Welcome to Sentivia

Okay, let me tell you a bit about myself. I'm a marine biologist, first and foremost, but I'm also an explorer and a photographer, working with National Geographic. It's a pretty amazing gig, but I'm here to let you in on a little secret – what we often see in pictures, especially those stunning, vibrant mermaid images, isn’t really how the ocean *actually* appears. I mean, those pictures are totally incorrect, and I apologize if I've just shattered some childhood fantasies.

The reality is, if you’ve ever been diving, you know the ocean is essentially a massive filter. The deeper you go, the more the colors disappear and everything quickly turns a dark blue. Us humans, being terrestrial mammals with trichromatic vision, are just addicted to color – we see and crave red, green, and blue. We like things to be eye-popping, and we have a tendency to try to bring that vibrancy underwater with us.

This fascination has a long, slightly embarrassing history. It all started almost a century ago, with guys like Bill Longley and Charles Martin. They were trying to capture the first color photograph underwater, using old-school scuba gear, with an insane setup involving a *pontoon* of high-explosive magnesium powder. Can you imagine? They’d wait for the perfect focus, and then – boom! – a pound of explosives would go off, just to get enough light for an image like that gorgeous hogfish picture. Sure, it’s a beautiful photo, but it's not real at all. They're artificially creating an environment just to satisfy our need for those bright colors.

What I've discovered is that the actual marvel isn’t how we can artificially make the ocean more vibrant. It's that if you look at the blue ocean as it is, you see something absolutely incredible. It's a crucible of blue, and the animals living there, for millions of years, have evolved ways to take in that blue light and give off *other* colors. It’s like a secret, underwater light show. We're seeing the blue light hit these animals and they're immediately transforming it.

Think about it – the ocean makes up 71% of our planet. Blue light goes down almost 1000 meters, but once you go down about 10 meters, all the red disappears. So anything that’s red, deeper than 10 meters, means it’s an animal transforming and making its own red light. It’s the largest single monochromatic, blue environment we know of.

My journey into this world of biofluorescence started with corals. Honestly, I could do a whole TED Talk just on corals and how incredibly cool they are. One of their amazing feats is that they produce these fluorescent molecules, proteins, which can actually make up about 14% of their body mass! That's a huge investment, so there must be a very functional reason. And this, it turns out, has been a huge breakthrough. For the last 10-15 years, this molecule has become one of the most revolutionary tools in biomedical science because it lets us see inside of ourselves so much better.

Now, how do I actually study all of this? Well, I have to swim at night! Initially, I was just using blue duct tape filters over my strobe lights, to make sure I was seeing *real* transformed light from the animals. It was a bit of a clumsy system, but it worked.

We were working on an exhibit for the Museum of Natural History, focusing on fluorescent corals, when we made a discovery that just blew my mind: we saw a green fluorescent fish right in the middle of our corals. It was the first time we'd ever seen a green fluorescent fish, or any vertebrate for that matter. It was an eel, and it was real. This discovery changed everything. I had to set aside the corals and team up with a fish scientist, John Sparks. We began a worldwide search to figure out just how common this phenomenon was.

Fish, I have to say, turned out to be far more interesting than corals, because they have much more advanced vision. Some fish even have lenses in their eyes that magnify the fluorescence! So, we designed new equipment, and we scoured reefs around the world, looking for any sign of fluorescent life. It's kind of like "E.T. phone home" - we're out there swimming with blue lights, looking for a response.

We found our photobombing Kaupichphys eel. These guys are super shy and reclusive, tiny, only about the size of your finger. They spend almost all their time hidden, but they come out on full-moon nights to mate, which, of course, is just blue light underwater. Perhaps they are using this as a method to see each other and find each other in this blue world.

From there, we started finding all sorts of other fluorescent marine life: green fluorescent bream with these bright racing stripes, red fluorescent scorpionfish that blend in perfectly with red algae, and green fluorescent lizardfish – whose differences become apparent only under fluorescent light. In total, we found over 200 species of biofluorescent fish.

I'm inspired by the work of Jean Painlevé, a French artist and biologist, who embodies the creative spirit of biology. He designed his own gear and was fascinated with seahorses. He even shocked himself to capture the moment a seahorse gave birth. It made me wish I could have shown him our footage of biofluorescent seahorses.

Things got exciting when we found green fluorescence in stingrays! Stingrays are related to sharks, so I thought, "Okay, someone's gotta see if sharks are fluorescent." That someone ended up being me, which felt a bit crazy at first, and I almost went back to the corals! Eventually, we found the first biofluorescent swellshark, right off the coast of California. They're only about a meter long, they can blow up like an inner tube, and they have these amazing patterns of fluorescence, some areas brighter than others.

Of course, the next question is, what does this mean for the shark? Can it even see this? Well, we worked with an eye specialist, Ellis Loew, and found out that this shark sees in the blue-green interface, probably about 100 times better than us in the dark. It is taking that blue world and making green and creating contrast that they can see! It allows them to see these patterns, and there might be distinct patterns between males and females as well!

Finally, just a few miles from here in the Solomon Islands, while swimming at night, we found the very first biofluorescent sea turtle, specifically, a hawksbill turtle. Now, it's gone from fish and sharks into reptiles. It shows us how much more there is to learn, and we have to protect these animals while they are still here so that we can continue to learn from them!

We also needed to understand the depth of biofluorescence. So, we used submarines with special blue lights, and we discovered that below 1000 meters, there’s almost no biofluorescence. Instead, it's the bioluminescent zone, where animals make their own light. I've even used my one person submarine suit – it's my Jacques Cousteau meets Woody Allen moment – to explore this zone more. I've really become fascinated with how we interact with the oceans in a delicate way since most of our exploration techniques aren't gentle. So, I'm working with Rob Wood at Harvard, on squishy, robot fingers, that can be used to interact gently with marine life in order to study them.

Back to powerful applications of all of this: we're using the fluorescent proteins from marine creatures to illuminate living brains and see their connections. And even more mind-blowing, a colleague of mine has engineered a fluorescent protein that can see voltage and even track when a single neuron fires. We are literally looking at a portal into consciousness that came from marine creatures.

It brings me back to perspective and interconnectedness. Our universe looks like a human brain cell from space, and in the deep ocean, we’re finding marine creatures that can illuminate the human mind. My hope is that with our own illuminated minds, we can see how interconnected everything is and see just how much more there is to learn, if we can just keep our oceans healthy.