Bertarelli Summer2024 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 10
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RE W I L D I NG
what “wild” or “pristine” means, I
immediately go underwater in my head. I am a marine community ecologist. As such, I am interested in how underwater ecosystems are structured and how they change through time.
In building a vision of “wild,” we each can pull from multiple
sources. We can turn to history, our oral, and, more recently, our written history that describes what underwater ecosystems looked like to
our ancestors and how the human relationship with the ecosystem
used to appear. We turn to personal experiences, in this case to experiences that we have had exploring underwater ecosystems. If I close my
eyes and imagine “wild,” I see a scene that is vivid and visceral, with big
animals, maybe a lot of sharks, and a seafloor that is calcifying, growing, and creating the corals and calcified algae that construct tropical
islands over millennia. What I see is a thriving coral reef.
About 20 years ago, we sought to describe with data what is
“wild,” or what is “pristine” underwater. We did an expedition to
what are amongst the most remote islands of the planet in the
central, equatorial Pacific: the Line Island Archipelago. They’re a
collection of islands that are managed by the Republic of Kiribati
and by the United States. And in these islands there are some
locations, some coral reefs, that have never experienced human
habitation. We took a ship, maybe not the most beautiful of ships,
but we did bring a team of world class scientists there to document
what we could learn underwater.
We wanted to see what was swimming around. How many fish
were there? What did they look like? How big? What species? We
sought to find what the biodiversity was like, the number of species
and where they lived. We looked at the bottom of the ocean to see
how many corals were there, how much algae was there, and what
else was competing for space. We looked at the water to think
about how healthy it was, estimating how many bacteria, viruses,
and nutrients were in the water. And all of this great work was
summarized into a set of photographs, which to me emphasizes
the importance of storytelling, of imagery and of art, even in the
science that we do.
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PAGES 6- 7: S AR AH _ L EW I S / S H UT T ER STO CK
W
HEN I THINK ABOUT
