Marine scientists -- United States -- Biography. |
Women marine biologists -- United States -- Biography. |
Bioluminescence |
Underwater exploration |
Widder, Edith |
Animal light |
Animal luminescence |
Light production in organisms |
Exploration, Submarine |
Exploration, Underwater |
Ocean exploration |
Submarine exploration |
Under water exploration |
Undersea exploration |
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Summary
Summary
A pioneering marine biologist takes us down into the deep ocean to understand bioluminescence--the language of light that helps life communicate in the darkness--and what it tells us about the future of life on Earth in this "thrilling blend of hard science and high adventure" ( The New York Times Book Review ).
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BOOKLIST * "Edith Widder's story is one of hardscrabble optimism, two-fisted exploration, and groundbreaking research. She's done things I dream of doing ." --James Cameron
Edith Widder's childhood dream of becoming a marine biologist was almost derailed in college, when complications from a surgery gone wrong caused temporary blindness. A new reality of shifting shadows drew her fascination to the power of light--as well as the importance of optimism.
As her vision cleared, Widder found the intersection of her two passions in oceanic bioluminescence, a little-explored scientific field within Earth's last great unknown frontier: the deep ocean. With little promise of funding or employment, she leaped at the first opportunity to train as a submersible pilot and dove into the darkness.
Widder's first journey into the deep ocean, in a diving suit that resembled a suit of armor, took her to a depth of eight hundred feet. She turned off the lights and witnessed breathtaking underwater fireworks: explosions of bioluminescent activity. Concerns about her future career vanished. She only wanted to know one thing: Why was there so much light down there?
Below the Edge of Darkness takes readers deep into our planet's oceans as Widder pursues her questions about one of the most important and widely used forms of communication in nature. In the process, she reveals hidden worlds and a dazzling menagerie of behaviors and animals, from microbes to leviathans, many never before seen or, like the legendary giant squid, never before filmed in their deep-sea lairs. Alongside Widder, we experience life-and-death equipment malfunctions and witness breakthroughs in technology and understanding, all set against a growing awareness of the deteriorating health of our largest and least understood ecosystem.
A thrilling adventure story as well as a scientific revelation, Below the Edge of Darkness reckons with the complicated and sometimes dangerous realities of exploration. Widder shows us how when we push our boundaries and expand our worlds, discovery and wonder follow. These are the ultimate keys to the ocean's salvation--and thus to our future on this planet.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Marine biologist Widder illuminates life in the dark depths of the ocean in her fascinating debut. After a blood disorder caused her to temporarily lose her eyesight at age 18 while studying marine biology, she became obsessed with how some marine animals produce light to navigate the darkness. Once she graduated college, she landed a research position studying bioluminescence in marine life 800 feet beneath the sea's surface. Using a small submersible called Deep Rover, she dove into the ocean's darkness to answer the question, "How much occurs when we're not down there stirring things up?" Along the way, Widder exuberantly describes the "quadrillions" of fish who depend on bioluminescence to survive in the depths of the open ocean, such as the bristlemouth, whose "light organs adorning its belly... allow it to hide in a place with no hiding places." Though the ocean is teeming with life, she points out that due to "chronic underfunding," less than 0.05% of the deep ocean has been traversed: "We've never had anything akin to... NASA for the ocean," she laments. This informs and electrifies in equal measure. Agent: Farley Chase, Chase Literary. (July)
Booklist Review
Marine biologist and MacArthur Fellow Widder endured dire medical struggles while in college, including a temporary loss of sight, which taught her to value every moment and made her an exceptionally sensitive investigator of the how and why of bioluminescence, the light generated by a wondrous variety of sea creatures, from the crystal jelly to the lantern shark. Widder innovated ways to study the "language of light" deployed by bioluminescent marine species, a demanding and risky undertaking requiring deep dives and new photographic strategies and instrumentation. A superbly captivating writer, Widder fluently elucidates complex scientific inquiries and findings pertaining to how bioluminescence helps marine species thrive in the watery realm where "there's nothing to hide behind." She also renders the ludicrous, the terrifying, and the enthralling with equal vim and vigor. As Widder dazzles readers with dramatic tales of expeditions frustrating and revelatory, describing such astonishments as seeing an "enormous squid" that was "completely new to science," she calls for an effort to explore the deep seas on par with the space program, passionately and expertly arguing that it is urgently important for us to understand the oceans, which are severely imperiled and essential to our survival. "We need to launch a new age of exploration, one that is focused on our greatest treasure, life."
Guardian Review
Divers investigating an underwater canyon off California made a startling discovery in 2002. They found a dead whale that appeared to be wrapped in a crimson, shag-pile carpet. Closer examination revealed this covering was made of red worms, previously unknown to science, which were eating the whale's skeleton. Subsequent research showed these acid-secreting creatures were all female and inside each was a tube containing a harem of dwarf males. These were carried around to provide fertilisation when the worms encountered food, such as a whale carcass, and wanted to start breeding. Scientists named the new genus Osedax, which means "bone-devourer". Were there more such bone-devourers? they wondered. Answers came swiftly. In waters off Sweden, they discovered Osedax mucofloris - literally "bone-eating snot flowers" - while the species Osedax jabba was named because its plump trunk reminded scientists of Jabba the Hutt from Star Wars. "The oceans, it turns out, are full of bone-eating worms¿ though nobody yet knows how they move through the deep sea or how they locate a skeleton," writes British marine biologist Helen Scales. Despite their ubiquity, Osedax's abyssal home allowed them to evade human detection for millennia, suggesting many other equally bizarre lifeforms lurk in the ocean depths, a point stressed by both Scales and US oceanographer Edith Widder. In their separate, equally vivid accounts of ocean life, they outline some of the staggering biological treasures that have already been uncovered - with the promise that many more await discovery. Consider the example of the cockeyed squid. "Its left eye is giant and directed upwards toward the sunlight while the right eye is smaller and aimed downward into the inky depths," writes Widder. It sounds nonsensical until you learn the smaller eye is encircled with bioluminescent light organs. "Thus the large eye hunts overhead for dim, distant silhouettes of prey while the bottom eye can use its built-in flashlights to illuminate more proximate prey." Bioluminescence turns out to be critical to abyssal life, adds Widder. Creatures from giant squid to plankton emit light to attract mates and food. "There are shrimps that can spew intense streams of liquid light from their mouths, like fire-breathing dragons; squid that discharge photon torpedoes of blinding blue brilliance; and fish that can eject sparkling dust storms out of a tube on each shoulder," she reveals. Far from being a dark, dead zone, as once thought, the abyss glitters with light and life and could house up to 30m different species, according to one estimate. Nor should we be surprised by this number. "More than 95% of the Earth's biosphere is made up of deep sea," says Scales. Both scientists have produced stylish, eloquent works, with Widder's being the more personal, beginning with her account of an adolescent illness that nearly left her blind and then moving to her current position as a world expert on underwater light communication. "My obsession with bioluminescence grew out of my brush with blindness," she writes. In pursuing this fascination, Widder has been given a unique view of the denizens of the deep, from the unassuming bioluminescent bristlemouth fish, which turns out to be Earth's most abundant vertebrate, to the Pacific barreleye fish, which can rotate telescope eyes inside its transparent skull. Scales's approach is slightly less personal but is equally enthralling and richly expressed and highlights how closely our lives depend on the deep. As she points out, the oceans have taken up more than 90% of the extra heat trapped by human-emitted carbon dioxide since preindustrial times. Without our seas, Earth would be scorched. But as she adds, the abyss, unlike that other great distant realm, outer space, has no stars at night to remind us it is there. "Yet the deep, quite simply, makes this planet habitable." But for how long can we rely on this protection? Humanity is adding acids, toxins, plastics and heat to the oceans while vacuuming up its fish stocks at an alarming rate. "We are managing to destroy the ocean before we even know what is in it," writes Widder. On top of these woes, a new crisis looms. To provide the rare metals needed to build wind turbines and electric cars for our climate-friendly future, mining companies are now eyeing up the mineral-rich nodules that litter the ocean bed. Enormous, remotely operated electric bulldozers are being designed to crawl the seafloor and sweep up these minerals, trampling all life and kicking up fine, muddy clouds that would hang in the water for aeons, writes Scales. "Delicate animals caught in those clouds and unable to swim away, like corals and sponges, would be smothered and choked." It is a chilling prospect. The deep is our planet's last wild place and we despoil it at our peril. To their credit, Widder and Scales have made abundantly, yet entertainingly clear the nature of the dangers that lie ahead.
Kirkus Review
An entertaining voyage to the bottom of the sea. In her first book, Widder, a veteran marine scientist and co-founder of the Ocean Research & Conservation Association, offers a captivating, watery-world personal memoir about exploring bioluminescence ("pure magic of living light") and an urgent plea to protect the world's largest ecosystem. As she laments, we're "managing to destroy the ocean before we even know what's in it." The author was hooked immediately after learning about bioluminescence. In 1982, on her first ocean expedition, she saw a vast array of "outlandish" bioluminescent sea creatures "about which most people knew almost nothing." Since then, Widder's career has been filled with dramatic highlights. On a 1984 expedition, she took her first deep water dive, to 800 feet, in the Wasp, a 2,000-pound metal suit in which she "oscillated like a tea bag on a string." She was "awestruck and baffled" by the lights she saw at the edge of darkness. Her second dive (1,831 feet) set a world depth record for the Wasp. Widder followed up that feat with a single-person submersible dive in Deep Rover, a 3.6 ton, "five-foot-diameter acrylic sphere with five-inch thick walls." On that dive, she filmed phenomenon never seen before in such detail. "I was sitting," she writes, "in the middle of a bioluminescent minefield!" After experiencing a harrowing near-death event due to a leaking sphere, with U.S. Navy support, a dive to 2,420 feet yielded further amazing discoveries, and another dive undertaken with the Discovery Channel and Fidel Castro's support resulted in a TV documentary. A special camera she developed allowed her to fulfill a goal of her lifetime, to be the first to film "the world's most famous invertebrate," the massive giant squid, "in its natural habitat." Widder's enthusiastic, joyful memoir amply describes the "wonder and exhilaration of discovery." Inspiring for science-loving readers and environmentalists young and old. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Most of the livable habitat on earth is in the ocean, yet humans know very little about the sea and its lifeforms. Oceanographer and marine biologist Widder is on a mission both to pry the secrets "below the edge of darkness" from its denizens and to save this habitat before human pollution destroys it--an eventuality that would particularly impact developing nations and indigenous peoples. She has spent her life studying bioluminescence--the way creatures in wholly dark places use self-produced light to escape predators, find prey, or mate. In 2005, she founded the Ocean Research and Conservation Association, where she researches oceanic life and ways to curb its destruction. She notes that some nations spend huge sums of money to explore outer space, but we have a livable, largely unexplored habitat right here on Earth. She also describes advances in deep sea diving and photography; Widder's ideas have made many of these innovations possible. This book illustrates the careful, curious, years-long quest of a scientist in love with her work. Widder peppers her text with witty asides as footnotes that invite readers into her passion. VERDICT Highly recommended for those interested in marine and environmental studies.--Caren Nichter, Univ. of Tennessee at Martin
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 Seeing Light is what, exactly? For something that has no mass, it sure carries a lot of existential weight. It is both an energy source and an information carrier. It can be injurious and it can be healing. It is one thing that can manifest as two things--a wave in the future and a particle in the past. In a vacuum, it travels at the maximum speed allowed by the universe, and it does so without ever decaying. It gives up its energy only when it interacts with other particles, like those that make up the visual pigments in our eyes, and it is through these interactions that we interpret the world around us. For most life-forms on Earth, light is the paramount stimulus that makes life as we know it possible. Green plants harness energy from light to synthesize sugar from carbon dioxide and water. In the process, oxygen is generated as a by-product. As magic tricks go, forming food and breathable air from what seems like nothing is hard to beat. Still, it's not especially flashy. Creating dazzling light from food and air, however, is very flashy. That's the magic of bioluminescence. Of course, to appreciate that particular alchemy, you need something equally miraculous: vision. Being able to see provides a huge advantage in the game of life; it is for this evolutionary reason that 95 percent of all animal species on Earth have eyes. These range from microscopic, such as some single-celled algae that have an eye no bigger than one-tenth the diameter of a human hair, to giant squid with an eye the size of your head. The different ways that such disparate eyes see the world reveal much about the biological needs of their owners. In fact, figuring out what different eyes are best adapted to see is such a valuable tool for probing the nature of life that it has become a whole field of study called visual ecology. If you compare the life of a giant squid inhabiting the deep sea with that of microscopic plankton living in sunlit surface waters, the difference in eye size makes sense: a giant eye collects many more photons than a tiny one and is therefore better adapted for living in a dim light environment. But what about another deep-sea inhabitant, the cockeyed squid? Its name derives from its mismatched eyes: the left eye is giant and bulging and directed upward toward the sunlight, while the right eye is smaller, recessed, and aimed downward into the inky depths. This seemingly makes no sense--until you learn that bioluminescent light organs encircle the small eye. While the large eye hunts overhead for dim, distant silhouettes of prey against a dark, lead-gray background, the bottom eye can use its built-in flashlights to illuminate more proximate prey. Clearly, to understand the visual ecology of the largest living space on Earth, one needs to appreciate the nature and function of bioluminescence alongside the nature and function of eyes. It is inevitable that when we try to figure out what different animals see, we relate it to what we can see. That is a major challenge in the deep ocean, though, where our very presence alters the visual environment. It's difficult to envision a place you are unable to observe in its natural state. Our eyes are adapted for a much brighter existence, which means that when we explore darkness, we must bring artificial lights so intense that to visual systems adapted to the deep sea, they are probably as bright as looking directly into the sun. Since it is such a challenge to observe animals in this realm without disturbing them, sometimes the best way to gain insight into their lives is to learn as much as possible about their eyes. The most important questions to ask about eyes are: What information do they accept, and what do they exclude? All eyes act as filters, allowing in only data streams about the outside world that optimize their owner's chances for survival. Anything that doesn't serve that purpose falls under the banner of too much information. Spending time and energy on producing ultraviolet receptors, for example, and processing and interpreting their output is counterproductive if UV light plays no useful role in detecting vital stuff like food, mates, or predators. Thinking about eyes and what they do and don't see is a mind-stretching exercise. We are blind to so many things in our world--some because of biological constraints, and many more because we simply don't know how to look. Environmentalist Rachel Carson once said, "One way to open your eyes to unnoticed beauty is to ask yourself, What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again? " An even better way to achieve heightened visual awareness is to lose sight and then regain it. As Joni Mitchell sang, "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it's gone?" That Joni Mitchell song, "Big Yellow Taxi," was released my first year in college. I started at Tufts University in the fall of 1969 as a biology major, with the aim of becoming a marine biologist. But before I had completed my first semester, it was clear that goal would be unattainable without medical intervention. During my precollege physical, I mentioned a pain I'd been having down the back of my left leg. Since I was pretty active--a skier and skater in the winter and a water skier in the summer--I figured I must have pulled a muscle. X-rays revealed otherwise: My back was broken. The doctor illustrated the extent of the break by making two fists with his hands, stacking one on top of the other, and then sliding the top one halfway off the bottom one. The slippage was pinching a nerve going down my left leg, causing the intense and persistent pain I felt whenever I sat down. I'm pretty sure I know when I broke it. I spent a lot of my childhood climbing up into and jumping out of trees in our leafy suburban neighborhood just outside Boston. My favorite tree was an old misshapen willow down by the pond near our house. Its trunk ramped up at a forty-five-degree angle away from the water and then branched into two large horizontal limbs, each with thick vertical branches that created separate "rooms" that made it the perfect pirate ship, tree house, or castle. The limbs were about seven feet off the ground: a comfortable jump that I made hundreds of times with ease. But I remember one Sunday, when I was eight or nine years old and dressed for Sunday school in some stupid frilly dress I hated, the jump didn't go as planned. When we came back from church, I couldn't change into my beloved jeans, because we were going someplace fancy later, but I was allowed to be outside until it was time to go, as long as I promised to stay clean. I wandered off to climb my favorite tree, but when I went to jump down, I remembered my promise and landed in a way that protected my dress instead of myself. A searing pain ripped through my back--like nothing I'd felt before. But it didn't last long, and I shrugged it off. Until that college physical, I thought low back pain was something everybody had. I couldn't remember a time without it. By my first semester at Tufts, it was so bad that I couldn't stand for any extended period, and sitting was equally miserable because of the pain in my leg. The only way I could do homework was by lying flat on my back with a pillow under my knees. This was not conducive to good study habits, as I would often fall asleep and bonk myself in the face with whatever tome I was attempting to wade through--a very effective form of negative conditioning. When it became clear I couldn't go on like this, a spinal fusion was scheduled for the beginning of February. According to the Urban Dictionary, "crumping" is a slang medical term indicating that a patient's condition is rapidly worsening. See also: "circling the drain." I crumped; not during the spinal fusion, which went fine, but afterwards, in the recovery room. I went from okay to Oh shit in a New York minute, flipping around in the bed like a fish on a dock while hemorrhaging nearly everywhere. I had a blood disorder called disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC). The cause is unknown, but it's often associated with major trauma and manifests as overactive clotting factors in the blood, causing clots to form in the small blood vessels of the body, blocking blood flow to vital organs. In extreme cases, the clotting factors and platelets are consumed to such a degree that severe bleeding ensues. The result, in my case, was that I wasn't just bleeding into my surgical sites but also into my lungs, depriving me of air, hence the fish-out-of-water imitation. Two factors conspired to allow me to survive this medical Armageddon. In fact, I was the first person ever to survive it at Mount Auburn Hospital. The first was that my orthopedic surgeon had recently attended an American Medical Association conference on DIC, which allowed him to recognize the symptoms. Usually, a doctor who sees his patient hemorrhaging will administer coagulants to stop the bleeding, but that just leads to more clotting in the small blood vessels and increased likelihood of organ failure. Instead, my surgeon knew to give me the anticoagulant heparin, thereby averting organ failure but greatly exacerbating the bleeding problem. The second lucky break was that the famous Harken "chest team" happened to be at Mount Auburn that day. The chest team's first order of business was to start my heart, which had stopped. Excerpted from Below the Edge of Darkness: A Memoir of Exploring Light and Life in the Deep Sea by Edith Widder, All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
Introduction: A Different Light | p. ix |
Part I Deep Seeing | |
1 Seeing | p. 3 |
2 Fiat Lux | p. 20 |
3 First Flash | p. 38 |
4 The Stars Below | p. 55 |
5 Strange Illumination | p. 79 |
6 A Bioluminescent Minefield | p. 98 |
7 Seas Sowed with Fire | p. 119 |
Part II To Know the Dark | |
8 Glorious Puzzles | p. 139 |
9 Stories in the Dark | p. 153 |
10 Plan B | p. 178 |
11 The Language of Light | p. 196 |
Part III Here Be Dragons | |
12 The Edge of the Map | p. 215 |
13 The Kraken Revealed | p. 239 |
14 Talking to Cannibals | p. 275 |
Epilogue: A Case for Optimism | p. 297 |
Acknowledgments | p. 303 |
Further Reading | p. 307 |
Index | p. 317 |