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Welcome to World Ocean Radio…
I’m Peter Neill, Director of the World Ocean Observatory.
My day is shaped by my inbox, steady receipt of a gratifying number of messages, projects, reports, and exhortations from ocean organizations and advocates from around the world. It is a privileged onslaught, sometimes overwhelming by its fulsome information and aspiration, both encouraging and hopeful in a time of much mis-information and despair. A recent example was entitled “A Forgotten Element in the Blue Economy: Marine Biomimetics and Inspiration from the Deep Sea,” authored by Robert Blasiak, from the Stockholm Resilience Center in Sweden, and a fascinating team of colleagues, and contributed to PNAS, a scientific journal published by Oxford University Press for the US National Academy of Science. It caught my attention as a provocative perspective and creative framework for response in the moment.
The Abstract reads as follows: “The morphology, physiology, and behavior of marine organisms have been a valuable source of inspiration for solving conceptual and design problems. Here, we introduce the rich and rapidly expanding field of marine biomimetics, and identify if as a poorly articulated and often over-looked element of the ocean economy associated with substantial monetary benefits… We contend that marine biomimetics is not only a “forgotten” sector of the marine economy, but has the potential to drive appreciation of non-monetary values, conservation, and stewardship, making it well-aligned with notions of a sustainable blue economy.”
The article identifies seven broad categories of biomimetic design: adhesion, anti-fouling, armor, buoyancy, movement, sensory, and stealth. Over the next few editions of World Ocean Radio, I propose to discuss each with examples of application and technological invention, illustrating monetary and non-monetary value derived from the close observation of Nature as ocean phenomena, evident as efficient and effective models for response as solution to negative human intervention and climate change and as an additional argument for ocean protection and conservation.
The article continues: Ocean exploration in recent decades has resulted in the discovery of deep-sea ecosystems where species have adapted to thrive under extremes of salinity, pressure, light, and temperature, including hydrothermal vents and brine pools The potential for future discovery is vast: half of the ocean reaches depths of 4,000 m or more, only 20% of the seabed has been mapped, and 70% to 90% of marine species remain undescribed Real-time feeds from unmanned deep-sea submersibles outfitted with the latest camera equipment are now freely available with thousands of people around the world sharing the experience of seeing unmapped parts of the seafloor and seamounts and unknown species for the first time. Museums around the world are filled with specimens and collections of deep-sea life, and thousands of genetic sequences, and even complete genomes, of deep-sea organisms are freely accessible in online databases.
Recent advances in ocean science and exploration have occurred alongside a dramatic expansion in the scope and diversity of ocean-based activities and industries. Today’s ocean economy encompasses multiple industries that add up to over USD 1.9 trillion revenues annually, including industries as diverse as aquaculture, fisheries, oil and gas, offshore wind, cruise tourism, and marine biotechnology. As the ocean economy has grown, so too has attention to issues of equity and inclusivity, as just 100 companies—mostly headquartered in the Global North—accounted for nearly 60% of the ocean economy in 2018. In line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030, a variety of aspirational narratives have emerged of the ocean as a source of development that is not only sustainable but also equitable and inclusive. This type of ocean economy has been described by some as a “blue economy,” a term that has become widely used in recent years, but which remains without a broadly agreed definition. A complementary narrative of “exploration before exploitation”underscores the loss that could accrue from embracing emerging extractive industries in the ocean, such as mining the seabed for metals and minerals, especially in the deep sea where recovery from impacts is extremely slow or impossible. If mining and hydrocarbon extraction represent one approach to ocean resources, marine biomimetics represents a starkly different paradigm of resource use.
It is this awareness of and exploitation through alternative, non-extractive, non-destructive, pro-sustainability ingenuity that is essential, now, in this time, when the forces of negative regress and entropy hold sway and the positive progress and hopefulness inherent in biomimetic alternatives represents the challenging choice before us.
We will disuss these issues and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.
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