Ocean Conservationist Enric Sala’s Lifelong Search for ‘Pristine Seas’

Enric Sala, the renowned Girona, Catalonia born-and-raised oceanographer,  marine conservationist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, hadn’t intended to seize the spotlight during a Zoom call last week with TV reviewers, but there it was.

Sala’s documentary Pristine Seas: The Power of Protection, a semi-biographical account of his lifelong campaign to persuade world leaders to set aside vast stretches of ocean as marine protection zones,  makes its global debut Monday on NatGeo WILD. 

And while other marine researchers and National Geographic filmmakers were in on the call, when someone asked Sala if the oceans are in as much trouble as some scientists — Sala included — say they are, he rose to the bait.

“Just last week there was a scientific study that shows the ocean has become really noisy, because of our activities,” Sala said. “Seismic testing and boats and the noise from ports — all the noise we are making underwater — is making it very, very difficult for whales and other creatures in the ocean to be able to communicate, to be able to reproduce, to be able to survive. Our impact is huge.”

Sala grew up on Spain’s Costa Brava coast, where he developed a lifelong passion for the sea. He earned a Bachelor of Science (Biology) from the University of Barcelona, and followed that with a Ph.D in ecology from the University of Aix-Marseille in France.

He went on to become a professor in his own right, taught at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. Five years later, he moved back to Spain, where he was appointed director of marine conservation and ecology — the first person to hold that post — for Spain’s National Council for Scientific Research (CSIC).

Sala felt unfulfilled though. While at Scripps he established the Scripps’ Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation. 

“What I was doing was simply writing the obituary of the ocean,” he says now. He felt he  needed to do more.

He changed course, and became a crusader for the environment rather than a witness after-the-fact. He was inspired in  large part by National Geographic Explorer Mike Fay’s groundbreaking MegaTransect of the Congo Basin in 1998 and ‘99 — an expedition that took Fay 465 days to cut his way through 3,200 kms (2,000 miles) of equatorial rainforest.

The distance covered and the discoveries made along the way wasn’t what struck Sala, though.

What struck Sala was that Fay’s expedition convinced then-president Omar Bongo of Gabon to establish 13 national parks. It wasn’t just about adventure, in other words. It was about conserving what was left.

Sala thought, why not do the same for the world’s oceans?

Sala was named a National Geographic Fellow in 2008, where he initiated the Pristine Seas project, a global program to explore, map, document and protect the last wild places in the ocean.

His partner in the project, James Cameron (yes, that James Cameron), was appointed a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence in 2011. Since then the two have campaigned hard on behalf of the world’s oceans.

Fast-forward 10 years. To date, the Pristine Seas initiative has helped establish 6 million square kms (2.3 million square miles) of marine protected area. That may seem a lot  but it is by no means enough, Sala says.

“Today, only seven percent of the ocean worldwide is protected from fishing, oil, drilling, mining and other damaging activities. The science is telling us we need at least 30%  of the ocean protected by 2030.

“The good news is that we know that when we give space to the ocean, the ocean comes back spectacularly, marine life returns. The ocean has this amazing resilience, this amazing ability to come back.

“In the last ten years, as you can see with our Pristine Seas film, we have worked with local communities and governments to protect 23 of the largest marine areas in the ocean, covering twice the size of India. And some of these places are still pristine, (which means) you jump in the water and you are immediately surrounded by sharks.

“Other areas are not so pristine. But we see that after a few years, fish and other species can come back. We don't have enough of the ocean protected, but what we have seen in the last ten years gives us hope.”

Pieonane/Pixabay

---

Moonstruck: Hunting Under a Full Moon

“It’s a beautiful story, a very clear example of how the presence or absence of the moon can have fundamental, ecosystem-level impacts.”

— Davide Dominoni, University of Glasgow

On the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, lunar science is still capable of surprise. Moonlight, as Science News reported this past weekend, shapes how many animals move, behave and plant the seeds for future generations. 

Just one example: Twice a month, from March through August — right now, in other words — hundreds of thousands of California grunion, silvery sardine lookalikes, beach themselves in the sand late at night and plant their eggs, which will hatch 10 days later. The incoming tide will wash the hatchlings out to sea, and their new home. The mating ritual is timed to the tides, with the hatching coinciding with the peak high tide, every two weeks.

As science now knows, the ultimate force choreographing this dance is the moon.

Another example: lions.

On the other side of the world, in Botswana, nature filmmakers and National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence Beverly Joubert and Dereck Joubert noted years ago how lions become more active under the full moon. Under the light of a full moon, lions even going as far as to tackle elephants — who are more comfortable in daylight — if they’re hungry enough and desperate enough, and if they sense an opportunity for the taking. The Jouberts were the first explorers to capture their strange find on film.

Hyenas are active at night, too, all the more so under a full moon, as the Jouberts recounted in their 1997 book Hunting with the Moon: The Lions of Savuti, one of the classics of African wildlife photography.  

True, it’s no surprise to scientists who study lions in the Serengeti — or anyone else, for that matter — that lions are more active at night, especially under a full moon. Cats are nocturnal, for the most part, after all.

What behavioural science has found interesting of late, though, is how the lions’ prey respond to the ever-changing threat at night, as the moon waxes

and wanes.

A 2016 study that involved some 200 camera traps over an area the size of Los Angeles found that wildebeest avoid places where lions are known to congregate on the darkest nights, when there is little moonlight to see by.

Another prey animal, the buffalo, were shown to huddle in ever larger herds on the darkest nights.

Different species, the researchers found, make different risk assessments, depending on the changing light, and modify their behaviour accordingly. (The study findings, co-authored by University of Minnesota ecologist and lion expert Dr. Craig Packer, were published in the science journal Ecology Letters in 2017. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ele.12832)

There’s more, too. The light of the moon influences the movement of the annual migrations in the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem. River crossings, which take place in daylight for the most part, have been known to occur on nights when there is a full moon to see by.

Behavioural scientists are constantly looking to find a human connection — whether the moon affects such human triggers as 

emotion and aggression, aside from that which is the stuff of Hollywood movies. That said, behavioural ecologist Davide Dominoni, of Scotland’s University of Glasgow, cautions against jumping to easy-to-reach conclusions.

“It’s really hard to find definitive answers because most of the studies are correlational,” he told Science News.

A correlation could be real, or due to some other factor — a common mistake in “junk science,” which seeks to find a human connection where there may be none. Until scientific researchers come up with a way to determine with hard evidence how the moon affects human behaviour one way or the other, it will remain the stuff of fevered speculation.

---