Marine Biologist Quotes

A doctor, a logician and a marine biologist had also just arrived, flown in at phenomenal expense from Maximegalon to try to reason with the lead singer who had locked himself in the bathroom with a bottle of pills and was refusing to come out till it could be proved conclusively to him that he wasn't a fish. The bass player was busy machine-gunning his bedroom and the drummer was nowhere on board. Frantic inquiries led to the discovery that he was standing on a beach on Santraginus V over a hundred light years away where, he claimed, he had been happy for over half an hour now and had found a small stone that would be his friend.

I wished I hadn’t majored in women filling their pockets with stones and sticking their heads into ovens. Maybe tomorrow the pinhole would widen and I would want to be a marine biologist.

Assessing the mind of a creature this alien demands that we be extraordinary flexible in our own thinking. Marine biologist James Wood suggests our hubris gets in our way.

Too bad I don't want to be an actress. Or a reality TV-star or something,'Quinn said. 'This would be such a great opportunity.' 'Yes,' Mom said, regaining herself. ' It's a terrible shame you only want to be a marine biologist. I suppose it would be much more useful to have been asked out to dinner by a whale.

Nobody dreams of becoming a surf journalist. I fantasized about being a marine biologist when I was eight years old, before it became clear to everyone, including me, that I was not mentally equipped to deal with observable facts and shit.

fisherman had to be a combination biologist, meteorologist, mechanic and mariner. Their livelihood, their very lives, depended on their store of practical knowledge.

So you didn’t become a marine biologist.” He shakes his head. “Plans change. Shit happens.

Orange roughy, a sluggish but delicious ocean fish, were caught in vast numbers before marine biologists realized how desperately susceptible to extinction they were.

One could make a compelling argument that we know more about the universe than the marine biologist knows about the bottom of the ocean or the geologist knows about the center of Earth. Far from an existence as powerless stargazers, modern astrophysicists are armed to the teeth with the tools and techniques of spectroscopy, enabling us all to stay firmly planted on Earth, yet finally touch the stars (without burning our fingers) and claim to know them as never before.

It’s worth it,” she said. “There are some amazing reefs and sea life there.” Jacob still looked baffled. “Do you want to be a marine biologist or something?” “No. I just want to see it.” “Why?” “Because it’s there. Because it’s something in the world I haven’t experienced yet.

Since the experiment began, dead beaked whales have been discovered stranded on beaches of the Gulf of California by senior marine biologists at the National Marine Fisheries Services, including several experts in beaked whales, the impacts of noise on marine mammals, and the stranding of marine mammals. These scientists, and others who care about whales, wrote letters to the expedition’s sponsors. Columbia University failed to meaningfully respond. The National Science Foundation’s response was to write a letter stating, “There is no evidence that there is any connection between the operations of the Ewing and the reported [sic] beached whales.

we have entered a new epoch, which has no analog in earth’s history. “Geologically,” he has observed, “this is a remarkable episode.” Over the years, a number of different names have been suggested for the new age that humans have ushered in. The noted conservation biologist Michael Soulé has suggested that instead of the Cenozoic, we now live in the “Catastrophozoic” era. Michael Samways, an entomologist at South Africa’s Stellenbosch University, has floated the term “Homogenocene.” Daniel Pauly, a Canadian marine biologist, has proposed the “Myxocene,” from the Greek word for “slime,” and Andrew Revkin, an American journalist, has offered the “Anthrocene.

I took a moment to breathe in the fresh air, glad I’d decided to get out of the house. After a moment, I continued on to Fisherman’s Wharf. Paul and I had often taken the kids there to feed the harbor seals—you could buy a bucket of fish for a dollar. Lisa had been obsessed and talked about becoming a marine biologist for years. She’d loved animals ever since she was little, begging to come to the clinic with her father, sitting up with a sick animal. Many nights we had to drag her home. We’d been sure she’d become a vet of some kind, but that was another dream that had fallen by the wayside. I still liked to go down and see the seals myself, though it was lonelier now

Chapter One Vivek Ranadivé “IT WAS REALLY RANDOM. I MEAN, MY FATHER HAD NEVER PLAYED BASKETBALL BEFORE.” 1. When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and he would persuade the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense. The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans play basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would pass the ball in from the sidelines and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A regulation basketball court is ninety-four feet long. Most of the time, a team would defend only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally teams played a full-court press—that is, they contested their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they did it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, Ranadivé thought, and that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that they were so good at? Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Ranadivé lives in Menlo Park, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. His team was made up of, as Ranadivé put it, “little blond girls.” These were the daughters of nerds and computer programmers. They worked on science projects and read long and complicated books and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadivé had come to America as a seventeen-year-old with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press—every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “I mean, my father had never played basketball before.” 2. Suppose you were to total up all the wars over the past two hundred years that occurred between very large and very small countries. Let’s say that one side has to be at least ten times larger in population and armed might

Such racist theories, prominent and respectable for many decades, have become anathema among scientists and politicians alike. People continue to conduct a heroic struggle against racism without noticing that the battlefront has shifted, and that the place of racism in imperial ideology has now been replaced by ‘culturism’. There is no such word, but it’s about time we coined it. Among today’s elites, assertions about the contrasting merits of diverse human groups are almost always couched in terms of historical differences between cultures rather than biological differences between races. We no longer say, ‘It’s in their blood.’ We say, ‘It’s in their culture.’ Thus European right-wing parties which oppose Muslim immigration usually take care to avoid racial terminology. Marine le Pen’s speechwriters would have been shown the door on the spot had they suggested that the leader of France’s Front National party go on television to declare that, ‘We don’t want those inferior Semites to dilute our Aryan blood and spoil our Aryan civilisation.’ Instead, the French Front National, the Dutch Party for Freedom, the Alliance for the Future of Austria and their like tend to argue that Western culture, as it has evolved in Europe, is characterised by democratic values, tolerance and gender equality, whereas Muslim culture, which evolved in the Middle East, is characterised by hierarchical politics, fanaticism and misogyny. Since the two cultures are so different, and since many Muslim immigrants are unwilling (and perhaps unable) to adopt Western values, they should not be allowed to enter, lest they foment internal conflicts and corrode European democracy and liberalism. Such culturist arguments are fed by scientific studies in the humanities and social sciences that highlight the so-called clash of civilisations and the fundamental differences between different cultures. Not all historians and anthropologists accept these theories or support their political usages. But whereas biologists today have an easy time disavowing racism, simply explaining that the biological differences between present-day human populations are trivial, it is harder for historians and anthropologists to disavow culturism. After all, if the differences between human cultures are trivial, why should we pay historians and anthropologists to study them?

And he’s supposed to be a marine biologist!

I've had the joy of spending thousands of hours under the sea. I wish I could take people along to see what I see, and to know what I know.

How, then, does the octopus decide what colors to turn? New evidence suggests cephalopods might be able to see with their skin. Woods Hole and University of Washington researchers found the skin of the octopus’s close relative, the cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, contains gene sequences usually expressed only in the retina of the eye. Assessing the mind of a creature this alien demands that we be extraordinary flexible in our own thinking. Marine biologist James Wood suggests our hubris gets in our way.

It was a marine biologist’s dream come true.  To really communicate with another species was incredible enough.  Now to be able to do it “out there,” in their native habitat, was a huge leap in oceanography research.  They couldn’t imagine what they were going to learn outside of the tank.

A marine biologist came onstage and was particularly upbeat. He said we had to meet the 1.5-degree target, because that way only 70 to 90 per cent of the coral would disappear, and not all, as the two-degree Celsius rise projected. He spoke like this was a worthy fight. Despite my interest in these matters, I hadn’t been aware of this. Was he telling me, so very directly, that up to 90 per cent of the world’s coral would die out if we reached an almost impossible goal of keeping global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius? Was that knowledge available when people were deciding whether to aim for the two-degree goal? Was there a group of councillors who approved this on behalf of the Earth’s inhabitants? I thought back through the news from recent years and couldn’t remember television and radio broadcasts being interrupted by this decision. I do not remember an election where a nation mandated the elected government to sacrifice the world’s coral reefs. I didn’t recall coral reefs being used as leverage in negotiations: ‘The car manufacturers’ association celebrates victory.

In the same year when Ratcliffe and Barker published their findings, Rachel Carson—a marine biologist formerly employed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service who left her job in 1952 after her previous publication, The Sea Around US, became a bestseller that gave her financial independence—began to investigate the anti-DDT activities among some communities, mostly in the US Northeast, affected by DDT spraying

Unfortunately, one of the planet’s most biodiverse and important ecosystems will not survive two degrees intact. The science on corals and global warming has got steadily more alarming over recent years, in tandem with the accelerated destruction of reefs by rapidly rising temperatures around the world’s tropical coastlines, as has already been described. In 2018 the IPCC had to admit that ‘tropical corals may be even more vulnerable to climate change than indicated in assessments made in 2014.’ Marine biologists watched in horror as the Great Barrier Reef suffered back-to-back bleaching events in 2016 and 2017, losing fully half its coral cover in the process. The IPCC’s latest predictions for the two-degree world are dire: even if global temperatures stay under 1.5 degrees, 70–90% of reef-building corals will be lost. With two degrees of warming, this increases to 99%.

Environmentalists were right to be inspired by marine biologist Rachel Carson’s book on pesticides, Silent Spring, but wrong to place DDT in the category of Absolute Evil (which she did not). Most of her scientific assessments proved right, some didn’t—such as her view that DDT causes cancer. In an excess of zeal that Carson did not live to moderate, DDT was banned worldwide, and malaria took off in Africa.

Wait,” she calls out, leaning over the side and squinting down at the blue-green water. “I can see something. An outline.” “What does it look like?” “A fish. What do you mean, what does it look like?” I roll my eyes. “I realize it’s a fish, but what kind of fish?” “How the hell should I know what kind? Do I look like a marine biologist?

Benzer and I talked one afternoon in the spring of 1971, at Caltech, where he had moved six years before. His office was small, bright with daylight, crowded with bookshelves and files all stowed with a mariner’s sort of compulsive comfortable neatness. On a shelf was a photograph, enormously enlarged, of nerve connections in the eye of a fly. Benzer was medium dark, medium short, as neat and compact as the room. He was wearing a lightweight tan cardigan over a shirt and tie. The photo, he said, was an electron micrograph: he was presently mapping the genetics of mutations that affected the nervous systems—the behavior—of fruit flies. Half a dozen of the early molecular biologists were then moving into neurobiology; Benzer brought out a cartoon that one of them had sketched, a jokey ancestral tree with the faces of molecular neurobiologists pasted in according to the organisms they were working with. “It’s a new phase,” he said. “I feel that, y’know, when I came into molecular biology it was a pioneering science. But when a science becomes a discipline, which is essentially true of molecular biology now, when you can buy a textbook, take a course— There’s no question there are many surprises left … but a field to work in, to me personally, when it becomes a discipline, becomes less attractive. I find it more fun to be striking out in something which is more on the amorphous side. Which was true of molecular biology when I started. Another thing that becomes unpleasant is the redundancy of effort, a number of people doing the same thing—so that even when you make a discovery, six different guys discover it in the same week. You begin to feel that if it’s five guys instead of six guys it doesn’t make any difference. But still, my change was not so much to escape from that, as just following my own interests; I’ve got interested in behavior and I want to look at it.

Humans evolved in nature. Our sense of beauty evolved to attract us to environments in which our ancestors thrived, such as grasslands with trees and water, where herbivores are plentiful, or the ocean’s edge, with its rich marine resources. The great evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson said that humans are ‘biophilic’, by which he meant that humans have ‘the urge to affiliate with other forms of life’. This is why people travel to wondrous natural destinations.

Biologists have long speculated about the reasons that animals in general, and marine animals in particular, make noise. One is communication; whales are said to communicate between members of a school. Another is defense, attempting to scare away attackers. Another is location, as in the echo-ranging of porpoises. Another is sexual attraction; most fish are noisy only within a male sex. A final reason must be that it must be pleasurable for a marine animal to make noise, just as in the humming of a tune by a human being.

It is the phenomenon made known by the marine biologist Daniel Pauly as the shifting-baseline syndrome. The world as first seen by the child becomes his lifelong standard of excellence, mindless of the fact he is admiring the ruins of his parents. Generation to generation, the natural world decays, the ratchet of perception tightens. Gradually, imperceptibly, big sharks give way to small sharks, small sharks to baitfish, baitfish to jellyfish to slime. On land, the big cats and wolves become feral house cats and coyotes. The wild standard sinks ever lower and becomes ever heavier to raise. Few notice, few care. Eventually, nobody remembers that wolves not long ago freely roamed the Adirondacks, and hence there is mad howling over the suggestion of returning them to their homeland. Southern Californians panic on learning that a cougar track has been discovered on the fringes of their gated neighborhood - mindless that cougars roamed these hills and canyons long before gated communities drew their lines in the chaparral.

The Greek word for kernel is karys, so the word used to describe creatures without a nucleus is prokaryotic—the name, originally procariotique, was coined in the 1930s by Edouard Chatton, a French marine biologist—while creatures with nuclei are eukaryotic. Bacteria are prokaryotes. Pretty much everything else, from yeast to elephants, are eukaryotes. This realization resulted in the creation of a fifth Kingdom, dividing one-celled eukaryotes, who retained the Protist name, from prokaryotes. Thus, by the time the dust had settled, in the 1970s, the hierarchical tree of life had two domains—Prokarya and Eucarya—and five kingdoms: Plantae, Animalae, Fungi, Protista, and Bacteria.*

Thus European right-wing parties which oppose Muslim immigration usually take care to avoid racial terminology. Marine Le Pen’s speechwriters would have been shown the door on the spot had they suggested that the leader of the Front national go on television to declare that ‘We don’t want those inferior Semites to dilute our Aryan blood and spoil our Aryan civilisation.’ Instead, the French Front national, the Dutch Party for Freedom, the Alliance for the Future of Austria and their like tend to argue that Western culture, as it has evolved in Europe, is characterised by democratic values, tolerance and gender equality, whereas Muslim culture, which evolved in the Middle East, is characterised by hierarchical politics, fanaticism and misogyny. Since the two cultures are so different, and since many Muslim immigrants are unwilling (and perhaps unable) to adopt Western values, they should not be allowed to enter, lest they foment internal conflicts and corrode European democracy and liberalism. Such culturist arguments are fed by scientific studies in the humanities and social sciences that highlight the so-called clash of civilisations and the fundamental differences between different cultures. Not all historians and anthropologists accept these theories or support their political usages. But whereas biologists today have an easy time disavowing racism, simply explaining that the biological differences between present-day human populations are trivial, it is harder for historians and anthropologists to disavow culturism. After all, if the differences between human cultures are trivial, why should we pay historians and anthropologists to study them?

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