Featured Thought Leader: Bart Shepherd, Director of Steinhart Aquarium
As the director of Steinhart Aquarium at the California Academy of Sciences, Bart Shepherd bridges two worlds: one where he oversees almost 40,000 live animals on land, and another underwater that few humans have ever seen. Shepherd is a frequent visitor to the Twilight Zone—an area that’s deeper than the range of traditional scuba dives. There, he conducts important research on a rich ecosystem, bringing his knowledge (and some amazing fish) back to the academy. We were fortunate enough to catch him between expeditions, and asked him about the many challenges and rewards of exploring uncharted reefs.
CURIOSITY: I like to ask people whether they're an outer-space person or an ocean person. I'm assuming you're an ocean person—how did that fascination start?
BART SHEPHERD: I'm definitely an ocean person, although I grew up a huge Star Wars fan. I’ve kept fish ever since I was a child. My mom got an aquarium when I was six or seven years old, and we put it in my bedroom. She and I did it together as a project, maintaining it, going to the pet store, picking out the fish.
I also grew up in Virginia Beach, Virginia, right on the ocean and the Chesapeake Bay, so I spent a lot of time playing around in the salt marsh and going fishing and crabbing. I think those were the things that really drove me to become a marine biologist. My whole life, I've had crazy dreams where the difference between air and water has been removed, and fish are just swimming around wherever I am.
C: Right now, you’re doing a lot of work in the “Twilight Zone.” Can you describe that region, and explain why it's so important that we explore it?
BS: That's some of the most interesting and exciting work that I'm doing right now. We're actually prepping to go to Vanuatu, which is near Fiji, to do Twilight Zone work there.
The Twilight Zone is this unexplored region of the ocean that sits just below where recreational scuba diving equipment allows you to go. But it’s shallow enough that there's still much of the coral reef structure there. Back in the ice age, 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, the sea level was much lower and reefs grew [in these areas]. As the water level rose and the planet warmed, the reefs became what we call drowned reefs. They got further and further away from the light, so that the coral couldn't survive and grow anymore, but they left behind this very complex three-dimensional structure that’s filled with all kinds of animals.
I dive with a team of scientists, and half of what we find down there is new. It's very exciting to be able to go down and see places that nobody else has ever looked at. I'm really the public outreach side, and I want to bring those stories, images, and animals to visitors at the academy and to virtual audiences online.
C: What unique challenges do you have to deal with when you’re diving to the Twilight Zone?
BS: Coming back is the hardest part. The challenge is the decompression. On a typical dive, you mess around at the surface for a couple of minutes, making sure your gear is set up, and then you just bomb to the bottom. You rocket down as fast as you can to your working depth, which might be 300 or 400 feet, and you've got 10 or 15 minutes at that depth to do your work. Then you turn around as a team and you start working your way back up.
Depending on how deep you've gone, you can have anywhere from three to four hours of ascent time ahead of you. It’s what we call an obligated decompression, where you have a computer that's telling you how high you can go, and you can't exceed that ceiling. You just work your way up the reef slow. That's tedious! So we try to come up with different things to do on the shallow parts of the dive, just to pass the time.
[See what a trip to the Twilight Zone looks like in this incredible video!]
C: Have you heard of the Aquarius Underwater Lab?
BS: Yeah, of course.
C: That’s amazing to me, that they can live there and not go through the four hours of decompression.
BS: Yeah, exactly, they just do it all at once at the end. I know people who have stayed in that. For us, though, that's not the most interesting part of the reef! I'd love to have one of those labs at 400 feet, so I could go down there for a week.
C: How do you communicate with your team while you’re diving?
BS: We scream at each other underwater. It's funny because we blend our own gas, we're not breathing air. Oxygen becomes toxic at the depth that we're working at, so you have to reduce the amount of oxygen from the 20% we're breathing right now, to maybe 7%. And nitrogen becomes a narcotic [at these depths]. You've maybe heard of nitrogen narcosis, where you go down to 100 feet and start feeling like you did a couple of shots of vodka. We want to make good decisions down there, so we need to take some of the nitrogen out of gas, too.
Then we need to replace the removed oxygen and nitrogen with something else. And we replace it with helium. Typically the gas we breathe on these deep dives is 7–10% oxygen, 70% helium. When you're talking to each other, 1) you have a mouthpiece in your mouth so you can't make any of the lip noises, and 2), you're breathing helium, so you sound very squeaky. And you have to talk loud because you're underwater, so you're screaming at each other in this sort of muffled high-pitched voice. It can be really entertaining, it's fun to watch on video. But at times it's a challenge because you want to tell somebody something and they can’t understand you.
C: That is both hilarious and inconvenient! You've mentioned finding new species and never-before-seen areas on your dives. What are some of the more memorable discoveries that you've made?
BS: We've found a lot of incredibly beautiful fish down there. There are a lot of fish that are in one of my favorite groups, the Anthias, or the fairy basslets. A lot of the fish at that depth are bright orange, red, or pink, because those wavelengths drop out as you go deeper in the water. So if you're a fish that wants to disappear at depth, you’re a color that doesn't exist at depth! They’re really gorgeous, you shine a light on them and you wouldn't believe it. Tell a kid to draw a rainbow fish, and that's what they draw.
On the last two trips in the Philippines, we were targeting one fish in particular called Sacura, and we actually brought back a pair of them alive. We'll get them on display in the coming summer as part of a new exhibit that we're opening here at the academy, and we'll be the first aquarium ever to display that species.
[Get a glimpse of the colorful life in the Twilight Zone.]
C: On that note, you're the director of the Steinhart Aquarium at the academy, and you’ve said that outreach is a passion of yours. What are some outreach strategies that have worked for you?
BS: A lot of it is about the creation of really compelling, rich exhibits that people can lose themselves in. I like to think of Steinhart Aquarium as “gourmet,” you know? It's not your cookie-cutter stuff. Some people might be disappointed that we don’t have piranhas, but we have so much else that you wouldn’t see at your typical public aquarium, and that's what we strive for: doing things that have never been done, showcasing environments and species that people wouldn’t have an opportunity to see anywhere else.
C: Do you have any tips for aquarium-goers everywhere about how they can get the most out of their visit?
BS: Yeah, slow down! Most people, they blow right by the tanks, we see that in visitor surveys and audience tracking. I don't expect people to read everything that we put on the wall, but stopping and looking at the animals for a second longer and trying to observe some of the behaviors … that's the beauty of it! It's not a still photograph that you look at and keep moving. These are dynamic mini-ecosystems, and the animals are interacting with each other and swimming around. Slow down!
C: It’s been established that our oceans are in a lot of trouble. Could you share what conservation efforts are near and dear to you right now?
BS: Coral reefs are probably the ecosystem that's most near and dear to my heart. I work with a group known as SECORE, Sexual Coral Reproduction. It's a group that exploits the way that coral reproduce for conservation purposes. My wife described it to me in way shorter and better terms than I could have: it's essentially in vitro fertilization for corals.
We go out in the wild and put little tents over the tops of the corals, and we collect the sperm and egg bundles that they release during their spawning. Then we fertilize those in the laboratory and grow lots and lots of little baby corals that can be put back out onto reefs in the wild. It's a great approach for buttressing coral populations and restoring reefs, maybe not to what they once were, but to something that still gives us a functional ecosystem.
C: How do you stay curious?
BS: How do you not? There's just so much out there! I definitely have a lot of hobbies, so that helps. I have two young children, and all they do is ask questions, right? So that certainly feeds into it, too. But how do you not stay curious? I think if you're not curious, you're complacent, and I don't want to be that.
Interview conducted by Melanie Kassel