News - Grand Grunion Gala
Remarks by Captain Charles Moore
April 30, 2005
Thank you all very much, especially those of you who work and volunteer at Cabrillo Aquarium. To have my work acknowledged by this prestigious award is extremely gratifying, and I'm compelled to salute my friends and my colleagues at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, without whose support I would not be standing in front of you tonight. On page 19 of your tribute book you'll find a special way to help endow this fine organization. In a few minutes, the great man for whom my award is named will take you along with him to experience t he raucous sights and sounds of the coastal ocean near and dear to all of us. This is the biome we can now explore and share via live video with students in the classroom thanks to the generous grant from BP for our Portals to the Sea Program. There is however, a remote, and enormous part of the great Pacific which is very different. Tonight, I want to take you with me on a virtual sea voyage to where very few people have ever been - a place that has never really been the destination for any traveler, yet is the size of a continent. The sea creatures populating the top two hundred meters of this oceanic realm take part in the largest daily mass movement of life on earth, yet most of them are smaller than your hand. As night falls, billions of tons of zooplankton and small fish move from the dark depths where they hide to feed near the surface on the small marine plants created only hours before by solar energy.
To understand this phenomenon from a landsman's point of view, think of these grazers as miniature sheep grazing every sliver of grass that has sprouted that day. It's easy to see why, in the deep ocean, the magnificent habitats featured at Cabrillo Aquarium, like the kelp forests and reef communities, cannot exist. What does exist is a stunning array of filter feeders evolved to process a billion cubic kilometers of seawater by spinning elaborate mucus webs to extract every particle of scarce food. They are masters of vacuuming a liquid medium. As unfamiliar and unknown as this realm is, it is actually the largest of all earth habitats.
Our earth spins, and so does the atmosphere, though its movement is more irregular. Like the earth, our spinning atmosphere has mountains and valleys. Mountains of air are heavy and exert high pressure on the earth and sea below, atmospheric valleys are lows. Hot weather at the equator makes the atmosphere rise and it forms a clockwise rotating high over the central North Pacific. The resulting winds create ocean currents that form the North Pacific Central or Subtropical Gyre, a gentle maelstrom which depresses the sea surface near its center. The peculiar features of this zone, the miles deep bottom and lack of upwelling nutrients combine to make it an oceanic desert at the same latitudes where deserts exist on land. The air feels like desert air, dry and clear, yet it's in the middle of the ocean. Due to its lack of resources, everyone who crosses the gyre is just passing through. The central High has little wind, so sailors avoid these "horse latitudes," so called because stock transporters in the age of sail got stuck there and had to jettison their cargo of horses.
Fisherman, both commercial and recreational find little to interest them either. Even the great whales, fishes and sharks cannot make a living. The main fish is big at 4 inches long and is so unafraid of being eaten that it has headlights shining all over its body. It is called a lanternfish. The diverse planktonic community that inhabits the gyre makes it an ideal area for baby sea turtles to mature, the juveniles can feast on lots of jellyfish and are exposed to few predators. A floating object, traveling around the perimeter of this enormous system, will reach the point where it started in about six years. Repeating the trip may find an object spiraling into the center where it can circulate for decades.
A journey to the eastern eye of this system in Oceanographic Research Vessel Alguita, takes a solid week sailing through seas so deserted that we usually see only one or two vessels during
the entire voyage, in spite of the lack of fog and haze. Remember, though that the distance to the horizon when an observer is ten feet above the water is only 4 miles. If something sticks
up above the sea surface, that height is added to the visible distance, so that a large ship can been seen 20 miles or more away, and a tall island even further, but when looking for flotsam,
our range is limited to a circle around the boat only a few miles in diameter. Flotsam is anything drifting that has been lost to the sea. Jetsam is a drifter jettisoned overboard to save
a ship. It is the accumulation of flotsam and jetsam in the gyre that sparked my interest in the summer of 1997, when, after testing a new mast in the Transpac race to Hawaii, we motored through
the gyre on our way home.
Day after day, Alguita was the only vehicle on a liquid highway without landmarks, stretching from horizon to horizon. Yet, as I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine
ocean, I was confronted as far as I could see with the sight of drifting plastic. It seemed unbelievable, but in the week it took to cross the gyre, I never found a clear spot. I have since conducted
three scientific surveys of the area, and found that bits of plastic debris outweigh zooplankton there by a six to one ratio. What does this mean to the filter feeders who vacuum it up as it breaks down
into ever smaller bits of plastic that may take five hundred years to biodegrade? We know that pelagic seabirds pick up bottle caps, cigarette lighters and bits of plastic in huge quantities, even feeding
it to their chicks until they are stuffed. Our current research seeks to answer questions about plastic's ability to transfer pollutants to these creatures. Japanese scientists found that plastic particles
have the ability to absorb hormone disrupting chemicals and concentrate them up to a million times their level in ambient sea water.
The fact that plastic is more available to filter feeders than natural food cannot be a good thing. Weaving the fibers of our modern lifestyle into the fiber of life itself will have unforeseen consequences.
The alarming nature of our findings is counterbalanced by the universal appeal of consumer plastics. I'm often asked to provide a direction for positive change. I like to think about natural plastics,
like the web of a spider or the beard of a mussel. In the tremendous crash of gigantic waves against the shore, the lowly mussel holds fast to its rock anchor with the help of natural glue and fibers
of tremendous strength. Such natural fibers will no doubt play a more prominent role in future production.
Frankly though, there will be no technological fix to the problem of ocean pollution in the foreseeable future. Look at the developing world. According to the United Nations, four thousand tons of thin plastic bags are produced each month in Kenya. These bags - many so thin they are simply thrown away after one trip to the store - block gutters and drains, choke farm animals and marine life, pollute the soil, and hold pockets of rainwater, offering ideal breeding grounds for malaria-carrying mosquitoes. We often hear in our own country about efforts at vector control. Spraying efforts directed at habitat for mosquitoes that carry West Nile Virus are beginning in Southern California. How can we develop a spraying program for pockets of rainwater held by millions of plastic bags that have been blown far and wide by the wind? Is the vector we need to control the mosquito, or is it our plastic bags? It seems that the only part of the natural world we can't control is us. That is why stewards are evolving for every habitat on the planet. Only by having caretakers for each and every ecosystem can we can we mitigate our natural tendency to trash them. I share my award with the millions of environmental stewards whose labors seldom receive widespread recognition. I should also acknowledge that this award is given to me not only for my work, but also for the generous support my family has given to the Aquarium in its Capital Campaign and Expansion, especially the Virginia Reid Moore Marine Research Library, named after my mother. John Hancock's grandfather and my grandfather's legacy is carried on through the John Hancock and Will J. Reid charitable foundations. Hancock oil company, once the largest independent, investing in the community that supported it, like BP Arco is doing now.
Thank you.
Posted: 6/10/05