Going Viral: An Environmental Activist's Story

- Hi, everyone. It is an absolute pleasure to be here talking to you today. And I'm here to tell you a story and this is a story about how a chance encounter led me to engage with millions of people worldwide on the issue of marine plastic pollution, a threat that is currently affecting the livelihoods, of all marine life on the planet. I will then talk about how that led me down a path of using social media and other viral videos to keep spreading stories about marine conservation, to ever larger audiences. And then finally, I'm going to end on a few lessons I've learned during this journey that can hopefully inspire some of you as to how you can start to enact global change today. My story starts like most stories start, as a kid, specifically, this chubby-cheeked little angel, and as a kid, I was already obsessed with wildlife. In fact the story that my parents often tell me is when you're that age, when you get read fairy tales and stories at nighttime, I used to go to my parents and ask them to read me from this musty old animal encyclopedia,'cause all I wanted to hear was facts about the ocean. To me, that represented something far more wild and engaging and fascinating than anything that could be read in a fiction book. So it made sense that by the time I became a teenager, I found myself absolutely obsessed with marine documentaries and nature documentaries, in general. I watched everything I could find until I could hear David David Attenborough's voice when I closed my eyes. And as I kept watching these documentaries, I started to realize two important things. Number one, our oceans were in danger, but number two, I really wanted to do something about it. So my next step was somewhat predictable. I went to university and studied marine biology, and I had this idea that on day one, I'd be ushered amongst the ranks of other conservationists, who'd be out saving sea turtles and whales and sea lions, all those wonderful marine organisms. But instead I found most of my time was spent in a classroom and while the lecturers knew so much about all the threats that currently faced our planets, there was nothing about how to address these threats. And that left me wanting, wanting to, I felt like I was missing something. I really felt like we already knew what the problems were, now we need to try to figure out how to make a change. So I realized that if I wanted to be part of ocean conservation, I had to start taking things a little bit more into my own hands. And the first step was to start volunteering. I started working for Archelon, the Sea Turtle Protection Society of Greece. And in this program, my expectation really started to meet reality. We used to walk along the beaches of the Mediterranean, looking for sea turtle tracks and sea turtles, obviously marine animals, but they crawl out onto beaches to lay their eggs, which means we can walk up and down beaches looking for nesting sea turtles tracks. Once we found the tracks, we can dig around until we actually find the eggs. Then once we know where the eggs are, we can protect that area over the incubation of those eggs. Then a few months later, those hatchlings will emerge and rush to the water. And with every nest that we protected, I really felt like I was achieving something. It felt like a tangible step towards this kind of healthier ocean that I envisaged. And I threw myself at my work. I felt very passionate about what I was doing. Luckily, I had some wonderful leaders who saw the passion for what I was doing and eventually offered me another job in Costa Rica. This evolved into a PhD that had me bouncing around from several different sea turtle nest habitats in South Africa, in the Caribbean, and Costa Rica again. And I felt very lucky to be part of something that meant so much to me, part of an army of say thousands of marine or sea turtle conservationists, working around the world. But once again, there was something that troubled me. And that was in several of these locations where I had been working, the same issue was happening, we were still seeing nesting populations declining. Best way to illustrate this, is this little figure I have in the left hand corner. This is the number of turtles nesting at Parque Nacional Marino Las Baulas, Leatherback Turtle Marine Park in Costa Rica. This is a site that I worked for eight years of my life. And when the monitoring program actually started way before I got involved back in 1988, there was about a thousand and a half turtles nesting per year. Last year, the number of turtles nesting at this location was only two. That's alone, sends shivers down my spine and it showed that all the work that myself and other sea turtle conservationists were doing worldwide to protect nesting beaches wasn't enough, but we already really knew this and there's several wonderful scientists out there who've been working at these problems for years that had identified the main threats faced by sea turtles. And these were, fisheries bycatch. And what we mean by bycatch is this is not fisheries actively trying to hunt sea turtles. This is fisheries that are working to catch fish that we might like to eat, swordfish tuna, things like this, but are accidentally or incidentally capturing sea turtles in their nets and causing the mortality of these animals. Then there's plastic pollution, the problem here is you have so much plastic waste in the ocean and so many species now confusing plastic for items that they would normally be feeding on, so they're accidentally ingesting plastic bags and any kind of marine debris that they find. And then lastly, there's also climate change. Now climate change has a bit of a double whammy effect on sea turtles. Number one, you have the problem of sea turtles lay their eggs on nesting beaches and if the temperature gets too hot, those eggs will literally cook inside the sand. So as global temperature's increasing, you are having a decrease in the success of these nests. You have another issue, which is unlike humans who have chromosomal sex determination, which is males are produced when there's an X and Y chromosome, females are produced when there's two Xs, sea turtles, don't have this. They have something called temperature-dependent, sex determination, which means the temperature of the eggs during incubation determines whether those eggs are going to be male or female, specifically with warmer temperatures, producing females and cooler temperatures producing males. So it's a little bit trashy, but you can think of it as hot chicks, cool dudes.(audience titters) Now, as temperatures tend to increase, this means you get this feminization of sea turtle populations around the world and this is also unsustainable. Now each of those problems is affecting sea turtles on a global scale and none of those will be specifically by conservation measures enacted not just only on a nesting beach, but any specific location, worldwide. Fisheries are controlled by global political and economic pressures. Plastic pollution is created and produced by basically every single coastal country on the planet and climate change is something that each one of us and the society we live in is in a sense aiding by whether we drive to work, when we turn our lights, all our energy producing, especially energy produced from non-renewable resources is adding to this problem. But in the fact these are global issues. There's also a bit of a silver lining, which means that each one of us as an individual can start to play a role in addressing these issues, whether we decide to eat fish caught from sustainable or unsustainable sources can help to address this history of fisheries and fisheries bycatch, Whether we start to use plastic items or non-plastic alternatives can help address plastic pollution. And whether we decide to turn our lights off or walk to work, or to drive to work, decisions like this can start to affect climate change. So with that realization, I started to realize that I wanted to take myself away from some of the work I was doing on nesting beaches. And I started throw myself at communication. I started realizing if I could just communicate some of these messages to large enough audiences that would start to have the impact that I wanted to see. So the obvious step was I started organizing campaigns. I started doing talks at schools, universities, public forums, anywhere that would listen to me, I would try to try to speak and send this message. But my strategy for communicating really changed, thanks to one fateful day in 2015. I was invited on a research expedition by a wonderful scientist and friend, Dr. Christine Figgener, from Texas A&M University, and she was running a project where she was looking at the genetic relations of this species of sea turtle on the image here, the olive ridley sea turtle, and she was running this project on the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica. Christine had invited me to join and help out on the trip. And I saw an opportunity here. One thing that I was interested in looking at, were epibionts, and epibionts are the animals that live on other animals. So sea turtles might look cute, but they're surprisingly filthy little things, they're covered in leeches, crabs, barnacles, all these little critters, they kind of crawl all over them. What's interesting about those animals is they can start to give you some insight as to the health and behavior of the animal that's carrying it. Certain animals if they're ill or yeah, if they're ill or don't have a lot of energy, they might be covered in certain species. Evidence that they've been feeding in certain areas might be reflected by which leeches they have on them. So there's all this little bits of information we can get about the host turtle from the animals that live on their bodies. So every time we caught a turtle, we'd bring it on our boat. Chris would start to collect a small genetic sample and I would go ahead scaring over these animals, looking for epibionts. And then for one particular individual, we found something that really took our breath away. And I'm going to show a quick video of what we found, but I do want to start with a quick disclaimer that while I do think it's very important that we share this video, it can be a little bit distressing. What we found was something wedged inside the nostril of an animal. And initially I thought it was a tube worm, it's like a worm with a hard shell and sometimes you find them stuck on the shells of sea turtles. And I thought, unfortunately, maybe this animal had just got one of these tube worms caught in its nose. We knew it was blocking the breathing, the nostril of the animal, so I jumped into action. I grabbed Swiss army knife and I went to go pull out. And Chris had a wonderful moment of genius where she jumped ahead, grabbed our camera and filmed the whole event and that's why we have this video today. But what we pulled out was not a tube worm. It was something a little bit more distressing. It was in fact, a plastic straw, which is this plastic straw that I have here today. I have a bit of a hoarder complex when it comes to pulling things out of animals. And you'll find more about this in a second. I would love to say that was the only time something like that happened. But about two months later, I was working at another location in Costa Rica doing a similar project, looking for epibionts, and we found something else lodged in the nostril of a sea turtle. Once again, I had a good friend, Sean Williamson who had a camera at hand. So I ran forward to take the item out. Sean jumped forward with this camera, and this is what we saw This time, the item wasn't a straw, it was a plastic fork and there's proof of my hoarder complex. It was that plastic fork. The first thing I felt after both of those instances was a distinct feeling of guilt. I've used plastic straws. I've used count plastic forks in my lifetime. And without being able to say specifically, this was the one person who put this straw and it fell into this ocean end up in this turtle meant that blame really laid with all of us, myself included and that kind of got me thinking more, about these items and this plastic pollution problem. But I also started to wonder how do those items get in there in the first place? There'd been no reports of plastic items being wedged in sea turtles noses, even though there have been other reports of sea turtles eating plastics, and the clue is really given away by the fork. Now it's pretty much impossible for one of these items to get wedged into a sea turtle's nose from the outside. What is far more likely, I think, is these animals actually ingesting the items then trying to regurgitate them and instead of being passed up back through the mouth, it's getting passed into this area, which is called the internal nares, basically the inner nostrils and it's where the nostrils connect at the back of your throat, yeah, to pass to the outside. So kind of like an unfortunate analogy, it's much like what happens if you drink while laughing and it fires out of your nostrils instead, it's the same thing, but happening with these turtles. And as I said, this hadn't been seen before. So I did what any good scientist would do and I wrote up this information in a scientific article, published two articles, one for each event and published them in the journal Marine Turtle Newsletter with a short description as to my hypotheses as to how those items ended up in that location. And I looked up the first of those articles in a research paper aggregator called Research Gate just a couple of months ago and you can see at the bottom that it had been read almost 3,000 times, which is pretty good as far as a scientific article is concerned, but I'm sure many of you know, that wasn't where the big impact of that event happened. In fact, the biggest impact was clearly on social media. The night after I removed the straw, I took some of the stills from the image. I posted them on my Facebook page with a quick call to arms about this is proof of the single use plastic world that we live in. And within a few days that post had already been shared 32,000 times online. And when you combine that post with the similar posts from the fork video, as well, we got over 60,000 shares in total. And when you combine those videos again, that equates over 220 million views online, which is several times the population of the UK. In addition to that, we're picked up by almost every single major new source in the world, Al Jazeera, National Geographic, BBC, New York Times. The site has been the inspiration for several anti plastic and anti straw campaigns, such as the Last Straw Movement, We Skip The Straw and we were the inspiration for a feature length documentary that was doing the rounds at very several movie circuits a few years ago, inventively called Straws. And perhaps this is the true measure of kind of outreach, it spawned thousands and thousands of memes. I've only put two here,'cause the vast majority of them aren't appropriate to be shared a public forum, but you get the idea. It's pretty clear that the impact of our global outreach was very effective, but what was the impact? Well, the impact was overnight we started seeing coffee shops, restaurants, counties, and even countries start to enact bans against straws and other single use plastics. And in fact, often that was accompanied with the hashtag fortheturtles. This was the reason why we're making that change. And it was an incredible moment that I'll never forget, really felt like we were tackling some of these bigger problems that we needed to address, to ensure healthier oceans and a single tackling the straws or forks alone or any other plastic items, it's not going to address the entire plastic problem, but it's a start. So I started to think, how can I use this information, this new tool that I've just discovered, to continue this work, to continue to spread messages about ocean conservation and the decision that I finally came to was to start are heading down a path of incorporating camera technology into my research as a marine biologist, with the idea that I could then use the footage resulting from using these cameras to both generate footage that could be used to answer important scientific questions, but could also generate similar footage that could be used to engage global populations in ocean conservation. What I'm going to talk to you about next, is three areas where I've been incorporating camera technology into my research and some of the impact that we've been able to achieve. Now, first of these is using drones and cameras attached to drones. Next, I'll talk about cameras, actually attached to the animals we are trying to study. And lastly, I'm going to talk about cameras that we are currently deploying into the deep sea. So starting with drones, sometimes we call them unoccupied aerial vehicles and the use of drones and really the commercialization of drone technology has created this wonderful new tool for ecologists. If you go back 10 years, when drones first started becoming available for relatively affordable prices, a couple of thousand dollars or so it enabled us who start studying animals from the air in a way that previously could only be achieved for far more expensive prices using things like helicopters or low flying aircraft. Now the wonderful thing about being able to record wildlife from the air is it gives you this board perspective that enables us often to start to answer questions such as, how are animals distributed? And what abundances of animals do we have in our habitats? Now that's important for starting to understand population dynamics or which habitats we need to protect specifically to guard the animals that we're trying to conserve. Another benefit of drones is for lots of marine animals, the sound produced by a drone is actually relatively quiet. So these devices create a lot less disturbance than say a snorkeler sitting next to an animal, trying to study it. So enables us to get natural undisturbed behavior of some of these animals. Now I want to show you a couple of quick videos that we've been able to record, drawing some of our drone research. Now this is a humpback whale that recorded trying to assess the abundance of different large animals. Once again, off the coast of Costa Rica there's little baby that came up just next to it, its calf. This was actually the first ever drone footage recorded of a leather backseat turtle. So this is the species that I spoke to at the beginning that has seen such catastrophic declines in the Eastern Pacific. And this is an American crocodile and this video was recorded off a popular surfing beach actually. So there's actually surfers off in the backgrounds who had no idea this was going on, but if you might look closer, you'll notice that every time the crocodile's foot touches the ground, there's a little colored line in each color, represents a different footfall where its (indistinct) called the right front foot or the left front foot, et cetera. What was interesting about that video is there's actually a lot of fossilized trackways of crocodiles out there. By trackways. I mean like fossilized prints like dinosaur prints from all these extinct crocodiles from long, long time ago. There's for several of these prints, paleontologists have struggled for a long time to try to figure out really what's going on.'Cause we've got these crocodile prints that seem way too spread out for a crocodile of any kind of known size and they've really been trying to figure out what's going on here. What we started to do with this video is you can actually see this crocodile kind of bounding across the sea floor using, cause it's in water, using its buoyancy to kind of take these really long strides. So we took the footage that we collected. We measured using a bunch of kind of complicated mathematics, the distance between each footfall. And we've been using that information to start to interpret some of these old fossilized trackways of crocodiles. I mentioned that, even though it's a bit of a tangent mainly 'cause I really like that study and it gives me a chance to talk about dinosaurs, which is something I do whenever I can and evidently, some other people liked our work too. We got picked up by the Telegraph. We were covered again by National Geographic, but we never quite got the same impact from those videos that we had from some of the previous straw videos. So for our next project, we decided to do something a little bit more, personal let's say, and for the next project I'm going to talk about, we were using animal borne cameras. These are cameras actually temporarily mounted directly onto the animal of interest. So we are specifically focusing on sea turtles and it's kind of like a GoPro head mounts for sea turtles. People had currently deployed and used similar technology and been using similar technology for several years. There's the Critter Cam by National Geographic. But what was different about the project that we led is lots of those projects previously focused primarily on the scientific insights you can gain from these cameras. And if you're focusing on science rather than say the media and the impact, there's some balances that you might take into account. For science, it might be particularly important to record for a really long time, but you're not that worried about the quality of the footage that you are recording. When you're thinking about it from a media and engagement perspective, the quality is really important to kind of build engagement and the duration you're recording is actually potentially something you are able to give a lot of leeway on. So we used a couple of kind of 4k diving cameras that we are built into this little contraption that we're able to mount onto the backs of these animals. And it really gave us this wonderful view of what it was like to swim through the oceans like a sea turtle. That alone I think is a pretty cool idea, but it's not always just about media. The goal for me is always trying to merge media and science to together. And there are still lots of scientific implications for collecting data on how an animal sees the environment around them. That footage can start to reveal what are they eating? How are they finding their food? How are they finding shelter? How are they interact with the different habitats that they're exposed to? And it can also of start to show how they interact with other species. And what about even the same species? Now this is something we didn't really consider until we started this project. But one of the biggest findings we've had from animal borne camera work with sea turtles is that sea turtles can barely or very rarely swim past another animal without going to check each other out and having some kind of interaction in some way. And previously we always really thought of sea turtles unless they're reproductive active as being solitary animals. They do their own stuff in their own ways and they kind of live their life that way. These interactions that we were recording, sometimes they're aggressive. Sometimes you might have turtle coming up and trying to bite another turtle or displacing it from a habitat which could be territorial behavior basically saying, this is my zone, get out of it. But we are also recording something a lot more kind of for a lack of a better word, pleasant. You would sometimes see sea turtles come up to each other and say, rub heads gently. Or they would come up and just quietly sit next to each other for long periods of time. The obvious answer would be, that's probably got something to do with reproduction, but in this study, all of our animals are juveniles. They're way younger than reproductive age. So we're still actually trying to figure out right now, what is the purpose of these social behaviors? And that's some of the studies that we're continuing. But instead of listening to me pontificate more about why they could be doing this, I'll play some videos and you can make up your minds. So we specifically ran this project in The Bahamas and that's why you have such beautiful crystal clear waters. And one of the reasons we decided to study in The Bahamas,'cause we didn't want to sell a negative message. We didn't want to study sea turtles in the habitats where there was going to be pollution. We wanted to look at them in relatively pristine habitats that really showed you exactly how beautiful the oceans can be and really try to get people engaged in that kind of dreamlike idea of marine habitats. Now these are some of the social interactions. You've often got videos of one turtle following another for long periods of time, several minutes. I think this is a little bite and sometimes much more aggressive bites like this. Now what's interesting about that video is there's actually two different sea turtle species here. The sea turtle on the left is a green turtle and the turtle with the camera is a hawksbill. Now the hawksbill turtle's about twice the size, of that green turtle, but that green turtle definitely showed it, who was boss in that interaction. Okay, we started getting somewhere. We were picked up by the Independent. We got picked up by a ton of online short documentary style videos from 60 second documentaries, Great Big Story. We were covered by CNN, a live major news channel in the US. And once again, we started kind of hitting this viral goal that we were arching for, so we must be doing something right For the final project, I'm going to talk about something a little bit different now it's going to take us away from the tropical picturesque habitats that we've mainly been looking at so far and we're going to start talking about the deep sea. For most of us the deep sea seems like a very remote and they're definitely very alien habitats, but it really shouldn't and something that I really feel strongly about. See the Earth's surface is 71% water. All that area in blue, that's the oceans. If you consider the deep sea, at least in this instance deeper than say 200 meters, 93% of that habitat is deep sea, all that area in orange. In fact, the deep sea covers over half of this planet. It's one of the largest ecosystems we have, far bigger than any terrestrial habitats. Yet it remains little explored and little understood. There's several reasons for that. Now the deepest a human has ever been able to dive and this alone blows my mind is over 200 meters, just a little over 200 meters, but the ocean keeps going. The ocean at its deepest point is over 11,000 meters. And as you descend down the water column, pressure increases and pressure tends to increase at a rate around one atmosphere per 10 meters. One atmosphere is the pressure you feel at the surface. And that's the force of all the weight of say all the air above you. As you descend down the water column, all the weight of all the water around you starts to crush down on your body and that's what we mean when we talk about increasing pressure. To head down anything beyond a couple of hundred meters, you need to have technology to protect you from the hydrostatic pressure increase around you. The human body simply cannot withstand it. So we need things like submersibles, submarines, which provide a dome of acrylic or titanium, something that protects the people inside from the external pressure. We also use things like, we call them ROVs, Remotely Operated Vehicles, which is the same thing, but you take the people out and you put them in a comfy boat somewhere and they do it all by remote control. These are wonderful tools that we're currently using to explore the deep sea, but there's another limitation, which is the deeper you go into the water, the darker it also gets. The penetration of sunlight decreases with depth and beyond somewhere between 200 to 500 meters and the exact amount depends on where you are in the oceans, very little or not enough light from the surface will penetrate for us to be able to see. So if we're trying to explore these habitats, we need to bring that light with us. So what we tend to have in the front of our submarines and our ROVs and our submersibles are big white lights to kind of pierce through that inky darkness around us to check out the animals that live there. But just because we need those lights doesn't mean that the animals that have adapted to live in those habitats, also need that light. In fact, most of those animals evolved incredibly sensitive eyesights to be able to adapt to these very low light conditions because of this, several scientists started to hypothesize that maybe some of the more intelligent, some of the larger animals in the deep sea are able see us and our devices that we're using to explore these habitats long before we're able to see them. Someone who came up with this idea is Dr. Edi Widder, you can see in the center here, who's absolute, incredible individual, huge mentor of mine and a wonderful, wonderful scientist. She started to wonder like, how do we address this question of trying to study these animals that are avoiding us way before we're able to see them? And her way of addressing that question was to develop something called the Medusa, which was her stealth camera. The Medusa is that yellow box, you can see in those two images, just there, The secret behind the Medusa was instead of using white lights to kind of see through the waters, she's started using far red lights. Now by far red lights, I mean, not quite infrared, but just like far enough into the red end of the spectrum so that we can still see it. But it actually means that most life that live in the sea can't see it. Now this is because most marine life is adapted to see lights in the blue and sometimes even the kind of ultraviolet end of the visual spectrum, but they see very little in the red end of spectrum. So we have this wonderful technique to help see some of the species around us, without them being able to see us. And it was actually Edi's research in a lot of cases that really answered this question that showed that lots of marine animals can't see in the red end of the visual spectrum. Another key in the development of the Medusa was that it was silent. It had no moving parts and I haven't really got into this, but lots of marine animals can hear and even if they can't hear, they can often sense vibrations. So not having any moving parts within this device, it was very simple. It was essentially a camera on a string that was kind of danged at the ocean, but it meant that we had a device that was both silent and invisible. That's kind of answered the problem of disturbing marine organisms, but we needed something to actually start to trying to bring them in as well. It wasn't good enough just to have a camera floating through the ocean, hope something cool swam past. We needed something to try to attract life. And for that Edi had another idea and for that, she once again started thinking about how deep sea life interacts with lights. I mentioned that light decreases sunlight decreases as you head down in the water column, but sunlight isn't the only source of light that you find in the deep sea. In fact, this source of light is incredibly common. Bioluminescence is light produced by animals and over 50% of our animals that live in the deep sea produce their own form of light they use to communicate with each other. So there's lots of different messages these animals might be sending back and forth. Might be just communication between members of the same species. You might use light to scare away a predator that's trying to eat you. You might even be trying to use light to find the prey that you are trying to eat. So there's lots of communication going on in there. And Edi started wondering how she could tap in and utilize that communication and her idea was to develop something called an E-jelly E-jelly was a circuit board that you can see up in the top right hand corner that had a bunch of LEDs in a circle and used to create this dim blue pinwheel display. Now, what was particularly important about that pattern was that is also the pattern that's produced by the deep sea jellyfish called the Atolla, or called Atolla that's found in most of the oceans of the world. So for everything swimming along through the ocean, they start seeing that and they start thinking there's this jellyfish that might make a bit of a tasty meal for them to come check out. Well, Edi had deployed the Medusa in several locations around the world, and she had an upcoming mission in the Gulf of Mexico. She needed someone who had experience at sea, knew their way around camera technology and she was very interested in starting to get more involved in this idea of social media and viral videos. And we started talking, and eventually she invited me to kind of be the head engineer, more or less for the camera on the Gulf of Mexico expedition. We went out there. It was amazing. It was so much fun. We recorded so many things. We really just didn't expect, just wonderful. We recorded all these fascinating species of deep sea sharks and one of my favorite things that we recorded, and this is for the first time this has been recorded live. We found all these deep sea shrimp, large kind of deep sea shrimp, that when they would accidentally bump into the camera, they would literally spew neon blue bioluminescence all over the spot. So it's kind of disgusting and kind of beautiful at the same time. I grew far too attached them, but there was something else that once again, really, really took our breath away. We recorded a species. that I'm pretty sure everyone in this room knows about, and it's a species that is so culturally important, that's mentioned in everything from Norse mythology to modern day blockbusters. It's a species that we think about and draw pictures of when we're little kids, but interesting enough a species that has barely ever been caught on camera. In fact, the only time it had ever been filmed before alive was in the waters of Japan. We often refer to the species as the Kraken while as scientists, we refer to it as the giant squid. And on that trip, we are able to record the second ever footage of this animal alive and the first ever footage in US waters. Now, what you see at the front of this image do you see that E-jelly with that little pinwheel pattern, and then you can see the giant squid looming in the background. Actually, I love that clip. We know the size of the E-jelly and we can actually start to use a bit of perspective calculations based on the fact that that animal was hanging onto the E-jelly at one point and had its tentacle relatively straight. So doing a little bit of mathematics, we're able to calculate the length of that animal was somewhere between four to six meters in length, which sounds huge. I mean, that's two to three of me standing from head to toe, but that's still actually a juvenile for the species. The species will grow up around 14 meters in total size. When we recorded that clip, it was absolutely wonderful moments. and once again, this is a bit of a tangent, but about 10 minutes or 20 minutes after this video recorded the boat that we were on actually got struck by lightning. We all survived. Everything was fine. Adrenaline was pumping. After that when we realized everything was fine, we got on the phone to a journalist from the New York Times, told them we had something wonderful and they immediately started writing up an article. And yes, we were competing, I think with Trump, for the headline of the day. Unfortunately, Trump had done something outrageous,(indistinct) again, but giant squid were a close second. And then it started getting covered on a million and one other sources. Eventually I started trying to count how many other newspapers covered the story and it got to 400 and that was the point at which I decided it's time to go to bed, but needles to say, we finally were able to kind of achieve that goal again, of really having a global outreach. I'm going to move onto the last section of my talk. Now I'm going to try to synthesize some of that information into five lessons that I like to share that I think are important. And we often need to think of, especially in science communication for engaging with large audiences. And my first piece of advice is global outreach needs global communication, and I'm framing this in terms of science, but it really applies to any field. Science shared in a bubble stays within that bubble. If we communicate exclusively to other scientists, that's where that information is going to stay, but that's not where that information should, in my opinion, be staying. We're part of a global network and if we don't start sharing that information, you really start to limit the potential impact that your work could have. The reality is most people aren't reading scientific journals, so there's so many other platforms that we can start to use, start to engage more diverse, more inclusive audiences, social media, blogs, podcasts, events like this. It's so important that we use these additional more globally available networks to communicate our stories. And that's the first step between letting something go viral and connect with people worldwide. I really kind of promote this idea of reach the audience that your work deserves. If your work is relevant to people on a global scale, make sure that people on a global scale can read it. Next, emotional connection promotes engagements. Once again, as scientists, we tend to communicate in terms of statistics and facts. Now this is very important and we should never ever take the facts and statistics out of science. In fact is arguably the fundamental building block of science. But unfortunately we're also, well, unfortunately, humans don't respond that well to pure statistics and facts. We need to make information. and the important information we have, more engaging and emotion is one of the ways that we can do that. If you can build that emotional connection, it provides a platform that you can then use to communicate these important, impactful facts that we need to make important decisions about the world. I'll give a quick example. This is a little couple of sentences. I took from a scientific article in Science, which is one of the largest journals on the planet. And it's talking about how much plastic is entering into the ocean each year. And there's one sentence here that I find particularly shocking, which is we calculate that 275 million metric tons of plastic waste, was generated in 192 coastal countries in 2010, with 4.8 to 12.7 million metric tons entering the ocean. Now, as shocking as that might sound, it's difficult to build that sense of caring. It just seems too abstract for a lot of people. If you just say that outright, I think a lot of people will miss the points. So if I'm trying on communicate about the threats of plastic in the oceans, potentially maybe you start with an image or a video such as the straw in the sea turtle's nose. And then you start to convey that that is the impact of a single straw in the ocean. Then imagine that straw is an absolutely minuscule amount of that potentially 12.7 million metric tons that's entering into our ocean. And then the story becomes a little bit more engaging, it connects with you on a deeper level. It really start to resonate and I think that's an important way that we need to start to share these stories, if we want to start connecting with people. I use a similar thing when I'm talking about the deep sea Conservation in the deep sea is something that I feel very strongly about. and once again, even though it feels like a remote habitat, it is a habitat that we are already very much having an impact on whether it be through climate change, processes such as deep sea mining, fisheries are already working in these habitats. But if I immediately start with some of the statistics, I freely find that people get turned off very quickly. So I tend to rely on stories about the giant squid. This is a story that people find cool engaging. The giant squid is a deep sea species, and you can't separate the two. If I want to get you excited about deep sea conservation, I often start thinking about the giant squids a species that has been so important that we've spoken about it for millennia, but we currently know so little about it. I can't tell you if populations are increasing, decreasing, No one knows on this planet. We don't know what threats these animals are facing. We simply haven't done the research to figure it out. And because of that, the giant squid could be on a massive population free fall, right now and we wouldn't even know. We could wake up tomorrow and the giant squid could have fallen off this planet and fallen into extinction. Until we start protecting these habitats and studying these habitats better, we can't address these important conservation questions. And I think the idea of losing something such as the giant squid starts to connect people on emotional level, that some potentially some more dry facts about the deep sea might not be able to achieve. Next positivity can be as powerful as negativity as most ecological stories tend to have an overwhelmingly negative tone. When you read the newspaper, we always read about the next wildfire in some parts of the world associated with climate change or the new findings of how much fish is being destroyed by global fisheries, stories like this, and they can be very effective and the straw video and the fork video are great examples of a negative story can really engage with people. But I also also think we run the risk of a certain apocalypse fatigue if we keep telling the same stories over and over again, we'll start seeing people turn off. So I think it's important to start to balance it with positive stories, as well, and what we've shown through positive stories, such this like the turtle camera, even the giant squid videos. These are stories that inspire awe and wonder about the natural ocean. Show the beauty that's still to be found as opposed to the beauty that we're currently losing. They can be just as viral and just as effective at engagement. So I'm not saying that one or the other is better. My personal opinion, it's the mix and the use of both that's the most effective Next promote individual action. The success of the straw video, I really think lied in the feeling that individuals could take part in trying to address this problem by simple a decision of when you go to a restaurant, do you ask a straw or do you say no to that straw? That gave people an enormous sense of power in trying to address this problem. And it doesn't mean that just saying no to one plastic straw is going to save the ocean. It doesn't, but it is a step in the right direction. And this is something that I really think is an important point. Something that may have been lacking in some of the other campaigns that have been running was while we're trying to build engagement, there wasn't a specific, here's the one step you can take to try to make the ocean a better place. And this is something that I often think about and something that I'm working on for future projects is to try to promote that individual action, to really start to see wide-scale behavioral change. And finally, you already have everything you need. The story that I've told you today was my story and my story focuses on marine biology. This is the something that I feel very passionate about and this is a subject that I've been dedicating my life to, but it doesn't have to be that way. We all have our own individual stories to tell, and we all have our own individual battles that we want to fight. You don't need to drop a camera to the bottom of the ocean to see a change that you want to see in the world around you. And technology has given us this wonderful tool and I guarantee everyone probably listening to this talk and in this room has a smartphone with a camera and access to the internet and access to social media. And I see that as technology putting the power to change the world in your pocket. So with that, I really think for everyone, excited to start seeing a difference in the world around them, I implore them to go out, record the stories they want to tell, start sharing it with the public and the people that they think are going to enact that change. And I'd love to hear more about the stories that you want to tell about the world around you. Everything that I've spoken about today has not been a sole effort on myself. It is a joint effort between countless incredible individuals and countless incredible organizations, just a small list that I've included here. And I'm deeply thankful for everyone who's been part of this incredible journey. With that, I have my email address, if anyone wants to contact me to talk more about the topics, my YouTube and Instagram, for anyone who wants to follow more about some of the work I do. Thank you very much for your attention. You've been a wonderful audience and I'd like to take any questions.(audience claps)- So the first question is about coastal countries being mentioned in particular as plastics polluters. Are landlocked countries not producing waste that gets to oceans? Does it mean we should start with our rivers and estuaries and stop plastic leaking out from that source?- The main source by which plastic is entering the ocean is exactly as who asked that question, realizes it's through rivers and estuaries. That is the main primary source that plastic is getting from land into the oceans. But that doesn't just mean that exclusively coastal countries are leading to this problem. Any of us using single use plastics produce this problem. And part of the complexity behind the plastic problem is if you're in a landlocked country, that doesn't mean that your plastic stays in your country, it can get blown into a river, washed out to sea and end up in any part of the ocean. So for example, with the fork and the straw, these were both recorded in Costa Rica, but there's no reason to say that it was Costa Rica that actually also produced those items. And that's why we need to think about it on a global scale.- Thank you. Question out campaigning. What's the science communication campaign you think has gone most badly wrong or more politely hang on, or more politely could have worked better, and why?- Ooh, that's a difficult question.'Cause if I now name a campaign, I have to call out maybe someone I know who's done something badly, right? But I will, I'll say.- [Moderator] Or could have gone better and how would you have made it go better, perhaps?- (indistinct) My least favorite say campaign is honestly probably Seaspiracy and the campaign associated with that. For people who don't know, Seaspiracy was a documentary that came out relatively recently about the issues of fishing worldwide and the take home message was that, well, my interpretation of the take home message is that we are fishing our oceans unsustainably, and we need to do something about that, yet in that documentary, there's several facts that are kind of bent. I'd say the facts aren't quite reality and there's stories that are told to have an impact more so than to tell the legit scientific truth. And this gets to my idea of like, it's important to have emotional connection to build engagement, but you shouldn't be using liberty with the facts to tell the story that you want to tell. So that's my hot take.- Okay, I'll do one more in online question, if I may. This is a question about disposal. So again, and with plastics, is the problem of plastics not plastics per se, but how plastics are disposed of, for example, burnt or landfill rather than eventually ending up in the oceans.- Yes and no. To address the plastic problem. There's not a single solution. You can't just say the problem is we're not recycling enough. It kind of goes to, was it the three R's reduce, reuse, recycle. We firstly need to start reducing our use of single use plastics. We also need to start reusing more so that maybe it's not just a single used plastic, maybe it's used until it starts to break down, or we use it for the lifespan of the object, and we also need to recycle it. So I wouldn't say the solution's just one of those three. It's a combination of those three that we really need to address these issues.- [Attendee] Where to start? Thank you for the presentation. I worked in about 40 countries starting in the mid 1960s for Canadian, US, UK, all kinds of companies And I've come to very different conclusions to you. I now live on the west coast of Canada, north of Vancouver. And my question to politicians has always been what are the limits to growth? And it took me until just a few years ago to realize there are no limits that. And one politician took me to one side and said, we have to sustain jobs. we've chosen to consumerism capitalism. We have to sustain jobs in forestry, fisheries, construction, everything. And this is the problem is that it's, and I worked for big corporations and small, there are no limits. A hundred years ago, we had 1.6 billion people on the planet. We now have over 8 billion. We grow by 80 million net per annum. How on earth can we change direction? We can do it in little stages, but I don't have your optimism even with the best campaigning, I don't see how we change the present situation.- Wonderful, wonderful point. I'm not hundred sure how to answer that proposal but let me try with this, in the stories I'm telling it's about making a change more than achieving a goal. So I think number one, this iron that are no limits to say growth or economic growth. I would argue that's there should be. And at some points as much as we would like to think that we can continue to grow forever, the planet has biological limits to the amount of minerals. The amount of minerals in the soil that we can extract, fish in the ocean, so there are some biological limits induced by our planet. We are hurtling towards the destruction of huge numbers of ecosystems on this planet. And when I tell my stories and talk about the positivity of this, this is not me saying don't worry. A hundred percent, I don't want to interpret this as me saying that me alone has been able to address these problems, I haven't. The reason I start to mention with these straws that it's just a drop in the ocean is I'm trying to make a change, a difference. And a point that I often emphasize when I have these discussions about, maybe say, where we're going with the planet, is for me, I don't see conservation and I don't see eco- minded living or ecologically- minded living as there is no end point. There is no goal. I'm not working towards the end of plastic of all time. The purpose of what I do is to start heading in that direction, start doing what we can to make the world a little bit of a better place. Can we, for example, save that sea turtle population that I showed you at the beginning. Maybe we can, maybe we can't, but I dedicated eight years of my life to extending that population and it's extending the time that population is still on this planet. And that is as worthwhile in my opinion, as anything else. We're trying to address processes conservation isn't a goal orientated. If we can't protect the species or we can't protect the oceans, we shouldn't protect them. No, we're going to work as hard as we can to try to fix these issues while we still have time. And that's all we can do. So my positivity comes in this idea of we're going to keep working to address these problems because that's, in my opinion, is the right thing to do and that's that. Whether we win, whether we fail, we'll find out.- [Attendee] Okay, thank you.- Professor Robinson, thank you very much. I know there are a few more questions in the room. I'm afraid we have to stop now though. So I'd encourage you to come up at the end and speak to the professor. It's been a really great lecture. Thank you for addressing these questions and thanks to the audience for your attention. Please do join us on Wednesday the 4th of May at 6:00 PM for the next lecture in the series on the natural world. And that's on Averting the Insect Apocalypse with Professor David Goldson. Thank you very much, good evening and please join me in thanking the Dr.(audience clapping)