My name is Nancy Knowlton. I'm a marine scientists here at the Smithsonian's National Museum of
Natural History and I study coral reefs and and actually just everything that lives in
the ocean. I've really been interested in science for pretty much as long as I can remember. When I
was in college I was still interested in biology but I didn't actually know the kind of biology I
was interested in and in fact I think my least favorite courses were about the topics I work
on now. But after I graduated from college I spent a year working in the laboratory of Dr.
Ruth Turner. She was a marine biologist, she was the first woman to go down to the
deep sea in Alvin (a very famous submersible) which is actually still used today. She really
inspired me and that's how I went from being a general-purpose biologist to really a committed
marine biologist. I started off doing animal behavior on these tiny little snapping shrimp
that lived with sea anemones. In 1980, Hurricane Allen came and swept by the north coast and really
pulverized all the coral reefs and turned it... it looked like an underwater parking lot after
the hurricane passed through. I really just dropped everything and joined a team of people
to figure out what happened as a result of the hurricane and how the reefs would recover. And
then that really led into a whole stream of work that eventually led to my conservation work today
and that's because those reefs never did recover. When water gets above about one degree centigrade,
or two degrees Fahrenheit, over the normal maximum for the area that symbiotic relationship breaks
down and the corals undergo what's called coral bleaching. If it's severe, and it often is,
it leads to the death of the coral. "And of course the future is also not looking too good especially
under a business-as-usual scenario." I came to realize that just talking about all the bad things
happening to the reefs was not going to really change the conversation in a way that it needed
to be changed. So I started seven years ago and Nancy brought me on to the Ocean Portal team and
took me under her wing. As the threat of climate change is continuing to grow the science that we
do here at the Museum has to evolve at the same time. We have scientists and researchers in the
lab. We're using cutting-edge technology to understand the impact of humans on the oceans.
Then what I do is I take that science and share it with audiences around the world so that they can
understand it. So next-generation sequencing technology is where we sequence millions and
millions of strands of DNA at the same time instead of one at a time. That lets us sequence
thousands and thousands of marine organisms at once and get a picture of the entire community
at once. It's pretty clear that in many cases biodiversity is linked to a healthier ecosystems,
ecosystems that do things that are helpful to humans. Whether it's making fish for us
to eat or cleaning up the pathogens out of the water or filtering water. We really need
to understand why and how these ecosystems are changing and how that might affect humans in
the future. So I went from studying snapping shrimp living with sea anemones to studying
the effects of a hurricane to studying the fact that there were many more species of corals out
there than people realized and that's been the story of my whole career. One discovery leading
to another and almost impossible to predict. And those changes were inspired by things I
saw underwater or events that happened. Makes you wake up every morning and be excited just
by the beauty, in addition to of course, all the cool scientific questions you can ask.