It’s 1969, within the center of the Gulf of California. Above is a blazing scorching sky; under, the blue sea stretches for miles in all instructions, interrupted solely by the presence of an oceanographic analysis ship. Aboard it a person walks to the railing, research the water, pauses to contemplate, then slips over the aspect. That is Invoice Hamner.
On at the present time, Hamner will unknowingly set into movement a collection of occasions that, a number of many years later, will lead to a number of Nationwide Geographic articles, the start of a world vacationer vacation spot, and a basic shift in how scientists take into consideration open ocean biology. However Hamner doesn’t know any of this. At this second, he’s each actually and figuratively treading water. He’s scorching, the deck is sweltering, and he’s trying, desperately, for one thing significant to do together with his profession.
The biologists go about their work as if that is the way it ought to be.
Hamner doesn’t actually belong onboard. An ornithologist by coaching, he has devoted his profession to understanding the internal workings of birds; already he has illuminated a few of the physiological mechanisms that calibrate the breeding cycles of avian our bodies to the solar’s rise and set. He does this ornithology work as an assistant professor on the College of California, Davis, a precious place as a result of it presents the potential of tenure, and tenure means safety for his spouse and two babies. However then Hamner broke out in hives. He began having bronchial asthma assaults. After years of shut contact, he had developed a devastating allergy to birds.
Hamner launched his home finches and starlings and bobolinks. However what would he do subsequent? He tried rising jellyfish and wound up with stinging vats of jelly goo. He tried rising moths as a substitute and ended up with a freezer’s value of rotten apples. Now he was right here, his presence on the expedition a favor from the oceanographer who was operating it, hoping for a clue as to what he may do subsequent.
Throughout his time on board, Hamner has watched his fellow biologists stroll across the deck, deploying big nets with massive steel cranes. The nets sink into the cool deep, the place they’re dragged for hours earlier than being hauled again to the floor. The whole lot inside them is a sloshing, shredded slurry. Not a single animal seems unhurt. The biologists go about their work as if that is the way it ought to be: piecing collectively the lives of ocean animals by selecting by way of buckets containing their literal items.
Actually, that is the best way most marine biology within the open ocean, the vastness past coastal waters, had been performed. Whereas renegades like William Beebe—the primary man to traverse the deep in a submersible—insisted on being within the water, most biologists traveled the ocean on the take away of a vessel’s deck, hauling marine life up for examination. Hamner couldn’t work this fashion.
As we speak, Hamner and his spouse Peggy, who labored alongside him all through his profession, are retired and of their 80s. Although they now dwell removed from the ocean in Northport, Alabama, their house is crammed with sculptures, pictures, and drawings from many years engaged on the water. Reflecting on his motivations, Hamner instructed me, “To review the pure historical past of any animal in its personal setting, one should observe it undisturbed over time.”
He’d been educated as an ornithologist; he had watched birds within the wild and studied them in aviaries. He needed to see the entire dwelling animal. And on that sweltering day within the Gulf of Mexico, he completely needed to get off the frying pan of a ship’s deck.
His face masks safe, Hamner plunged into the ocean and seemed round.
Organisms resembling translucent bowls, which Hamner acknowledged as jellyfish, pulsed by way of the present. Comb jellies formed like stemless wine glasses shimmered with rainbow patterns. Hamner’s eyes settled on rhythmically-beating, barrel-shaped creatures, roughly the dimensions of his hand, which clenched and relaxed just like the valve of a coronary heart. Hamner vaguely acknowledged them, as he had a jar of one thing related again at his lab. It was labeled “salp”: a bunch of invertebrates carefully associated to vertebrates. However this salp was easy and strong, by no means just like the mangled pile of jelly in his jar.
Bruce Robison, a good friend on the expedition, joined him within the water. Robison was a marine biologist by way of and thru—however not like Hamner together with his birds, Robison had spent his profession far faraway from the life he studied, utilizing nets as different marine biologists did. It wasn’t till Hamner got here aboard that somebody thought to leap into the open ocean and immerse themselves on the planet of their research topics.
“There’s this phrase a couple of feeling for the organism,” says Michael Dawson, a marine biologist on the College of California, Merced. “And that’s what Invoice introduced.”
Hamner and Robison noticed a fish hovering within the water, watching them swim. Wanting nearer, they realized that the fish was inside a salp, hiding within the open central chamber whereas the clear barrel beat round it. As if the fish had been additionally an explorer, driving in a salp submarine.
“Robison went again to the ship,” remembers Hamner now, and vowed to throw out his nets. Later he was employed by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Analysis Institute, the place he turned a pioneer of learning midwater ecology with remotely operated automobiles. As for Hamner, he was enthralled. If all that life might be seen slightly below the floor, what else may be on the market? He had discovered one thing new to do together with his life.
When Hamner returned dwelling he instructed his spouse Peggy, who’d all the time needed to be an explorer herself. Peggy had educated as a scientific librarian, however she dropped out after they had been married, following her husband, as most ladies did in these instances. However, like her childhood hero Osa Johnson, she dreamed of trekking by way of jungles and crusing over uncharted waters. Collectively, Invoice and Peggy Hamner hatched a plan: They’d go to as many marine labs as they might, choose the perfect for diving within the open ocean, and develop a way to check life between the ocean floor and the deeps, a area that sailors referred to as the “blue water.”
They ultimately settled on the small Bahamian Island of Bimini, off the coast of Miami, Florida. They recruited a handful of scholars and pooled all the cash they might discover, from pupil scholarships to Nationwide Science Basis grants. Then, with their two younger youngsters in tow, they set off for Bimini.
Issues didn’t begin effectively.
A shark ate my weight belt.
After they arrived they found that there was no room for them within the Lerner Marine Laboratory’s customer housing. In desperation they rented half of a close-by duplex. The Hamners and their youngsters slept in a single room, their college students in one other, with one pupil sleeping beneath eating room chairs so nobody would step on him within the evening. Hamner’s father, who’d accompanied them to assist with childcare, slept on the porch. Finally they moved right into a half-built home with the beams and bricks uncovered. Brief on funds, the scholars would wander to the native sportfishing dock, asking fishers to donate the meat of their catch.
Through the day they loaded a small boat with their SCUBA gear and began experimenting with blue-water diving. This too began poorly. “A shark ate my weight belt,” remembers Alice Alldredge, considered one of Hamner’s former college students. She had dropped the belt and was swimming to fetch it when a shark swam beneath and swallowed it entire. One other shark slammed Peggy Hamner within the again. Sharks, it appeared, had been an issue. The group began carrying lengthy picket sticks on their dives and used them to poke the sharks away.
Slowly, they constructed up a way for blue-water diving. They labored out a way involving a weighted rope anchored to a float and a contraption they referred to as the “trapeze.” All of the divers clipped their very own ropes to the central trapeze, and a security diver floated on the nexus, watching everybody, making certain that nobody obtained tangled or indifferent, or sank too deep or drifted away or obtained attacked by a shark. And since the animals of the open ocean are nearly fully clear, the divers decided that one of the simplest ways to identify floating life was to look barely up, towards the solar, trying to find the shadows creatures made as they handed in entrance of the sunshine.
“Dropping slowly into the clear blue water as the sunshine darkened, and visibility expanded perpetually, made me really feel like an astronaut floating in area,” remembers Peggy Hamner. “Each dive.”
In the future after diving, Invoice Hamner introduced again a jar with a big clear butterfly-like animal inside. He gave it to considered one of his college students, Ron Gilmer, who was learning snails. “Oh my gosh,” Gilmer mentioned, grabbing the jar. “I believe that is Gleba!” Gleba had been, and nonetheless are, among the many open ocean’s most elusive snails. They flap two extensions of their physique, like wings, and have clear crystalline shells that look a bit like glass slippers. Only a few folks have seen one, and nearly nobody has seen one alive. Over the approaching days Gilmer documented wild Gleba for the primary time, and in so doing, found one thing completely surprising.
“They feed with mucus,” he instructed me. “Large balls of mucus.” As they drift, Gleba grasp from the bottom of a giant balloon made out of snail slime. They sail on these till the mucus collects a mass of floating edible particles, at which era the snails slurp the entire thing up, mucus and all. Nobody had ever seen a snail feed this fashion. For days, each time Gilmer went out he watched as entire fields of Gleba drifted by, the water crowded with clear balloons and the butterfly-like snails who flapped beneath them. However then at some point they had been all gone, as in the event that they’d by no means been there.
The Hamners and their college students would go on to explain how open ocean species drift with currents that shortly shift and alter, washing animals in at some point, drawing them out the subsequent. Gilmer would publish his paper on Gleba within the prestigious journal Science, with Hamner insisting that Gilmer, who did a lot of the work, be the only real writer—a generosity that’s just about unparalleled in the present day, the place tutorial tradition calls for that the majority senior scientists add their names to papers even when not significantly concerned. Hamner’s pupil Larry Madin would uncover that salps, these heart-pumping glass barrels, are a few of the ocean’s best feeders. After his time at Bimini, Madin would go on to check salps at Woods Gap Oceanographic Establishment, the place he discovered that salps might export massive quantities of carbon to the deep ocean.
Whereas in Bimini, Alldredge and Invoice Hamner observed a flurry of snow-like particles that all the time appeared to float round them within the blue water. Hamner and Alldredge collected samples, with Hamner even developing a small oven to dry and weigh them. Alldredge would later go on to conduct pioneering analysis on this phenomenon, referred to as marine snow. She would ultimately be inducted into the Nationwide Academies of Science. One other pupil, Neil Swanburg, studied massive comb jellies that floated like Christmas tree ornaments within the water. He went on to check these and different open-ocean organisms, making essential discoveries about their biology and position as open-ocean predators.
Dropping slowly into the clear blue water as the sunshine darkened made me really feel like an astronaut floating in area.
Invoice Hamner was again on observe. He now had a brand new subject of research, profitable papers and grants, and his college students had been changing into specialists in their very own proper. Hamner was supplied tenure at UC Davis on the idea of his work in Bimini and his earlier work with birds. However the time Hamner and Peggy spent at Bimini modified issues. They had been explorers now, and job safety was not as interesting because it had as soon as been. Collectively they determined that Invoice ought to flip down the supply; they traded a steady tutorial life for the lifetime of drifters, similar to the species they studied. They wouldn’t all the time know when and the place their funds would come from, however in alternate for that uncertainty they might discover and journey on the currents of an infinite curiosity.
In Australia, they documented the important significance of floating open-ocean life for coral reefs, and described how open-ocean animals would drift towards shore and be consumed by hungry corals and reef fish. In Palau, they performed the primary research on jellyfish in saltwater lagoons, actually reducing the primary path to the now-celebrated Jellyfish Lake. They introduced alongside a group from Nationwide Geographic who would make that lake’s golden jellies well-known, drawing guests from world wide and spawning an entire trade within the area. In Antarctica, they had been the primary scientists to doc the education conduct of Antarctic krill, diving into large faculties that shifted like starling murmurations round them.
Collectively they gave rise to tutorial fields that produce new generations of scientists yearly, and basically modified the best way we see the open ocean. “He took sampling off ships and coasts and into the blue water of the pelagic ocean,” Dawson just lately instructed a packed viewers on the seventh Worldwide Jellyfish Blooms Symposium, the place he gave a speech honoring the Hamners’ work.
The Hamners dove the place nobody had, minimize trails to locations hardly seen, and swam with a few of the most essential species on Earth, all whereas elevating two youngsters and dwelling year-to-year off what grants they might purchase. In 1988 Hamner was employed as a professor on the College of California, Los Angeles. Now not diving, they’ve now come to relaxation on the College of Alabama, the place they train in an outreach grownup training program: two tenacious, curious, infinitely adventurous scientific visionaries. 
Lead picture by Laurence Madin
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