530: A Living Highlighter
Transcript from 530: A Living Highlighter with Steve Haddock, Christopher White, and Elecia White.
EW (00:00:06):
Welcome to Embedded. I am Elecia White, alongside Christopher White. Well, let us see. I have finally achieved my dream of conning a jellyfish scientist to come onto the show and talk to me about the innovations in technology needed to study jellyfish.
(00:00:25):
But you know we are just going to talk about jellyfish. And eelpout. Do you know eelpout are a thing? Disco clams. It is going to be so exciting. We are going to talk to Steve Haddock.
CW (00:00:37):
Welcome Steve. I do not know that you know what you have gotten yourself into.
SH (00:00:41):
I know. I did not agree to this. What is going on here?
CW (00:00:43):
<laugh>
EW (00:00:45):
Could you tell us about yourself, as if we met at the lunch table at MBARI?
SH (00:00:52):
I am, I guess in short, a marine biologist. I really like gelatinous organisms. So actually the other things that are not technically jellyfish, but other things like comb jellies, siphonophores, and all of the alien looking creatures of the deep ocean especially and the open ocean. I study their genetics and how they make bioluminescence.
EW (00:01:22):
You recently wrote a book?
SH (00:01:24):
Yes. We recently- With my co-author Sönke Johnsen, we created a coffee table book that is called "The Radiant Sea." Which it is basically trying to trick people into learning some science, by showing them pretty pictures and then having captions next to them that describe what is going on in the picture.
EW (00:01:47):
It is so effective. I read half the captions to Christopher.
SH (00:01:53):
That is funny. I wonder which ones.
EW (00:01:57):
We want to do lightning rounds, so we get to know you a little bit better.
SH (00:01:59):
Okay.
EW (00:02:01):
This means we will ask you pretty fast questions and want short answers. This lightning round is going to be focused on which of these things is the best. Are you ready?
SH (00:02:11):
Ready.
CW (00:02:15):
Disco snails or disco clams?
SH (00:02:19):
Disco clams.
EW (00:02:21):
Oarfish or Mola mola?
SH (00:02:24):
Oh no. Do not make me choose. I am going to have to go Mola mola.
CW (00:02:30):
West dorm or Case dorm?
SH (00:02:32):
Case dorm.
EW (00:02:34):
Photosynthesis in giant clams or in jellyfish?
SH (00:02:39):
Oh, boy. Jellyfish.
EW (00:02:42):
It is a hard question, is it not?
SH (00:02:43):
Yes. These are all...
CW (00:02:46):
Excuse me. I have not read this one. Nitrogen-fixing organelles in marine bi-
EW (00:02:50):
Bigelowii.
CW (00:02:52):
Bigelowii. Right, right. Sorry. I tried to read that as "biology." Nitrogen fixing organelles in marine bigelowii, or using the GFP as a visual marker of medical gene therapy.
SH (00:03:02):
GFP 100%.
EW (00:03:04):
Reading neat factoids from a book to your spouse, or being the spouse who receives the facts?
SH (00:03:11):
I am afraid I am the one who is reading them, but I would enjoy being the one who receives them.
EW (00:03:18):
Me too. Me too!
CW (00:03:22):
That sounds like some sort of accusation.
SH (00:03:24):
Take a note, Chris.
CW (00:03:25):
Octopus or whale?
SH (00:03:27):
Octopus.
EW (00:03:29):
Eelpout or giraffe?
SH (00:03:32):
Eelpout.
CW (00:03:32):
Bioluminescence or transparency or chromatophores in animals?
SH (00:03:38):
Bioluminescence.
EW (00:03:40):
All right. All right
CW (00:03:41):
Favorite fictional robot?
SH (00:03:44):
Favorite fictional robot. I am a "Star Wars" guy, so BB-8 I think is pretty amazing. But K-2SO from "Rogue One" I think is probably the funniest. And IG-88 is pretty amazing. But yeah, I guess if I have to choose one, BB-8 is kind of a classic for its uniqueness.
CW (00:04:09):
All right.
EW (00:04:11):
Do you have a tip everyone should know?
SH (00:04:13):
Oh, I have a lot of tips. Use floating time zones in your calendar when you make an appointment, so you do not show up to the airport 12 hours early.
EW (00:04:24):
<laugh>
SH (00:04:24):
Learn- <laugh> Yes, there is a story behind that.
(00:04:30):
Learn how to tie a slippery sheet bend or slippery bowline, as opposed to a regular bowline.
EW (00:04:41):
It is pronounced "bolen," not "bowline"?
SH (00:04:43):
"Bolen," yeah. It is very maritime. Bosun, "bolen."
(00:04:47):
In a terminal window, if you open and then a period, it will pop open that window in your Mac GUI. If you are making-
EW (00:05:00):
To look at previous commands?
CW (00:05:02):
No, no. To open a file.
SH (00:05:03):
Just open a window in your GUI, in your browser, that corresponds to the terminal window that you are in. It will open the folder that you are working in. Anyway.
(00:05:14):
And also making waffles with soda water makes them really fluffy and crispy.
EW (00:05:25):
Like tempura. Hmm.
SH (00:05:28):
Yeah.
EW (00:05:28):
These are good tips. I feel like we could just do a tip show.
CW (00:05:31):
<laugh>
SH (00:05:34):
<laugh> I love tips.
EW (00:05:36):
Okay. Let us talk about your book, because I have been very excited about it. And, because this is audio only, I am going to need you to describe all the photos in the book.
CW (00:05:46):
<laugh>
SH (00:05:47):
Okay. A word is worth a thousand pictures. Are you going to ask another question, or do you want me to answer that one now? Describe all the photos in the book? One thing about the photos in the book is that they are no CGI. They are all living animals, so they are in good shape. That alone, I think makes them unique in the domain of books about the deep sea.
CW (00:06:16):
Really?
SH (00:06:16):
Because if you have ever seen a live deep sea organism, you immediately recognize that most of the pictures in the books are dead specimens. Their eyes have turned milky white. Their jaws torn halfway off. Their skin is peeled away.
(00:06:32):
They look basically like roadkill. I always think of it like if you had a book about the wildlife of Africa, and it was a zebra that had been hit by a Land Rover and tire tracks across its back. That is what a lot of the depictions of deep sea animals are like. So this book is kind of an antidote to that.
EW (00:07:01):
Because jellyfish are hard to get to the surface intact.
SH (00:07:04):
Absolutely. Yeah.
EW (00:07:06):
They do not really come up in the nets so well.
SH (00:07:11):
That is all very true. So most of the people that I know- Practically all the people I know who study jellyfish, are also photographers. Because you do not have the luxury of just throwing it in a jar and I will look at it later when I get back to the museum. They are basically live.
(00:07:28):
If you get them up with the submarine, which is what we do, or for the scuba diving, they are alive for a short window of time, unfortunately. So you document them, and what they look like and what their internal structures are, by taking photographs of them.
EW (00:07:47):
Your book has many jellyfish photographs. But it has also got larval eels and octopus and-
CW (00:07:57):
Squids.
EW (00:07:58):
All kinds of- Yeah, the squids.
SH (00:07:59):
Yeah, the squid.
EW (00:08:00):
Unlike my other jellyfish books and octopus books- Yes, those are all plural folks. This one is organized differently. It is not organized by animal. Or these are the jellyfish, these are the comb jellies, and they are not really the same animal. It is organized around their function?
SH (00:08:27):
Kind of around how they play with light. We divided it- Because both of us study light. Sönke works a lot on structural colors, like black pigmentation, transparency. And I work a lot on bioluminescence and fluorescence.
(00:08:43):
So we organized the book around optical properties of animals and kind of optical- The way they hack their optical environment, essentially. So we have transparency, we have pigmentation. We have iridescence, which is structural colors. And then we have bioluminescence and fluorescence.
(00:09:08):
What is kind of funny is that some animals appear in practically every chapter. They have examples of interesting transparency, and parts of them are pigmented, and they are also bioluminescent. So there are a few featured creatures that show up in each section.
EW (00:09:29):
What started your interest in bioluminescence?
SH (00:09:34):
I think everybody who experiences it is somewhat fascinated by it, to some extent. I was just lucky. So I went to Harvey Mudd. I feel like we should do our secret handshake.
EW (00:09:50):
<singing> M-I-C-K-E-Y.
CW (00:09:52):
No, it is not M-I-C-K-E-Y. That is "Mickey."
EW (00:09:53):
Oh, wait, no. Right. H-A-R-V-E-Y.
SH (00:09:57):
Cue the sound of secret handshake taking place.
EW (00:10:00):
Being messed up. <laugh>
SH (00:10:03):
But I had a biology professor there who was a really influential person. He basically recognized that I was the annoying student who was always asking questions in class. So he encouraged me to go to grad school with some of his former colleagues at UC Santa Barbara.
(00:10:21):
The team there- I worked with Professor Case who studied bioluminescence. Another guy studied deep sea. Another woman, Alice Aldridge, studied open ocean ecosystems through scuba diving. So I just got really immersed in it from the get-go.
(00:10:46):
There are so many unanswered questions about bioluminescence, that it is just a really fruitful field to be able to explore.
EW (00:10:55):
Like, why cannot we make lights more like jellyfish and squid do? Why do we have to be so inefficient with our electricity?
SH (00:11:02):
Yeah. Well. Actually, LEDs. People often email me. They are like, "Oh yeah, we want to make a bioluminescent streetlight, or lamps around the house that are organisms." And it is actually way, way more efficient to use an LED.
(00:11:20):
Because if you use an organism, you basically have to keep it alive and happy and growing and well fed and in a controlled environment. Just the energy to do that, I think is more than the energy of the light that you would get out. But having said that, for the animals themselves, it is incredibly efficient.
(00:11:44):
Imagine something a millimeter long communicating to something that is maybe, I do not know, 2,000 times larger than it, and at a distance of a kilometer. Proportionally to its body size, it is really light is the only way that you can send a signal like that, if you are something small living in the dark ocean. So it is a really efficient process.
EW (00:12:17):
Would not- Sound transmits so much better in the ocean.
SH (00:12:20):
Sound transmits further. It is not directional. It is not traceable to a discrete point. And it is also really hard to generate sound. So the things that do it- If you are a squishy jellyfish, you do not really have a structure that is going to allow you to make sound.
(00:12:37):
You need either a gas filled float or hard surfaces. Like snapping shrimp actually cause cavitation with their claws. Rubbing your legs together like a grasshopper or something like that. Or a whale. So most invertebrates do not have anything that can produce those sound waves.
EW (00:13:02):
And so they chose light.
SH (00:13:04):
Yeah. Or light chose them. Many, many times through evolution, at least probably a hundred times.
EW (00:13:11):
It is so improbable. And light also requires eyes, which even Darwin said, "Well, that is kind of the weakness in my theory here, is that eyes are just so improbable."
SH (00:13:26):
Yeah.
CW (00:13:27):
The better question is, "Why we do not produce light?
SH (00:13:30):
Yeah, I know. We think we are so special, and that these are primitive organisms like jellyfish. And yet birds and all of these glorious creatures of the land cannot do something so simple, that a jellyfish and thousands of other ocean creatures can do it.
(00:13:46):
But yeah. I have shifted my thoughts about the evolution, because like you said, the eyes have to come first for it to really function well. People think, "Well, jellyfish are bioluminescent, therefore it must be this primitive thing." But actually it must have evolved after all the visual predators evolved, and all these visual interactions happened in the ocean.
(00:14:10):
So it is really interesting to think about how potentially recent and widespread the evolution is, at least in the ocean.
EW (00:14:20):
You have been doing this for a couple of decades.
SH (00:14:22):
Yeah.
EW (00:14:24):
More than two, less than ten.
SH (00:14:27):
Correct. Thank you for your discretion.
EW (00:14:33):
How has the technology to study jellyfish changed over that time? I mean, we have ROVs now and they just wander around. People watch them for amusement value.
SH (00:14:44):
Yeah. No, it has changed immensely in that time, between even when I started and now. Let alone a century ago, when people were studying bioluminescence in the early days.
(00:14:55):
But probably the two biggest revolutions are the imaging, which is driven by the thirst for consumer electronics. But when I started, we had these intensified cameras that- They were 640 by 480. The photons would hit a phosphor and cause an electron cascade. So they were incredibly noisy.
(00:15:25):
You would get these grainy black and white images, low res images, of bioluminescence. That was the only way we could document it.
(00:15:33):
Now we have cameras that we actually take down in our subs, on our ROVs. They have 4K full color low light capability, that is not quite as good as the human eye, but it is getting there. It allows you to capture things that previously you could only see with your naked eye.
(00:15:56):
So that is the one. The other is really the genomics revolution.
EW (00:16:01):
With the cameras and the bioluminescence, you said low light, but are you still showing a flash to them? Or? How are you actually seeing the creatures?
SH (00:16:13):
When we take our low light camera down there, we crank up the ISO. We crank up the sensitivity to like 80,000, maybe 60,000 ISO.
EW (00:16:26):
What? Wait. 80,000, 60,000 ISO?
SH (00:16:30):
Yeah.
EW (00:16:31):
I can buy 400 ISO film, at like fast.
CW (00:16:35):
DSLRs go quite high now too.
EW (00:16:36):
Oh, okay.
SH (00:16:36):
Yeah.
CW (00:16:36):
Yeah, yeah. It is a digital thing.
SH (00:16:39):
DSLRs probably go to like 12,000 and start to get noisy. And maybe 25. But these 4K cameras can- Canon even has one that I think goes to 500,000, but it is only HD. So there is a Sony camera that goes 4K, and we shoot at about 80,000.
(00:16:58):
We turn all the lights off on the ROV, except we have some dimmable LEDs, red LEDs, and we put that on the lowest setting. We can drive around with just very barest amount of red light shining out and find the animals.
(00:17:18):
Then we actually- We have different ways to stimulate them. I still want to make- Maybe one of your listeners can help me with this. But I still want to make an underwater horn that I can honk, like a buzzer, to startle the animals to make their flash of light.
CW (00:17:35):
Have we got the past guest to hook you up with?
EW (00:17:38):
<laugh>
SH (00:17:38):
Oh, really? I seriously want to follow up.
CW (00:17:40):
The people from the African animal studies who-
EW (00:17:43):
Meredith Palmer.
CW (00:17:43):
Who play back animals at the animals, and differing sounds of the animals, to see if they scare them.
EW (00:17:49):
<laugh>
SH (00:17:50):
So I need that, that can work underwater to 4,000 meters depth. But what we do now is we have a paintbrush in our robotic arm that we stick out next to the camera, and we brush the animal with this paintbrush. It does not really damage it, but it stimulates it to cause its bioluminescent flashes.
(00:18:10):
Or we just hover there with the ROV. This ROV, the size of a sport utility vehicle, looking at an organism that is maybe like two centimeters long. The pilots are really incredible. So we just hover there next to it, until it gets spooked and swims away and makes a flash.
(00:18:29):
Some of the pictures in the book are actually frame grabs from the videos that we have gotten with the subs.
CW (00:18:38):
That disparity never occurred to me. That the ROVs are so big, and you are studying a lot of times animals that are so tiny.
SH (00:18:44):
Yeah.
CW (00:18:44):
It must be just a really difficult job to follow or find, and then hold position and stuff. Oh wow.
SH (00:18:53):
They love it when I come out, because it is like- They are used to just going on the sea floor and picking up things that they can see. When I come out, it is like, "I want that invisible thing that is smaller than a pea. And can you please put that in the sampler for me?"
EW (00:19:06):
You said red light, which these animals probably cannot see, because they are deep underwater and red light does not go down there. Would you not use blue or white light, like angler fish do?
SH (00:19:21):
Well, we are not trying to attract them or lure them. We are just trying to see where they are. So by using red light, it gives us the ability to have the animal in the frame and still see the blue bioluminescent light in front of it. We can actually choose either to drop that red channel out of the video and just see the bioluminescence, or leave it in to give you some context.
(00:19:44):
But we are using it like night vision, to find the animals. Actually there are some classic stories of deep sea fish that have their own red lights that only they can see, and they swim around hunting prey using this-
EW (00:20:01):
Flashlight?
SH (00:20:02):
Special invisible, yeah, flashlight right under their eye.
EW (00:20:05):
Deep sea animals are really weird, right? I say that as a very biased, prejudiced, bigoted land animal.
SH (00:20:14):
In some ways, I feel like the aliens of Hollywood are so much less creative than actual life. Because they are bilaterally symmetrical. They have kind of a head thing. They have eye looking things, and arm-like appendages.
(00:20:29):
And then in the deep sea, all the rules are just thrown out, and things do not have to have any kind of familiarity in their body. So they are alien. But on the other hand, they have been in the ocean for millions of years, and they probably outnumber us. So they could be thought to be the norm. And we are really the exception.
EW (00:20:53):
"Oh, look at those cute little humans. They only have two arms and two legs. How do they get by like that?"
SH (00:21:00):
Yeah. And they all look the same.
EW (00:21:02):
They do not glow. It is just sad.
SH (00:21:05):
Yeah.
CW (00:21:05):
Look how not squishy they are. I do not know.
EW (00:21:09):
<laugh>
SH (00:21:10):
Well, the other aspect of that is that we think, "Wow, they are living in this extreme environment." But to them, our environment-
CW (00:21:19):
Is like Venus.
SH (00:21:20):
Think about the temperature fluctuations that we experience in a day. And in the deep sea, it is like 1.9 degrees. Tomorrow's forecast, 1.9 degrees.
EW (00:21:31):
Still dark.
SH (00:21:32):
Still dark.
CW (00:21:34):
Never mind. It is much less humid here.
SH (00:21:36):
Yeah. The humidity is what gets you.
EW (00:21:42):
Does the constant and low temperature help with the camera noise?
SH (00:21:47):
Maybe a little bit. It still, I think, gets hot inside the housing, but we do have a little bit of heat sink ability. They are in these titanium cylinders, and so there would be some heat transfer going to the outside. But I do not think the sensor itself is cooled in particular.
EW (00:22:09):
I started to ask you about describing the book, but do you have a couple of favorite photographs?
SH (00:22:17):
Yeah. One of them is a frame grab. It is a picture of this arrow worm, that has just done an escape response where it swims in a circle. Each time it pulses its fins to swim, it creates a vortex ring of illuminated particles. So you see this ring of little- Kind of like smoke rings of light.
(00:22:45):
That one is special to me just- Partly because it looks cool. But also that is my first big discovery as a grad student, when I saw that out the back of a submarine with my eye. Then I spent years literally trying to figure out what I had seen. To be able to film that and show it to other people is really special.
(00:23:06):
Even a lot of the iridescent jellies that are just so- It is not something that ever is seen in their environment, because it is these rainbow patterns that are across the bell of the jelly, that are only caused because I have a white strobe light shining on it to interact with it. And that would never happen in its environment.
(00:23:28):
But some of those are just- I think the colors are just so vivid and so beautiful. So I feel like the function of those is to just get people to appreciate these jellies more.
(00:23:40):
And I had a lot of fun taking pictures of soap bubbles on our kitchen table, basically. I created this setup. I went to our makerspace and I cut some white acrylic to use as a diffusing dome across the top of it. And then I had our son blowing soap bubbles basically in a little chamber.
(00:24:04):
I shot literally probably 2,000 pictures of soap bubbles, of which we used one in the book. But those just look like planets. They look like Jupiter or something. I do not know. Some of the squid shots are really pretty special to me.
EW (00:24:26):
One of the squid sections really caught my attention, because they can- We think about squid being able to ink things. But they can choose- I do not know if it is by species or they can choose choose, to output, shoot ink, black or bioluminescent.
(00:24:54):
The bioluminescent would convince someone that they were still there, and the black would convince someone that they were not there? How does that all work?
SH (00:25:03):
Yeah. Well, some of the animals we see, they have two different escape reactions. Or two different phenomena, that one seems to be meant to work in the daylight, and one to be meant to work in the darkness.
(00:25:17):
So like you mentioned, things like a- They call them a pseudomorph, a false body. So if an octopus or squid shoots out an ink cloud, often it is like a skinny ink cloud for a skinny squid, and a puffy cloud for a puffy round squid.
CW (00:25:33):
Oh. Interesting.
SH (00:25:35):
So they will shoot out ink. It may have some noxious chemicals in it as well. But really its function is they are going to swim away, and leave you looking at this cloud and thinking that is the organism still there.
(00:25:48):
The bioluminescent, that kind of display with bioluminescence actually is super common. There are worms that do it. There are jellies that do it. There are shrimp that do it. Squid. Fish even. They will shoot out a big cloud of ink, and then they will just skedaddle away, so that the predator, the potential predator, is totally distracted by this glowing target.
EW (00:26:14):
So this would be like me glitter bombing a mugger.
SH (00:26:17):
Yeah. Same exact thing.
CW (00:26:19):
<laugh>
EW (00:26:21):
I have not finished the bioluminescent and fluorescent sections.
SH (00:26:25):
Okay.
EW (00:26:26):
But I did read all of the transparency. Including seeing the picture where you have one that is in a black background and you can see the creature. But then there is another one that is in a blue water area, of the same eel. And it is just not there. I mean, it is barely there.
(00:26:50):
How do we know these things exist and are not just made up?
SH (00:26:54):
Well, yeah. When we collect things with blue water scuba diving- That is when we go out in the open ocean, it is just like blue in every direction that you look. You are surrounded by creatures, but you do not see them.
(00:27:08):
And then when I- I take a lot of people on their first blue water dive, because it is kind of an obscure method. But often they are like, "Oh, there is nothing down here." But then you start focusing on your hand in front of your face and you see, "Wow, wait, I am surrounded by transparent creatures."
(00:27:24):
So what we do is sometimes if you are on a blue water dive with me, I will just be staring at you with a vacuous look on my face. It is because I am using you as a black background to highlight the animal. So you are basically a black backdrop for me.
(00:27:41):
And then we also look back up at the sun, so that sun coming through the transparent animals can give them away. But oftentimes you will see something with the sun out there. You will reach down to get your jar to collect it. You look back up and it is gone. You just cannot find it again.
(00:28:02):
Things are really amazing. They put a lot of attention to detail on making themselves completely clear, especially in the shallow surface waters.
EW (00:28:15):
I liked the idea that if I was transparent, and I did not want someone to eat me because I had eaten something that glowed, I needed to have my stomach be basically mirrored. So that people did not eat me so that they could eat my lunch, which would be bad.
SH (00:28:34):
Yep. Yeah. So things try to be totally transparent. But for example, you cannot make your eyes transparent. Your eyes function by absorbing light. So they automatically have to pull light out from the path.
(00:28:49):
So things will do all kinds of crazy things with putting silvery surfaces around their eyes. They will put bioluminescent light shining out below their eye to reproduce, mask out the silhouette. It is called counterillumination.
(00:29:05):
And there are some really fun squid, that they rotate their eye so that their light organ is always pointing down. So we see them swimming upward in the water, their eyes pointing horizontal. It is like a plumb bob or something. And then they rotate their body swimming down. Their eye is completely horizontal still, in that same orientation.
(00:29:25):
So the eye and the stomach are two things where organisms will compromise their transparency, because it is just too risky to be totally clear in your stomach.
EW (00:29:41):
Especially if you are eating the little light emitting copepods.
SH (00:29:44):
To your prey. Yeah.
EW (00:29:45):
Yeah. How much of what you have studied over your career, has an application in human technology? We mentioned GFP for medical.
SH (00:30:00):
Yeah. If it is a granting agency that I am talking to, then all of it, pretty much has.
EW (00:30:05):
<laugh> Everything.
SH (00:30:08):
No. Yeah. We do have the advantage in this field, that both the bioluminescent and the fluorescent molecules, and the genes associated with them that organisms have come up with, end up being incredibly useful for biotechnology, biomedical. Because you basically have a living highlighter.
(00:30:32):
You have a system that, "I want the nervous system to light up, or I want the nervous system to become fluorescent in this organism that I am studying." "Well, put a gene from a jellyfish in there and you can achieve it."
(00:30:45):
Or the example that we always give, but it is true, is that studying cancer, if you want to study the treatment and see if a tumor is growing or shrinking. You do not necessarily have to sacrifice a little experimental mouse, and cut it open and look inside of it to measure the tumor. If you make that tumor glow, you can actually visualize it in the live organism.
(00:31:17):
The same properties that make it a magical thing for the organisms in their life, also make it a very powerful, magical tool for technology.
EW (00:31:27):
Bioluminescence is when I create light, and fluorescence is when I take light and reflect it later, or reflect it into a different color?
SH (00:31:41):
Yeah. It is not quite a reflection. But it is like an absorbing and reemitting that happens pretty much instantaneously.
EW (00:31:50):
Oh, it is not like storing it later, like radium does for watch dials?
SH (00:31:55):
No.
CW (00:31:56):
Well, radium is radioactivity.
EW (00:31:59):
Yeah.
SH (00:31:59):
Yeah.
CW (00:32:00):
It is just emitting.
EW (00:32:01):
The later, fake radium.
CW (00:32:03):
Oh. Glow in the dark paint?
EW (00:32:04):
Glow in the dark paint.
CW (00:32:05):
Okay.
EW (00:32:05):
Thank you.
SH (00:32:09):
You could have fluorescent phosphors that are excited by radioactivity. Actually I have a little demo box of fluorescent minerals and rocks and stuff. One of the things in there is this uranium glass that they used to make. "Look at this pretty china that has got a greenish tint to it," but it is saturated with uranium. That stuff is also fluorescent.
(00:32:33):
There are close associations between all kinds of electromagnetic interactions that happen.
(00:32:39):
Fluorescence, basically, it is like a pigment that converts light to a different color, instead of just absorbing light out of the environment. The power of fluorescence is that it lets organisms be brightly colored in a blue monochromatic environment, if that makes sense.
(00:33:01):
Because if you only use pigments, you can just absorb light. You can just be different shades of blue down there. If you have fluorescence, suddenly you have this whole palette of colors that you can exhibit.
(00:33:15):
The one thing about fluorescence though, is that you cannot turn it off and on. It is basically built in. You could maybe shutter it, but I do not know of any examples of things that shutter their fluorescence.
(00:33:27):
Bioluminescence, you can kind of store it up and release that light energy when you need it. And you can control how bright it is and make it glow. But yeah, fluorescence is just going to have a brightly pigmented flag on your body, if the lighting conditions are right.
EW (00:33:51):
But are chromatophores not basically pigments you can open and close? Why would there not be fluorescent chromatophores?
SH (00:34:02):
Um. There could be, but-
EW (00:34:03):
But we have not found them yet.
SH (00:34:05):
Nobody has thought of it yet, as far as I know.
CW (00:34:08):
Does anything take advantage of birefringence, the kinds of thin film or thin defraction kind of things?
SH (00:34:15):
Yeah. That is all the iridescence chapter, is where we lump all the structural type phenomena in there. The disco clam that you mentioned at the beginning, that is a structural color.
(00:34:29):
A good example is the blue ring octopus. It has these bright blue rings on its body, that warns you that it is a venomous species. The blue rings are an iridescent structural color. Giant clams-
EW (00:34:49):
Do not pet the blue ring octopus.
SH (00:34:52):
Yes.
EW (00:34:53):
It will go badly for you. Even though it is tiny, it can take you down.
SH (00:34:57):
Yeah. I know. If you look on social media, there are all the pictures of people holding them in their hand like, "Look what I found."
EW (00:35:03):
Wow, that is really going to hurt, if you survive.
SH (00:35:06):
Should go pick up a cone shell instead.
EW (00:35:10):
Sorry. Sorry for the distraction. Well, actually, let me ask you about the disco clams.
CW (00:35:18):
Let me ask you about the disco clams.
EW (00:35:22):
It was all going to come down to this. They provide a white color that is very startlingly white. And it is reflective. It is not bioluminescent. They do not generate any light to go with it. They only react to light surrounding them.
(00:35:39):
They live pretty shallowly or they would not be able to get to all the light, the whole light spectrum. And they have little glass, silicon beads that help them do this retroreflective display. Why?
CW (00:35:59):
<laugh>
SH (00:36:01):
I hope you are not going to ask me with a function. I was afraid you were going there.
EW (00:36:05):
<laugh> They really do look like they have little lightning storms in their mouths.
SH (00:36:10):
Yeah.
EW (00:36:11):
And their mouths are surrounded by small red tentacles. So it is creepy.
SH (00:36:17):
Yeah. No, it is really cool. It looks like a little electric spark is going across. I am going to say we use this out a lot in the book, is that we still do not know. Scientists still do not know why this does that. I am going to use that out for this.
(00:36:37):
You can do a- What is the call a friend thing? And ask Sönke if he has any ideas about it. But basically, I do not know about why those guys do it.
(00:36:48):
Some clams have really cool lures, that they inject their larvae into fish's mouths. They lure them over, and then they inject their larvae and they temporarily parasitize them. I do not think anything like that is happening.
CW (00:37:04):
Nothing in science fiction that deep sea animals have not done. And it is all horrible. You were saying they are so different. The word that comes to mind sometimes is Lovecraftian. Yeah. Okay.
SH (00:37:18):
Oh yeah. I could tell you about the ones that hollow out the other organisms and lay their eggs around this-
CW (00:37:24):
I guess there are land animals that do that sort of thing too.
EW (00:37:26):
Wasps.
SH (00:37:28):
Yeah. Yep. There are some pictures in the book of this big amphipod that basically does that. And you can see the little babies crawling around inside the barrel of its host.
EW (00:37:41):
As you just said, the book notes that science does not know how some things are done. It is like you are setting up open problems in biochemistry. Has anyone taken you up on that? Has anybody said, "Oh, I saw this in the book and will you be my PhD advisor?"
SH (00:38:02):
I have gotten grad student inquiries. I basically was really lucky. I just hired a biochemistry technician who is full-time going through the list of mysteries, and trying to solve the hows of some of these bioluminescent creatures that we found, or we just do not even know the first thing about the chemistry of their light emission.
(00:38:26):
I think the two big areas of questions, one is the how, so the chemistry. But the other is the why, which you alluded to before. We do have some experiments that have shown some of the whys. But a lot of those are just stories that we make up. "This seems plausible. It looks like this might be functioning in this way."
(00:38:49):
But as you might imagine, it is pretty hard to do experiments to demonstrate natural behaviors in the deep sea.
CW (00:38:58):
Let me ask you a slightly different question, that you also may divert from. All these strange to us things like transparency, bioluminescence, fluorescence, they must come at some cost to the creature, right? Nothing is free.
(00:39:15):
Why is it not a transparent creature that can flash things and do all? Why does it not have all the functions? There must be some cost. So what is the thinking on, "Okay, well, if I become a transparent creature, what am I giving up or what becomes difficult?"
SH (00:39:31):
Yeah. I think surprisingly, you might think that fluorescence or bioluminescence would be the most costly, in the sense that you are talking about. But I think transparency actually is one of them that requires the most commitment in a way.
(00:39:47):
Because if you look in "Finding Nemo," they have the big angler fish character in there and its eyes are milky white. The reason they are milky white is because it is a dead fish. The proteins in its lenses have become denatured and turned- Basically just like a hard boiled egg goes from clear to white. That has pretty much happened to their eyes.
(00:40:14):
It takes energy and organization at the cellular level and the subcellular level to keep things transparent. So probably one of the things you are giving up is musculature. You just cannot be like a big slab of tuna and be transparent at the same time.
(00:40:34):
But there is also a lot of energy invested, I think, in the chemicals that produce bioluminescent light. For some things, it is pretty much like the emergency flare last resort thing, it seems like.
(00:40:50):
I have seen jellies, like little comb jellies, and the poor thing was bioluminescing. It was exuding out its bioluminescent material in a cloud, and its whole body was just shrinking at the same time. It was giving its all literally to make this bioluminescent display. They have good regeneration capabilities, but I think this little guy was just not going to recover from that, because it had invested so much energy just in that emergency.
CW (00:41:22):
Oh, interesting. Okay. So they are ones where they can store it up and then use it. But then either it is damaging to them to do it too much, or they have to wait a long time before they can try to escape something.
SH (00:41:34):
Yeah. They hold it in reserve. They are usually careful about when they flash. That is partly why they are not flashing all the time, because they are saving it for the right occasions.
EW (00:41:48):
It seems like iridescence and the using molecular or very small structure to augment or produce colors, is probably the least investment evolutionarily. Do you agree with that?
SH (00:42:12):
Energetically, maybe. But as far as subtlety and organization and precision, it is probably the most. Because those plates in the iridescent structures on a squid, they have to be aligned to within the nanometer really, to function in the way that they are supposed to. Yeah, once you have it built, you are probably getting a free ride. But up to that point, it can easily go wrong.
(00:42:46):
There are a couple- I think I had both pictures in the book. But there is a picture of a shiny silvery looking deep sea fish. And when I was shooting that guy, it would go from brown, just drab brown, to shiny bluish silver between shots, basically because of the angle of the strobe and the angle of the camera. That iridescence, it had to be such a precise relationship, in order for that to even show up.
EW (00:43:18):
You mentioned that comb jellies, which have the rainbow around them that we see at aquariums and whatnot, do not actually have anything under the water, because that is all about reflecting light.
SH (00:43:34):
Yeah. It is like a soap bubble sort of, or- I do not know if people are probably old enough to remember compact disc and DVDs. But basically like the fine grooves in a diffraction grading. That when ctenophores basically have a whole series of those plates along their body, and it makes these incredible rainbows that flicker and flutter along the side of their body.
(00:44:01):
But none of that really happens in their environment. They never are in that pure white light to really have that show up. But they are also bioluminescent in those same places. Under those comb rows are canals that have bioluminescent proteins, photo proteins. So they can produce bright flashes of blue light.
(00:44:28):
When you get to the bioluminescence chapter, you will see some examples of ctenophore bioluminescence, where it is like these radial mesh patterns and really, really cool displays.
EW (00:44:42):
One of the things that surprised me, that was in the iridescent chapter, was the vantablack. That it is an iridescent sort of feature. It is a structural molecular way of shining the light inside you, so it does not come out, was how I described it. Is that right? Or how would you describe blacker than black?
SH (00:45:10):
I am blacker than black. How much more black could it be? Yeah. So when we take pictures of some of these black fish, like the dragonfish and the angler fish, they just suck in the light of your strobe. It is really hard to get good illumination, which is my excuse for some of those pictures in the book, where it is like, "Yeah, you can see the face, but the rest of the body just fades off into the distance."
(00:45:33):
What Sönke studied, how they achieve that. I think in short, instead of just having a sheet of pigment, like a piece of black paper or something, where it has one chance to absorb light, but otherwise it can potentially bounce off.
(00:45:51):
In those fish, their pigment is in a gumball machine, or a bag of marbles or something. So light goes in there and it bounces off one of those pigment, has a chance to be absorbed. And instead of coming right back out and being seen, it goes and hits another gumball and hits another gumball. So it has multiple chances. It gets trapped in this pocket of pigmentation, so that there are many more opportunities for it to be absorbed.
(00:46:25):
It is actually vantablack does not work underwater, unfortunately, because it is these nanotubes. So it is pretty much a water repellent surface. But if we could make a vantablack version that uses the same deep sea fish technology, so to speak, then I think it would be really neat. It would be a really useful product.
EW (00:46:51):
But this super black actually did have an interesting why. It was a very, "Oh yeah. Okay, that makes sense." Angler fish need to be super black, blacker than black, because of their lure. They cannot reflect upon themselves, or it gives the whole game away.
SH (00:47:18):
Right. They would just be lighting themselves up. It is like the guy looking for his keys under the streetlight. It is like, "Why are you looking? Did you drop them here?" He is like, "No, I dropped them over there, but the lighting is better over here."
(00:47:29):
So yeah, with the fish, it is the same kind of thing, where they have to have that light out to attract prey, but they do not want to just be shining that light on their face. They want to come looming out of the darkness and surprise their prey.
EW (00:47:46):
You have mentioned that some of these images are from ROV video captures. How many of them are from a human in the water with the camera?
SH (00:47:58):
So there are, I would say, three types of photos. So some of them are from the ROV video. Some of them are from scuba diving, person in the water with the camera.
(00:48:08):
The majority of them actually are animals that we have collected from the deep sea, but then brought up to the ship to photograph. So a lot of them are things that are captive specimens, still alive, but not in their actual environment.
EW (00:48:28):
I have a couple of listener questions. The first one from Nick, which probably should have been a lightning round question. "Have you ever played games with an octopus?"
SH (00:48:42):
I have played games with octopus and squid. I did up at Friday Harbor, Washington in the Puget Sound. I did a scuba dive, and there was a giant Pacific octopus that was under a rock. I took my glove off even though the water is freezing cold. I just could not resist wiggling my finger next to it and it put its giant suckers on top of my hands.
(00:49:11):
And then also in Mexico on a night dive, we were studying creatures down there. There was this whole wall of these "jumbo squid" they are called, Dosidicus diablo rojo. They are as big as a human adult. They are like five or six feet long.
(00:49:34):
Their tentacles- Their suckers are lined with teeth. So it is a disc. It looks like a normal sucker, but it has a serrated edge to it. So if you just lay it on your arm-
EW (00:49:40):
Cookie cutters.
SH (00:49:43):
Well, kind of, yeah. They leave little bloody welts along your arm. But anyway, we saw all these and we would have- If we turn off your flashlight, they would come towards you and investigate. And then if you turn your light on, they would swim away.
(00:50:00):
One time I turned my light on too late, so it shot out its tentacles towards my hand, and then swam away. But yeah, there are a lot of really cool deep sea squid that are fun to interact with.
EW (00:50:18):
You said a night dive, and you have talked about blue water diving, which is out in the middle of nowhere. No islands, no continental shelf nearby. Do you do night time and blue water diving? That seems like a good way to get lost in the middle of the ocean.
SH (00:50:37):
Yeah. We have tethers when we are doing this, but that is basically called blackwater diving. There is a whole tourism industry, especially in Hawaii, the Philippines, Florida. People go out and they pay money to be dropped in the ocean in the darkness.
(00:50:54):
Some of the really great photography that you will see is blackwater photography, because things vertically migrate.
EW (00:51:04):
Because all those deep water things come up. Yeah.
SH (00:51:06):
Yeah. There is a lot of migration. So a lot of the larval fish pictures in the book were taken by my friend Jeff Milisen, who is a blackwater guide. I think there are two or three pages in a row, that are just all Jeff's photos of these amazing larval fish that he took during blackwater dives.
(00:51:24):
The squid on the cover is one that I saw on a blackwater dive. It has got really cool transparency, but also these pigment spots that would contract and dilate as its mantle pulsed.
EW (00:51:43):
From Simon, "Are there any, or what are the best cooperative behaviors or emergent effects of jellyfish blooms?
SH (00:51:54):
Interesting.
EW (00:51:55):
Do jellyfish work together?
SH (00:51:58):
They do not work together per se, but they are often found together. Part of that is attributable to their life cycle, where they will have a phase in their life that pops off a bunch of baby jellies, and then those guys all drift around and kind of grow up together.
(00:52:16):
And so you get blooms in the bay. I do not know that there is any coordinated- Probably the closest thing is that Bill Hamner was a open ocean ecologist who sort of started blue water diving. He found that they did sun compass navigation. So in this bays, they would all swim the same direction at a certain time, and swim the same direction in the other way a certain time.
EW (00:52:44):
But that is not vertical migration. That is east-west?
SH (00:52:47):
That was horizontal. Yeah. There are ones that vertically migrate, but this was an east-west thing. It was different from what most people had seen.
EW (00:52:56):
Was that related to photosynthesis or just weird?
SH (00:52:59):
Nope. It was not a species that had symbionts. There are some in the lakes in Palau that are swimming up and down to- The thought is that they swim down to get nutrients or basically fertilize their algae, and then they swim up to photosynthesize. They have this vertical migration that is not to avoid predators, which is the usual rationale. But it is to actually nurture and babysit their symbionts, their algal associates.
EW (00:53:31):
So are these jellyfish with algae that they are farming? Or is this algae with jellyfish as their chariots?
SH (00:53:41):
It is mostly the farming. There is one, the upside down jellyfish that is in the Caribbean and in Florida and stuff. I guess it is throughout the tropics. But it lays on its back on the bottom pointing up and it looks just like a plant or a piece of seaweed or something. It basically just spends the whole day sitting there letting its algae photosynthesize for it.
EW (00:54:06):
Okay. So why cannot I glow? Why cannot I photosynthesize? And-
CW (00:54:12):
Why cannot you farm algae?
EW (00:54:14):
That is photosynthesize, basically.
CW (00:54:15):
Okay.
EW (00:54:15):
And why can I not live in the deep sea, where all the other interesting creatures are?
CW (00:54:22):
I can answer the last one.
EW (00:54:23):
Yeah. Let us see. Simon also asked, "Are there any intriguing biomimetic engineering efforts to adopt the jellyfish's way of addressing a problem?"
SH (00:54:36):
There are people who make soft robotics that use jellyfish-like motions for swimming. I think somebody might have even done- So comb jellies are these- It is this other group of organisms that is actually not related to jellyfish. We are more closely related to jellyfish than these things are.
(00:55:03):
But they use these cilia, that cause the iridescence, for locomotion. I think that could be a cool way to make a very maneuverable vehicle, more so than a jellyfish that pulses. Their rotational ability is somewhat limited. Their ability to back up is somewhat limited. But ctenophores can go forward, backwards, spin. I think it would be potentially an interesting avenue for some kind of biomimetic robot.
EW (00:55:38):
But it would have to be water-based. You cannot do that in the air. It would be too heavy.
SH (00:55:43):
Yeah. Maybe if it was helium filled, you could have little thrusters. Basically like a drone.
EW (00:55:49):
Little cilia thrusters. Hmm. I guess they are kind of feathery.
SH (00:55:55):
Yeah.
EW (00:55:56):
All right. All right. I can see it. Oh, I have so many more questions. You wrote a book about scientific blue water diving.
SH (00:56:06):
Yeah.
EW (00:56:06):
And you wrote a book called "Practical Computing for Biologists."
SH (00:56:10):
Yeah.
EW (00:56:12):
Were those books significantly different to write, than "The Radiant Sea"?
SH (00:56:18):
Oh yeah. A thousand percent. "The Radiant Sea," it was definitely a project that we had been talking about for at least ten years, and really laying the groundwork for it for probably 30 years each. Accumulating photographs and just knowledge of what the organisms were doing.
(00:56:43):
"Practical Computing" was written with my friend Casey Dunn. It was kind of inspired. Our education at Harvey Mudd College is very eclectic, and you have to study a lot of different disciplines. But then I become a marine biologist afterwards, but I still was standing on the shoulders of that education.
(00:57:10):
My friend Casey and I both had a computing background, and we saw how understanding just relatively simple things- We always say that it is like the 10% of the knowledge that will get you 90% of the way. We wanted to create this book to lower the barrier of entry for people who are biologists, and just empower them to use computing more efficiently.
(00:57:39):
It is definitely not a purist's guide to Python's programming or syntax or shell operations. But it is a very practical approach of like, "This will get you partway there, and it will teach you enough that you can learn the rest of the way yourself."
(00:58:00):
The most common reaction to people saying that they have that book is that, "I wish I had known about this last year, before I did this super tedious project, that I could have programmed my way out of it." So yeah, it was very different.
(00:58:15):
It was actually honestly a lot harder to write, because we had to create screenshots of all the interface, and write all the programs and double check them, and do the syntax highlighting. That was a multi-year project.
(00:58:35):
"The Radiant Sea" book came together relatively quickly, I would say. Because we had already gathered the information over the time.
EW (00:58:46):
I have been talking to another author, commiserating about the difficulty of finishing technical books.
SH (00:58:56):
Yeah. Well, you wrote two at least technical books, right?
EW (00:59:01):
Yeah. It was his first and he is almost done, and he hates everything about it. Which is a normal stage in the book writing process.
(00:59:09):
But "The Radiant Sea" did not feel like that. It felt like you or Sönke had a fun, joyful feeling of sharing the wondrous discoveries and saying, "Hey, look at this! Is this not cool?" Was it like that? Or did you just successfully write amazingly well?
SH (00:59:42):
Well, thank you. But I think it was really like that. It was just a fun thing. And Sönke is funny. We both are kind of irreverent in different ways. He is, I do not know, maybe more like Monty Python or over the top. I am more just deadpan of like, "I am going to say this, and hope that you do not notice that it is not serious, until a little bit later." But yeah, it was just fun.
(01:00:11):
It was very interactive. We would pass the captions and the chapters back and forth, and just have free reign to critique. But it was a lot less pressure to be technically correct.
(01:00:28):
Everything, we made sure it was factually accurate. But we could just say, "Oh, check this thing out. This is really wild. This is something that we saw." Or, "This is something that we experienced." Or, "This picture, look at how amazing this organism looks." It was just much more of a conversational thing to write, than an authoritative textbook.
CW (01:00:57):
I have one more question for you. When you do these dives and explorations, how often have you been surprised by something? And how often have you been actually shocked by something? Not shocked electrically, but like, "Oh my gosh! What is that?"
SH (01:01:13):
Stung by something many times. So on one sense, we go out a lot. We go out pretty much every month to the deep sea. So in a way, it is like going to your local park and you see the scrub jays and the banana slugs or whatever it is. You see the animals that are in your area. So some of them are new to science. They have never been described, but they are still somewhat familiar.
(01:01:46):
And then there is the stuff where it is like, "What in the world?" We just saw this siphonophore, which is kind of jelly. It was just exuding out these plumes of green fluorescent fluid from its- Not its tentacles, but they are called palpons. Anyway, it was just like creating these green plumes.
(01:02:07):
We have seen this one comb jelly that is also a new species. But we saw its feeding response, of how it actually grabs prey with its lobes, which was unlike any other comb jelly. There have been times when everybody just exclaims in the control room, and those are always really super fun.
(01:02:32):
We have seen a jellyfish- We just saw an octopus, where we have only seen it like four times in 30 years. We found that it eats jellyfish. But then we just came upon another one and we opened up its arms and it also had a different species of jellyfish in its arms. So we were all really surprised and delighted to have that confirmed.
(01:03:01):
So yeah, I would say it is pretty regular that everybody is just going, "Wow!" in the control room.
EW (01:03:16):
Were you at MBARI when Davidson Mount was discovered to have an octopus garden?
SH (01:03:25):
Yeah. I was not on that crew. That is Jim Barry's work and the Marine Sanctuary's work. But yeah, that overlapped with the time that I was there. So yeah.
EW (01:03:36):
That was accidental and weird.
SH (01:03:40):
Yeah. Yeah. Accidental and weird. We found- Have not actually still published this yet, but there has been a New York Times article about it. But we found the tusk of a woolly mammoth on the top of a sea mount 3,000 meters deep. So that was probably the most surprising thing I have seen. But yeah, you just never know what you are going to come across.
CW (01:04:05):
Thing that gets me about a lot of the deep sea creatures and things, is that there are so many people obsessed with cryptids like, "Oh, Nessie. Oh, it might be a lost plesiosaur." And, "Sasquatch. Look, it is a giant man-ape thing." The reality of the creatures we keep finding, is so much weirder and more interesting, than any of those things.
EW (01:04:26):
Leatherback turtles are just weird. How is this giant VW sized creature, that is a turtle without a hard shell, survive on jellyfish, which are basically water with-
CW (01:04:39):
Tic tacs.
EW (01:04:39):
Yeah.
SH (01:04:42):
Well, all the giants, the ocean giants, like Mola mola, leatherback turtles, this octopus that I just mentioned is called the giant seven-arm octopus. It is also one of the larger octopus species. They subsist on jellyfish, basically.
(01:05:00):
So it is one strategy, is to be slow moving and have this very sedate life cycle, but persist at it. And so you can grow to big size over time.
EW (01:05:15):
It is the jellyfish version of iceberg lettuce.
SH (01:05:18):
Yeah.
CW (01:05:19):
We do not talk about that now.
EW (01:05:20):
It is a bad time to talk about iceberg lettuce.
SH (01:05:23):
Oh yeah. It gets back to that question of if there is coordinated activity in the jellyfish. Some of the predators depend on that coordination. They depend on there being a giant aggregation of jellyfish to be found, or else they would not be able to find enough prey to feed on. So it is part of the circle of life.
EW (01:05:48):
Do you have a favorite animal?
SH (01:05:50):
I do. It is probably my son.
EW (01:05:53):
<laugh>
SH (01:05:53):
A favorite marine animal? It is really hard to choose, but probably some kind of a comb jelly. Yeah, they are just- I think comb jellies, probably.
CW (01:06:12):
Oh, so pretty.
SH (01:06:13):
Yeah. And just most people do not get to see them, so I just really feel lucky every time we come across- I just gave a talk to some six to ten year olds. I had a live ctenophore that I brought with me from a jar that we had collected.
(01:06:29):
It was just so fun to shine the flashlight on them and let them see the flickering rainbows, and have them all gathered around the table. And these two cool for school boys that were just like, "What? What? Check this out!" So yeah, it is really fun to share them.
EW (01:06:50):
Steve, do you have any thoughts you would like to leave us with?
SH (01:06:54):
I would say there is a whole wonderful world down in the deep ocean. It is not lifeless and it is not grotesque and scary. It is actually worth understanding, studying, and preserving.
EW (01:07:09):
Our guest has been Steve Haddock, author of "The Radiant Sea: Color and Light in the Underwater World." You can find his book wherever you usually find books. It is beautiful. I recommend it.
(01:07:21):
Dr. Haddock is also a senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, and an adjunct professor at the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
CW (01:07:35):
Thanks Steve.
SH (01:07:37):
Thank you guys. That was fun.
EW (01:07:39):
Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you to Scott for the introduction, and our Patreon listener Slack group for their questions. And of course, thank you for listening. You can always contact us at show@embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm, the website where you can find the show notes and the transcript.
(01:08:00):
And now a quote to leave you with. This is actually going to be from Steve's book, "The Radiant Sea." It is in the afterword. There is perhaps an unintentional poem about what visual communication says in the voices of the ocean. "I am here. I want to find you. I am someone else. I think I am in love."