Transcriber: Elena Montrasio Reviewer: John Ockey
Throughout history, great teachers have emerged
to help us with the complicated task of how to be human.
But today,
the enormous challenge that we face
is how to live on this planet without destroying it.
Now, the animals know how to do this,
and through science, they can now teach us.
I'm a field biologist; that's my normal habitat.
I've spent my entire life looking into the water,
trying to figure out what is going on.
I came to this coast to study communication in orca,
and the orca led me to a remote archipelago on the BC coast.
My son jokes that he was raised in an inflatable boat,
(Laughter)
and I am so grateful, to both of my children
for tolerating this very unusual upbringing,
because in the course of the hundreds of hours
that we spent following whales,
I made an unexpected discovery that might help protect their future.
Now, the first whales that I worked with were from this coast,
but they were being held captive at Marineland,
a theme park near Los Angeles.
And every morning, just before dawn,
they did the most extraordinary thing.
They would go up to one spot on the wall of their tank
and squirt water at it.
And that spot was, invariably, where the sun first hit.
Of course, the spot moved through the year,
but the whales always knew where it was going to be.
This behavior was so focused and so intense,
I had to consider the possibility that maybe whales engage in rituals.
Early in my work with wild whales, and before I was a mom,
I was dangerously naive about the ocean.
And one day that I will never forget,
I was following a family of whales that was headed west,
and suddenly, I was lost in the fog.
I had no idea which way to go:
it was like being in a glass of milk.
And to make matters much worse,
my underwater microphone picked up the roar of a cruise ship
entering Blackney Passage, where I was floating.
I could literally feel terror creeping up my body
as I anticipated the bow of that boat
splitting the fog open and rolling over me,
when suddenly, the whales appeared right beside my boat,
and instantly I felt safe.
For the next 30 minutes, I followed them.
Suddenly, we broke out of the fog - I broke out of the fog.
I knew where I was.
I could see that the cruise ship was gone - I'd avoided that.
And I turned to watch the whales come out of the fog, but they never did.
They had apparently turned around
and headed back the other direction again.
I replayed this scenario over and over in my head
because I had a lot of trouble accepting what had just happened.
They had been going west,
I began to panic,
they turned around,
stuck with me until I felt safe again,
and then, apparently, they had headed back
in the same direction they were originally going.
Was this a string of coincidences?
Or did they know that I needed help?
And, if they did, how was that even possible?
So, to accept what I had witnessed -
first, that whales appear to engage in rituals,
and second, they seemed capable of sensing panic in another species
and decide to do something about it -
I had to change my entire worldview.
The separation between animals and humans is actually a continuum.
There is no hard boundary,
and they can teach us so much
but only if we are willing to listen to everything they say,
no matter how extraordinary.
The whales that I was studying ate predominantly salmon,
and so following the orca
meant that I was following and learning about salmon.
And here, on the western edge of the North American continent,
salmon are the masters at the art of thriving.
They are intrical to the whole cycle of life.
When the sun hits the open Pacific waters,
it triggers plankton blooms,
and small fish come and eat the zooplankton,
and then the salmon eat the small fish.
And so, in a sense, they are storing the energy of the sun in their bodies.
Then, at the end of their lives,
they migrate back to the stream where they were born,
and after they've safely buried their eggs in the gravel, they die,
and they release this wealth of nutrients
that they gathered from the open ocean.
On this great migration, the salmon feed over 100 species,
and then, when they die, they feed the trees.
So, trees grow in concentric circles,
and every year they add another growth ring,
and trees on rivers where lots of salmon return
have bigger growth rings than trees that are far from salmon
or even in years when there's fewer salmon.
So trees fed by salmon
are sequestering the carbon and releasing oxygen.
As the salmon thrive, the world around them thrives.
Following whales raised a lot of questions,
as you can imagine,
and one of them was,
During the months when there was lots of salmon on this coast,
why did they keep moving?
Why didn't they just stay in one place, relax and feast on the salmon?
Well, the evidence suggests
that the whales learned not to overfeed in any one area,
because they might deplete the resource that they depended on.
So, in a sense, the salmon taught the whales, "Keep moving!"
and as a result, both species thrived.
Salmon had the same lesson for the first people on this coast.
The message was inescapable:
"Kill off all the salmon in the river, you threaten the future of your tribe."
This is exactly the problem we face today.
We are killing the ecosystems
that produce the clean air, water, and food that we require to survive.
Because we've lost contact with nature,
we're no longer getting the direct feedback
that we clearly need to learn how to behave.
We're flying blind,
wrecking the ecosystems that we depend on.
When I first arrived in the Broughton archipelago,
on the BC coast, in 1984,
there had been a hundred years of logging damage,
and the commercial salmon fleet was getting bigger and more aggressive.
But despite this, the salmon were so resilient,
such masters at thriving,
that they were still coming back in huge numbers.
But then we crossed a line.
In 1987, the first salmon farm moved in.
With them came bacterial outbreaks
that began killing the native coho in the nearby hatchery.
The big-farm salmon populations attracted seals,
and the salmon farmers tried shooting them.
But when that didn't work, because there were just too many seals,
they deployed high-amplitude sound machines
to try to chase the seals away with pain.
The unintended consequence of that was that the whales left.
Whales see with sound; their ears are like our eyes.
And they were not going to risk their hearing, and so they fled.
I watched the A clan Northern Resident orca
abandon a territory
that had probably been theirs for 10,000 years.
And that was 24 years ago.
In 2007, I co-authored a paper in the Journal of Science,
predicting the collapse of the pink salmon of the Broughton archipelago
due to sea lice from salmon farms.
And this year,
1/10th of 1% of those fish returned.
What does 1/10th of 1% look like?
Looks like starving bears, swimming desperately island to island,
knowing that if they don't find a stream that still has salmon,
they are going to die this winter during hibernation.
So for 30 years, I did everything I could think of.
I went from studying whales to studying sea lice and studying viruses.
My research has found
that the majority of farm salmon on this coast
are infected with the newly discovered piscine orthoreo virus.
It's a blood virus from the Atlantic Ocean,
and when it infects our Chinook salmon,
it appears to cause their red blood cells to rupture,
causing liver damage, organ failure, and, ultimately, death.
The immune system of all animals
is a very powerful instrument.
As a scientist, a mother, and a grandmother,
I had to ask,
"Can we figure out
how to live on this planet without destroying it?"
Well, as it turns out,
I believe that the wisdom of salmon is what we need.
If you look
at the immune system of an animal,
they can deal with everything that happens:
disease, temperature change, pollution, stress.
And it does this
by up- or down-regulating specific genes,
which trigger proteins to go deal with the situation.
Reading immune systems, which genes are up and down,
is called genomic profiling.
And this is a planet-wide language shared by the cells of all animals.
For example, a salmon's immune system,
fighting a virus in the influenza family,
is configured in a very similar way
to a human immune system fighting an influenza virus.
The salmon gets mucus on their gills; we get mucus in our lungs.
Reading immune systems
would be something like looking at a person put on a bug hat,
apply bug spray and pick up a fly swatter.
That would be a pretty good indicator
that they were going to fight a bug, not a bear.
Similarly, if we read the immune system of salmon
and look at what tools that immune system is picking up,
i.e. which genes are turned on and off,
we can get a pretty good idea of what the salmon's dealing with.
Is it a virus, is it a bacteria, high water temperature,
low oxygen, starvation and so on?
This means that by taking a tiny, non-lethal sample from the salmon,
they can report to us what we're doing to the ocean.
How? Well, they migrate thousands of miles,
from the remote headwaters of the rivers where they're born,
past our small towns, our farms, our industrial outfalls, our big cities,
and on out into the open Pacific Ocean.
And if we check in with them all along this migration route,
they can give us a readout on what we're doing to them,
to most of the North Eastern Pacific Ocean
and, ultimately, ourselves.
So my goal is to make people aware
that if we look at where the immune systems of salmon
are blinking warning lights
on this migration through our civilization,
we can use that information to strategically get in there
and just start fixing the problems.
We don't need to guess about what we're doing wrong.
They can tell us.
And we plug back into that direct feedback
that we require to learn how to thrive,
making sure that the world around us thrives.
What I'm describing here is not to suggest that human activity stop,
but simply that we adopt a teacher
that knows how to do what we don't know how to do
and what is really threatening our entire civilization.
The companies, large companies
are going to have to eliminate
toxic waste.
Cities will have to reinvent sewage disposal.
Anybody on antibiotic or birth control drugs,
you're going to have to put a filter in your toilet.
The agricultural industry
is going to have to step away from pesticides that kill off life,
and of course, we have to drastically reduce the burning of fossil fuels.
All of this is going to be a struggle, but if we get it right,
the kids get to survive.
(Applause)
So restoring salmon is part of fighting climate change.
As more salmon return to this coast,
because we're reading their immune systems,
because we're finding the problems and we're fixing it with their help,
as more of them return, the forests will start to breathe more deeply,
drawing down that carbon that is threatening our civilization
and releasing the oxygen that we cannot survive without.
Instead of looking at the mountain, or the river, or the forest
and calculating how much we could make by taking it apart and selling the pieces,
we could instead turn our minds to how to work with it,
how to dovetail into those natural systems,
these powerful ecosystems that not only made us
but are keeping us alive.
And we are required to learn to work with those systems
if we are going to continue to survive as a species on this planet.
The salmon are vanishing.
This year was the lowest wild salmon return in the history of Canada,
but if we pick up the powerful tool of genomic profiling,
the fish can not only direct their restoration,
but they can become our teacher.
And we can learn how to thrive on this planet
and allow the planet around us to thrive
by becoming the best animal that we can be.
Thank you.
(Applause)