A Love Letter to the Ocean: Life, death and mating in the sea

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0:44And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And today, we are spending our time together under the sea. The magic that is under the water, we've only really just begun to explore. This is Catherine Moore. And over the years, she's worn lots of different hats. I'm an engineer-turned-surgeon-turned-global-healthcare strategist. Beyond her professional world, Catherine loves adventure, especially in the ocean. I have been a scuba diver ever since I was in college, and I enjoy exploring new things, which occasionally puts you in a dangerous way.

1:39So that brings us to January 1997, the start of what turned out to be a love story. Though it really doesn't seem that way at first. I had a group of friends who all wanted to get together and go scuba diving and land exploring in the Galapagos. And it's an area where there's enormous pelagic life, whales and sharks and manta rays. And it's diving like nowhere else. So Catherine and her friends chartered a boat to some of the most remote Galapagos islands. It was a sunny day and we were pretty sure we were going to see a lot of hammerhead sharks. And they will congregate in very large schools.

2:26So you get in the water and you just calmly sink down to the bottom. And now you're under the schools and you can look up and see them all. Wow. You weren't scared at all? I had been diving with enough sharks at that point that it was excitement rather than fear. You know, sharks get a really bad rap. We're not their food. They're not going to come and just sort of randomly taste us. So, you know, my heart rate was fast, but that was excitement. I was on the hunt for the beautiful photograph. So Catherine was there, 50 feet down beneath a school of sharks, and the surge, the back-and-forth movement of the water, was particularly bad that day.

3:13Yes. And so the bottom wasn't smooth and sandy. It had some fairly large rocks and a lot of sea life, like sea urchins and things like that, around on the rocks. So that's where I was. and then I got caught in a particularly big surge and I instinctively flung my right hand out because I had my camera rig tucked in my left arm to brace myself against the rock but I wasn't bracing myself against a rock. I slammed my hand into one of those sea urchins and I felt the crunch kind of travel up my arm and I pulled my hand back and I could see that there were sea urchin spines stuck all the way through my hand.

4:07So you were stabbed, essentially, underwater. Yes. What went through your head? It was absolute disbelief. I mean, I'm looking at these things through my glove. You know, I'm not actually looking straight at the skin of my hand. And so it was surreal. It didn't feel like that was possible. It felt like it wasn't my hand. Catherine Moore continues her story from the TED stage. Now, this is bad. I mean, obviously, when you have something all the way through your hand, it's kind of bad anyway. but in this case sea urchins have a venom on them that if you've ever tangled with them you know that a sea urchin spine in you gives you horrible painful inflammation.

4:54So adrenaline brain kicked in and I just yanked the spines out. I don't remember doing it. I just remember thinking I can't get my glove off with these in here. I do remember taking the glove off and a big plume of black coming up in front of my face. And biologist brain now shows up and starts freaking out. How could all that toxin have gotten into that wound already? Well, physicist brain then shows up and very calmly explains, no, no, no, we're at 50 feet. Red wavelengths are attenuated. That's blood, not black. And sharks. So what are you going to do? So I'm in this cloud of blood, and I really, at an intellectual level, knew that I probably was not in much danger.

5:46You think blood in the water, and suddenly it's a feeding frenzy, but no. Hammerhead sharks don't really feed when they're schooling like that. But I didn't really want to be in the cloud of blood. And I didn't really want to go up through the set of sharks while I was really actively bleeding. So I used this band that you have on your scuba diving rig, and I slipped my hand up underneath it, and I cranked that cummerbund down really hard over my hand to kind of put pressure and then sort of angled off towards where my buddy was so to leave that cloud of blood behind. But so eventually you have to surface, right?

6:33Yes, yes. You're out of air. The dive is done. So how did you do it? So I looked for a not very sharky area, but there weren't any very not sharky areas because we were in this big upwelling, in this big school. And yeah, leaving down close to the bottom and swimming up through them and being in free water felt a whole lot more exposed. and the temptation to go super fast is really high, but you can't. So I just chanted, they don't feed when they're schooling. They don't feed when they're schooling. They don't feed when they're schooling. All the way up. Your adrenaline must have been through the roof.

7:18So you get pulled into the boat and you're like, hey, so this thing happened when I was down there. I mean, is there venom in your hand at this point? Well, yeah, there's sort of a slime that's on the outside of the spines. And there were a lot of local ways in which people dealt with getting sea urchin spine stabs, because they can get infected and they can get really quite terrible reactions to them. And we were a good two days away from where I could get any sort of formal medical attention. Oh, wow. And so the guys who were our local guides were like super apologetic, but they said, you know, you've got to get that as hot as you can.

8:08And if you can do that, you know, we can minimize the possibility that you'll get an infection or a really bad reaction. so I put my hand in water as hot as I could stand and I let it acclimatize a little bit and so once it got to the equalization point they started pouring additional boiling water into the pot where my hand was and so they would bring the temperature up a little bit and you know it would really hurt and it would acclimatize and then they'd put more hot water in And they were just essentially going to go until I freaked out and took my hand out. Because the more they could do that, the more likely I was to not have any bad effects.

9:00Did you, I mean, did it turn you against the ocean in any way? Were you like, this is crazy, this is too dangerous? Were you angry? No. No? Nothing like that? No, not at all. No, no. I mean, the ocean doesn't care about you, but it also means the ocean isn't malicious. The ocean didn't do that to me. I wasn't going to feel resentful. I was a guest, and I got hurt, but it wasn't the ocean's fault. That was my fault. No, I went diving the next day. What? You couldn't keep me out of the water. Oceans cover almost three quarters of the Earth's surface. More than 80 % of that underwater world remains largely unexplored.

9:50And while those depths can seem vast and frightening, they're also a place of magic, whimsy, passion, and even love. So today on the show, a love letter to the sea. We'll dive under the waves to explore connection and intimacy, from the surprising sex lives of fish to villainous snails that will enamor you, and a love story, which brings us to the conclusion of Catherine Moore's run-in with that sea urchin. A few weeks later, her hand was starting to heal, all except for one spot, which stayed stiff and painful. So it turned out I'd broken off a tip of the urchin spine in the joint itself. And that's why it wasn't getting better.

10:42And so the orthopedist says, you know, we should get this out. Nothing too urgent, not emergency. So we scheduled a small surgery for a few weeks out on a Monday. And on the Friday before, I broke my pelvis in a horseback riding accident. Yeah. So we kind of postponed that surgery. My broken pelvis and I were now facing six weeks on the couch, and I would have gone absolutely insane if it hadn't been for my friends. Spontaneous parties broke out at my house every night for weeks. I was fed, I was entertained, it was great. But that kind of enthusiasm is sort of hard to sustain over the long term, and eventually it petered down to just one friend who would send me jokes during the day and come and keep me company in the evening.

11:32Someone I got to know a whole lot better during this period of convalescence. He and I had been friends for about three and a half years at that point and hadn't really ever thought about a romantic relationship. But he was one of the most stalwart people and our conversations broadened and deepened. And so I developed the most important relationship of my life while I was convalescing on that bed. That was 21 years ago, and for 19 of those years, I have been married to that marvelous introvert who never in a million years would have approached me under other circumstances. So this isn't a story about piercings or sharks or boilings or breakings.

12:21It's a love story. It's a love story with a funny little epilogue. Now I was weight-bearing again, I could reschedule that surgery. Get the spine out. but I didn't need it anymore. Turns out, when you break a bone, your body scavenges calcium from all the bones in your body and from the little sea urchin spine that you happen to have lodged in the joint of your finger. So yes, my pelvis is now part sea urchin. So you don't need to worry, though. That I am not fully human is one of the things that my family loves the most about me. Thank you very much. That's Catherine Moore. You can go to ted.npr.org to see her full talk, along with beautiful illustrations by artist Natalie Moore, who also happens to be her daughter.

13:15On the show today, a love letter to the ocean. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

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15:11In fact, 75 % of Walmart management started in hourly roles. With benefits like health care, paid parental leave, and tuition support, Walmart isn't just a place to work, it's a place to grow. Learn more at walmart.com slash spark. App. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and today's show is a love letter to the ocean. You know, I have had this song stuck in my head since I watched your talk. Would it be okay if I played it for you? Yeah, I'm game.

15:53Romantic sponges, they say you do it. Do you recognize it? I do. This is the great Cole Porter's Let's Fall in Love. Let's do it. Let's fall in love. Let's do it. That's right. Let's do it. Let's fall in love. Yeah, he's actually a little dirtier than I'm giving him credit for. This is Mara Hart. She's a marine biologist and an author. The name of my book is Sex in the Sea, our intimate connection with sex-changing fish, romantic lobsters, kinky squid, and other salty erotica of the deep. I mean, this song just goes on and on about electric eels doing it, lazy jellyfish doing it, goldfish in the privacy of their bowls doing it.

16:44Yeah. What's your reaction to that song? as a person who specializes in the sex lives of fish. Oh, well, I rock out to that song. It's fantastic. But it completely misses so much of the more colorful and honestly kinky components because the fun part isn't that they do it. The fascinating and fun and important part is how they do it. For example, clownfish. Nemo! We're in their school! Nemo, don't move! Don't move! You'll never get out of there yet. Right, everybody knows finding Nemo, they know clownfish, but what they don't realize is that clownfish species all start life. Any individual that's born starts life as a male.

17:34And then later in life, he transitions into a female. Really? Yeah, yeah. And they pair up, a male and a female will pair up. And for them to make the most babies, what they want is for the bigger of the two to be female. And this is because unlike in mammals where, for example, with humans, right, a woman is born with all the eggs she will ever have. In fish, the bigger the female is, the more eggs she can carry. And since sperm is really cheap to make, a small male energetically can make a lot of sperm. He can make enough sperm to fertilize all of a large female's eggs. And what's happening is the female is actually sort of doing this psychological warfare.

18:28And she kind of bullies her mate, the male. And she kind of keeps him from sort of getting too aggressive, where he would actually then begin to transition into a female. He then bullies all these smaller males to say, don't you guys get any wrong ideas about competing with me for access to this female's eggs? So his bullying kind of keeps the juveniles in this almost like suspended, premature state. And then when that female dies, the male can very quickly transition into a female. And then the next largest juvenile matures into a male. And then they will become the mating couple. And nobody has to leave the anemone and go find a date or a mate, which is much safer.

19:17That is crazy. It's crazy. Who knew that clownfish could be so intriguing? You just can't make this stuff up. You know, nature has the best imagination of all. But the fact that you and I and most people know very little about how clownfish mate and very rarely think about how marine life reproduce, Mara says that's a problem. Because these animals reproduce in a different way, our actions affect the success of sex in the sea in ways that we might not anticipate right when it's most important. So for clownfish, they're often caught and sold as aquarium pets. And the bigger fish, right, are the ones that tend to be the more attractive for sale.

20:07So if you imagine on a reef, you go around and you start pulling off all the big clownfish, you're taking all the female. And taking all the females completely disrupts the life cycle of an entire school of clownfish. You skew the sex ratio. You're making it harder for those individuals that are left behind to actually find their mates, or you're forcing them to transition in an undercondition sooner than they would. And that's going to actually decrease the amount of offspring that is being produced. which causes a ripple effect for every creature connected to the clownfish. So just imagine how we are messing with the mating habits of all kinds of marine life.

20:51The ones we know about and the ones we don't. It's so varied the way that animals have sex in the sea. And it's so different that we really need to take that step back and start to shift the way that we act and shift some of our behaviors so that we can respect the way that life reproduces there rather than thwarting them. All to say, we need to know how marine life do it. And so now, let's dive deeper and move from the coral reefs of the South Pacific down to the cold, cold romantic waters off the coast of Maine. Take Maine lobster. They don't look that romantic or that kinky. They are both. Here's Mara Hart on the TED stage.

21:41During mating season, female lobsters want to mate with the biggest, baddest males. But these guys are really aggressive, and they'll attack any lobster that approaches male or female. Meanwhile, the best time for her to mate with the male is right after she's molted, when she's lost her hard shell. So she has to approach this aggressive guy in her most vulnerable state. What's a girl to do? Her answer? Spray him in the face, repeatedly, with her urine. Under the sea, pee is a very powerful love potion. Conveniently, lobsters' bladders sit just above their brains, and they have two nozzles under their eye stock, which they can shoot their urine forward.

22:33So, the female approaches the male's den, and as he charges out, she lets loose a stream of urine and then gets the hell out of there. Only a few days of this daily dosing is all it takes for her scent to have a transformative effect. The male turns from an aggressive to a gentle lover. By the week's end, he invites her into his den. okay so urine as an aphrodisiac also kind of a chill pill so he invites her in for a nightcap is that kind of it they go for it so she will occupy the den with him and they'll hang out for a while a couple of days they'll hunt they'll feed they'll sleep do their lobster stuff and then And when she feels that her molt is imminent, she will circle around front of him.

23:33And then they go through this wonderful ritual. He sort of bows his head down and puts his big claws out in the sand. And she sort of rises herself up and she takes one of her big claws and she'll tap him on one shoulder and then the other. And we call this, yeah, we call this nighting because it really looks like that. You are chosen. You are chosen. And we're pretty sure it means not only are you are chosen, but don't go anywhere because all this is about to happen. Oh. She then goes to the back of the den. And for the next few hours, she will molt. So she sort of slips out of her shell, if you will.

24:14That whole time, the male guards over her. He'll walk back and forth from the front of the den to her. He'll sort of stroke her with his antenna and his walking legs, his small legs. And lobsters, their taste buds are on their feet, on those little legs. So he's actually kind of like tasting her, licking her. That's where like the kinky part comes in. So he's sort of guarding over her, tasting her, caring for her. And then she sort of gives him a signal that she's ready. And now at this point, she literally is like a blob. She can't support her own weight. She cannot stand up. She can't really move.

24:52And so he scoops her up using his walking legs and forms almost like a hammock and holds her and rolls her over so that they're belly to belly, basically in the missionary position and sort of cradles her there. And then he inserts these two special little fins that he has sort of at the base of his tail that slot into that pouch. And he delivers his sperm packet. And then he very gently lays her back down. And that's it. That's the sex. But then for the next few days, he will guard the front of that den while her new shell is hardening. And then when she's ready, she stands up, says, thank you very much, leaves the den.

25:35They probably never see each other again. And then the next female will arrive at his doorstep and start spraying him the face with her pee. And the whole thing repeats. It's like marine erotica, kind of. So, right, you go down a lot of rabbit holes when you're writing a book about sex in the sea. And I would never want anyone to look at the history of my computer. I'd be terrified at what they'd like.

26:05so in terms of the role that humans are playing in lobster sex i mean in terms of i guess i should say disrupting um lobster sex like can you explain that sure so the ability for her love potion for her urine to work as a love potion depends on her urine having certain chemical signals, right? And the male having receptors that can receive those signals. And one of the things that we're doing in the ocean through climate change is we're making the oceans more acidic. We're actually changing the fundamental chemistry of seawater. That might scramble the message as it's passing through the seawater.

26:53And we know that more acidic seawater is known to damage certain kinds of receptor cells. It's affecting smell and chemical signaling in many species. So imagine if her love potion didn't work, right? That disrupts the whole strategy that lobster reproduction is based on. And it's not just climate change where this happens, if there's a big pollution event, oil spill or runoff from land, that can change the chemicals signature of water and mask or mess up the ability of animals to detect those scents.

27:34Dive deeper and sex gets even stranger. Fan fin anglerfish live at about 3 ,000 feet below the surface in the pitch black waters. And the males are born without the ability to feed themselves. To survive, he has to find a female fast. Meanwhile, the female, who is ten times bigger than the male, ten times, she lets out a very strong pheromone with which to attract mates to her. So this tiny male is swimming through the black waters, smelling his way to a female. And when he finds her, he gives her a love bite. And this is when things get really weird. the bite itself triggers a whole bunch of chemical reactions and the first is that basically his jawbone starts to dissolve his tissue kind of starts to almost like melt and fuses with her body their circulatory systems entwine and almost all of his internal organs start to dissolve except for his testes.

28:46His testes actually like kick up into like full-blown maturity mode and he starts producing sperm. In the end, he's basically a permanently attached on-demand sperm factory for the female. It's a very efficient system. But this is not the kind of mating strategy that we see on a farm, right? I mean, this is weird. It's really strange. But if we don't know that these kind of strategies exist or how they work, we can't know what kind of impacts we may be having, even in the deep sea. Presumably with the anglerfish, this must have been one of the hardest discoveries to make. And if you don't know that these wild procreation activities are going on, then you can't know when you're impacting them, right?

29:40As humans, we don't know what we don't know. We don't know what we don't know. So I think there's two lessons there. So first is precautionary approach all the time. Assume you might be doing harm and make sure that when you're putting a new behavior or new activity into place that you're proving no harm. In many places on land, if you're going to put up a development or you're going to allow industry to come in and do some sort of extractive activity, they have to do an environmental impact assessment. They have to show they're not going to hurt endangered species or disrupt the ecosystem. We don't tend to do that in the ocean.

30:20And some of that is because we think the oceans are endless and abundant forever. Now we know that's not the case. So taking a precautionary approach is really important. And correcting some behaviors that we know we've gotten wrong. So So things like fishing on spawning aggregations. So again, for fish who release their sperm and eggs into the water, many of them form these annual, amazing, huge sex parties, right? They're like giant orgies. And you'll have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of fish that will all gather in one place at one time. Often it's like a full moon party.

30:58They do it. They love the full moon. There's reasons for that. But big full moon sex party. and while they're reproducing, let them reproduce. That's not a good time to come in and fish. It's easy, right? For the fishers, it's easy because they can catch a lot of the biggest fish all at once. But you're tapping into the principle rather than taking the interest, right? You're actually cutting off the ability of that population to make more fish for you for the next year. Do you use these examples and sort of the same sort of sexy language about fish? Like when you're talking to people who are overfishing or people who might be polluting the oceans?