc from the unlikely benefactor Loel Guiness, a British politician and business man, he travelled the world’s oceans making the TV series “The Undersea World of Jacques-Yves Cousteau.” He was a colourful and controversial character, but he undoubtedly raised the profile of the marine environment and marine science in particular. I remember watching him on TV, with his nasal French accent barely understandable, making discoveries and dicing with danger. Today those programmes seem contrived and clichéd – and were satirized cruelly in Wes Anderson’s “The Life Aquatic”  - but they opened up a previously unimaginable world for me and millions of viewers around the world.

There were plenty of colourful characters in Wellington last week for the 50th anniversary conference of the New Zealand Marine Sciences Society. These are people who are trying to understand, and help us all understand, the silent world Cousteau wrote about so eloquently. . I had the privilege of giving a plenary address to the conference on WWF’s marine campaign, and particularly our project “Future Seas” which looks forward 50 years.  

One of the major problems faced by marine scientists is, of course, that neither they nor anyone else will ever see the majority of the world’s oceans. They are too large, too deep, too dark, too dangerous and too remote for humans. Perhaps that’s why marine scientists are so interesting: if you study places that can only be reached by a deep sea dredge, which brings up buckets of mud and assorted animals, you have to have a very good imagination to work out what the place is really like. If you’re really lucky, a remote-controlled robot will send back some grainy footage, but mostly, you’ll need all your powers of deduction. Or maybe you’re a fisheries scientist, your work a combination of standing on the freezing and dangerous deck of a trawler half the time, and hunched over a computer modeling stocks and catches the other half.

There is a thriving organisation call Deep Ocean Expeditions, headed by a New Zealander, Rob McCallum, that specializes in diving to parts of the ocean that few, if any, people have ever been to. Getting Rob’s organisation to New Zealand and into some of our remote areas of ocean, such as the Kermadec Trench, could throw a new light on our amazing marine wildlife. What we do know about our marine life is summarised nicely in these two WWF-New Zealand publications: Shining a Spotlight  which highlights some of the most important places in our oceans, and Treasures of the Sea which describes groups of species, their significance and state of knowledge.

New Zealand is home to huge numbers of seabirds and marine mammals, many of which are found nowhere else on earth. Some of the whales – especially the beaked whales – are so rare that they have never been seen alive, and are known only from one or two specimens that have washed up on the beach. Working out what they are, where they go and how they live is nothing short of magical, which seems very apt for what sometimes seems like a parallel universe, it is so different to the terrestrial world around us. Of course, one of New Zealand’s most eminent marine scientists in this field is also an actual magician , but that’s another story.

Back to the science - WWF's Future Seas project  uses a scenarios-based approach to logically define a theoretical future. We can't predict what will happen, but by talking, arguing and analyzing we can better prepare for what might happen. The main finding of this project is that whatever happens to our marine environment in the future, a comprehensive and representative network of marine reserves that protect significant ecosystems is essential for the wellbeing of people and wildlife. And that's something that both the current and previous governments have so far paid little more than lip-service to.