Future Knowledge of Life in Oceans Past

Keynote Speech by Jesse Ausubel
Oceans Past Conference
Kolding, Denmark, 24-27 October 2005

Introduction

Thank you to Poul Holm, Chairman of the History of Marine Animal Populations (HMAP) program, for his generous introduction. Thanks to Anne Marboe and the rest of the HMAP team for the careful and thoughtful work needed for a successful conference. On behalf of the more than 1,700 researchers now involved in the Census of Marine Life, thanks to all of you for coming to Kolding and for the outstanding scholarship that you will present during the next 3 days. Five years ago historical marine ecology scarcely existed. During the next few days, we will hear 75 fresh reports.

My presentation this evening has five parts: 

1. A personal English Prelude
2. An orientation to the Census of Marine Life, 
3. Some of the Limits to Knowledge of historical marine animal populations,
4. A broad historical hypothesis, the Great Reversal, a terrestrial example that will encourage HMAP, and finally
5. Some expectations of the Census of Marine Life for the HMAP program.

An English Prelude

Let me begin with the English prelude. I am always comfortable and happy among historians because my father, whom I liked very much, was a historian. He specialized in 19th century Britain. Every few years, my father would bring the family by transatlantic passenger liner from New York City to Southampton for a long stay to conduct his research. I crossed the North Atlantic by ship 12 times, a rare privilege for someone born in the middle of the 20th century. Since the 1960s, aviation has separated travelers from the power and mystery of the oceans.

Like all visitors to England, my family marveled at cathedrals and castles. Unlike most visitors of the 1950s and 1960s, we also marveled at the cities that manufactured the industrial revolution. We lived for a year in Manchester, when coal smoke still fogged that city. We visited nearby Rochdale, whose streams and canals riveted textile mills whose weavers struck in 1843 for cheaper grain that could come from abroad. We climbed the seven hills of Sheffield carved by the six rivers that powered the wheels that sharpened the steel that made Sheffield famous.

Like many boys, I became fascinated by railroads and maps. I still have some of the maps of Britain I collected. One series compared Britain before and after the Industrial Revolution. Before the Industrial Revolution large green areas on the maps housed fewer than 12 inhabitants per square kilometer. In my mind, this was the world of the castles, of the tales of King Arthur and Robin Hood, of forests and deer, of silk and leather.

The Industrial Revolution shrank the green and extended networks of canals and railroads. This was the world of novelist Charles Dickens and Oliver Twist, of brick and steam, of cities and coal. I found the industrial landscape fascinating, no less fantastic a stage for the imagination than an undisturbed woodland. And the industrial landscape reached around the world. Cotton came from plants sunning in Egypt and India, wool from sheep grazing in Australia, and whole grain and flour from the wheat belt advancing westward across the United States.

The English landscape proved that the history of nature is, or became, the history of human nature. HMAP shows that the seascape, like the English landscape, includes human nature.

The Census of Marine Life

Let me now offer an orientation to the Census of Marine Life. In the late 1990s several leading marine scientists shared their concerns with the Sloan Foundation that humanity’s understanding of what lives in the oceans lagged far behind our desire and need to know.

Some of the scientists emphasized the chance for exciting discoveries about the world in which we live. Much remains to be discovered about the diversity of life in the oceans. For example, ichthyologists have so far identified about 15,000 species of marine fishes. They also believe about 5,000 species of marine fishes remain to be discovered and described. The age of exploration in the oceans is not over.

Other researchers highlighted the importance of establishing baseline information on the distribution of marine life. For most marine animals, we lack reliable maps of their range or distribution.

Still other researchers pointed to the changing abundance of many species and the need for improved management of fisheries and marine reserves. They noted increasing exploitation of largely unsurveyed areas such as the continental slope and sea mounts as well as violent debates about numbers of supposedly well-known species such as cod, tuna, and salmon.

Happily, the diverse scientists converged on a strategy to address their concerns: conduct a worldwide Census whose purpose would be to assess and to explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine life. The founders of the program organized the Census of Marine Life around three grand questions: What did live in the oceans? What does live in the oceans? What will live in the oceans?

From the outset, the founders of the Census recognized that a survey of contemporary marine life would have much more value if compared with historical information. Their first grand question, “What did live in the oceans?”, motivated the HMAP program.

The leaders of the CoML, including Poul Holm, encouraged HMAP to meet three challenges:

1. to create pictures of what lived in the oceans before fishing became important, a time 50 years ago in some areas, 500 in others, and one thousand or more in a few; 
2. to dissect the influence of fishing, habitat loss, climate variability, and other factors on changes in marine animals populations since fishing became important; and
3. to create and make accessible long time series on marine animal populations and related factors so that future researchers could more effectively study why marine animal populations change.

I will expand on these challenges before closing. However, let me first briefly describe the CoML and its status. Recall that the CoML is a decade long program that commenced in 2000 and will include in 2010 with the First Census of Marine Life. We are now about halfway along in time, though in effort the Census will reach much higher peaks during the next 5 years. All the components of the Census have agreed to aim toward the 2010 synthesis. Along with HMAP, the key components of the CoML are its 14 field projects making new observations in diverse realms to address the question What does live in the oceans?, its Future of Marine Animal Populations (FMAP) program addressing the question What will live in the oceans?, and its data assimilation framework, the Ocean Biogeographical Information System (OBIS), which provides both archiving and access. Opportunities for synergy between HMAP and the rest of CoML abound.

HMAP researchers are already integrated with some of the ocean realm field projects, for example, in the Gulf of Maine area. In fact, HMAP researchers made news in 2005 with a cover article in the journal Frontiers in Ecology reconstructing cod populations on the Scotian Shelf using the logbooks of the captains of fishing schooners operating from Beverly, Massachusetts. I wonder whether in the Gulf of Maine region, HMAP researchers might further enhance their cooperation with researchers surveying today to present a seamless past and present for that exemplary region, exploited for 500 years. Both polar regions also offer opportunity for integrating past and present. I wonder whether HMAP’s walrus experts might link with its Arctic team. I wonder whether HMAP’s seabird experts might team with the researchers of the circum-Antarctic Census of Marine Life to document not just two or three but many decades of populations of albatross, of which 19 of 21 species are now endangered. Mention of walruses and birds leads to the global question of whether HMAP experts on top predators, including whales, seals, and turtles, might join with the top predators (“TOPP”) field project to create knowledge that spans long times and wide oceans for these long-lived and far-ranging animals.

Links already exist between the HMAP and FMAP projects, through Heike Lotze and others. HMAP’s millennial studies of the Wadden Sea have adapted analytic tools of the kind that ecologists have developed for prediction, and FMAP researchers have exploited more than 50 years of data on catches of long-line fishermen to learn and forecast trends in diversity, distribution, and abundance of tuna and billfish. Forecasting and backcasting are two sides of a coin, and researchers in HMAP and FMAP are sure to find mutual benefit by sharing data and tools.

HMAP is already a major provider of data to OBIS, which now enables access to about 6.1 million records of 40,000 species, and aims for tens of millions of records for more than 200,000 species. One of HMAP’s great legacies could be digitization of dusty datasets and their integration into larger databases that allow us to perceive patterns over larger areas, longer times, and covering more forms of life. OBIS welcomes the role of helping historians to practice in new ways, and I am confident HMAP’s researchers will seize them.

Everyone involved in the Census, drawing on OBIS, can also thrill one another with new visualizations. In an era when all information is born digital, the CoML has the chance not only to perform analyses and create insights in words and numbers, but to share them in both static and dynamic images. Long appreciative of the power of maps, historians have much to contribute in making the CoML innovative in the forms with which we share what we learn.

Limits to Knowledge

Let me now turn to limits to knowledge. I strongly believe that it helps to understand what you know and why you know what you know, what you do not know but might readily learn, and what it is very very hard to learn or might be unknowable. That is, it helps to understand the limits of knowledge. In the Census we often refer to these limits by speaking of the known, the unknown, and the unknowable. For both producers and consumers of knowledge, knowing what you do not know, like writing terra incognita on a map, can be as valuable as adding detail to lands you have explored. Disclosing the limits to knowledge can also be among the most useful of acts. Such disclosure helps people to choose where to explore, avoid frustration, hedge bets.

The limits that separate knowledge into the known, unknown, and unknowable are numerous and diverse. Like biodiversity, these limits call for taxonomy. Let me offer a taxonomy of limits to knowledge in which I classify the limits into five families: 

1. the vast expanse of the oceans 
2. difficulties encountered when assembling parts into a whole
3. blinders we put on ourselves
4. surprise interventions from outside
5. the invisibility of the lost past

The first family of limits, the vast expanse of the oceans, encompasses physical and practical barriers. It is very hard to see what is far or dark or deep or at high pressure. A fundamental reason that knowledge of marine life remains crude is the impermeability of water to light. The expanse also challenges the timeliness and frequency of observations. Only a few governments regularly send out research vessels to make direct scientific measurements for assessments of stocks. The ships trawl nets whose mesh size matters greatly. They trawl only in a few locations. Their sonars probe only narrow swaths which fish might avoid because of vessel noise or pressure waves. The survey vessels sample a tiny fraction of the sea, mostly near shore and at shallow or a few depths. Technology offers stunning progress in observing marine life, but an ocean observing system that regularly reports a quite complete picture to us is many decades away.

The second family of limits, assembling parts into a whole encompasses both statistical challenges and models. Serious problems mar fisheries statistics. Fishers tend to underreport catches, and commercial activity addresses fished stocks, rather than fish stocks. “By-catch” data are used to fill in estimates of some other species but also suffer biases. In turn, little is known about the validity of the mathematical models used to turn available data into assessments of stocks. For many species, the sparse knowledge of life cycles may limit the realism of models. Models themselves suffer limits of many kinds, including simplification, mathematical forms are used, and errors in describing initial conditions. Few models capture extremely sensitive, non-linear systems where, for example, an ecological regime shifts from dominance of one species to another.

The third limit, the blinders we put on ourselves, stem from economic as well as cultural factors. The agencies that carry out stock surveys, such as the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, have little funding for them and thus obtain small or short samples. Governments in most countries have weak means to verify or rectify the numbers they receive. Disciplinary myopia also causes experts to overlook data. Although by weight microbial life might make up 90% of ocean biomass, researchers largely ignored it until recently. We all bring cultural biases to our work as well that leads us to exclude or discount certain kinds of data and information. Often we know only what someone else is willing to pay for.
A tsunami exemplifies Surprise Interventions from Outside, family 4. A prohibition against fishing would be a surprise intervention by people as surprising to fish as Earth’s surprise of a tsunami. Abrupt changes do from time to time disturb out orderly world.

A fifth family of limits, especially important for HMAP, is the invisibility of the lost past. Some phenomena leave no traces or; or they may have left traces but we cannot find them. It is very hard to reason backwards to what has disappeared. What Jeremy Jackson calls “shifting baselines” may fall into this category of lost in the past. Many are shocked and disbelieving at changes as large as on the Scotian Shelf, where the past cod population may have amounted to 30-50 times today’s. Having forgotten what existed, we simply think something different never existed.

Of course, historians continuously challenge this limit and their ingenuity is what inspires this conference. Historians always challenge the invisibility of the lost past. As Glenn Jones has shown, menus can be as good as gravestones as evidence of past lobster populations. In the papers in the next few days you have found traces about bowhead whales, turtles, sharks, walrus, conchs, octopus, shrimp, oysters, sponges, crabs, many kinds of fish, and several kinds of birds. Even if the animals may be lost in the past their oil, bone, dyes, and fur may survive intact or in records.

I urge HMAP researchers to confront limits. Identifying them openly, you have a better chance to overcome them, or to help other people act wisely when faced with hard limits.

A Hypothesis: The Great Reversal

Let me now return to the environment itself. During the 1980s, I studied long-term trends in use of energy and materials. I learned that the efficiency of use of energy and materials has improved for as long as records are available. A steady increase in the sparing of these resources per unit of output or service provided is normal. In 1992, curious about agriculture, I asked my esteemed colleague, agronomist Paul Waggoner, “How much land can 10 billion people spare for Nature?” By 1996, I began to hypothesize that humanity had reached an inflection point in development about 1970, when the rate of human population growth peaked, allowing improving efficiency to reverse the expansion of cropland in several nations. Seeing expanding forests in several nations and borrowing a phrase from the demographers’ phrase of population transition, geographers now speak of a forest transition. Examples from energy, materials, farming, forestry, and water use, too, suggested that a “Great Reversal” of resources use was underway in several ways.

In the middle of the 20th century, humans began to reverse the pattern they followed for millennia of extending further into nature to meet needs for food and materials. Recognizing this Great Reversal, I and my associates explored the areas in human use for cities, logging, and farming. We searched for principles and trends to forecast land use in the latter part of the 21st century, a world of 10 billion. Offsetting the sprawl of cities, rising yields in farms and forests and changing tastes can release large amounts of land. For example, with growing population and cities, the USA in the next century could still newly spare for nature an area twice the size of Spain. Cutting of forests peaked in the USA in 1906. The volume of both hardwoods and softwoods in standing in US forests has risen steadily since about 1950. In fact, studies of forest biomass for the decade of the 1990s in the boreal and temperate region in more than 50 countries show the forests expanding in every one, in area and/or volume. Globally, a wise and intelligent humanity could extend the Great Reversal into a Great Restoration of nature on land.

What about in the sea? Are a reversal near and a restoration in prospect for fish as it may be for trees? Answering the questions of marine reversal and restoration requires answers to two questions: What does live in the oceans? What did live in the oceans? Here again we come to HMAP. I suspect human use of the oceans is 100 years behind our use of the land. That is, the forest transition or Great Reversal in land use may precede and foreshadow a marine Great Reversal. The evidence of HMAP may reveal the time course of exploitation, including unwise exploitation, of the oceans. HMAP may give a head start of decade and even centuries in anticipating trends, improving as well as declining. Use of overarching hypotheses, such as the Great Reversal on the land, may help HMAP to navigate its work in the sea.

HMAP’s ingenious evidence and its tasks

Speaking of evidence, I want again to remark on the ingenuity of HMAP researchers. Congratulations on discovering new sources of evidence, and also finding new evidence in old sources. Along with menus, HMAP’s evidence includes buttons and bones, logbooks and lore, paintings and pavements, isotopes and ice. HMAP researchers keep extending the limits of knowledge by finding new ways to make the past visible and by lifting blinders that we ourselves had placed.

I like to read early texts of geography and history. Since the start of HMAP I look at such sources with fresh, wide eyes. I expect HMAP researchers will continue to surmount limits by finding more information in traditional sources. Let me briefly mention some indicative ore bodies that might be fruitful to revisit.

Starting earliest, I think of Seneca’s Naturales Quaestiones and his treatises on natural phenomena. Another source might be the chronicles of St Brendan. Brendan is believed to have been born near the present city of Tralee, County Kerry, Ireland, in 484 and died in 577. His Navigatio or wandering was assembled about 300 years later. Some is pure Celtic fantasy, but to me his description of one region as ”curdled ocean” sounds very much like it could be the Sargasso Sea. A fellow Irishman, Dicuil, Hiberniae wrote De Mensura Orbis Terrae, On the Measure of the Earth’s Globe, about 825. It is important for providing the first records of Iceland and the Färoe Islands as well as the Orkneys and Shetlands. Maybe Dicuil is useful for HMAP.

Here in Denmark, I must mention the Graenlendinga Saga (“The Greenlander’s Saga”). The medieval Icelandic chronicles, the Graenlendinga Saga and also Eirik’s Saga, famously offer the primary written evidence for the Norse landfall in North America. We should look again at their accounts through the lens of HMAP.

About the same time as Eirik, the Moroccan geographer and cartographer al-Idrisi’s wrote a Universal Geography, produced in Sicily 1153. His Nuzhat al-Mustaq describes the seas of the North Atlantic. “There are animals of such great size that the inhabitants of the islands use their bones and vertebrae in place of wood to build houses. They make hammers, arrows, spears, knives, seats, steps, and in general every sort of thing elsewhere made of wood.” Perhaps HMAP can extract some ideas from al-Idrisi about the distribution and size of Atlantic marine animals 950 years ago.

I hope such fantastical ideas, after our good dinner and wine, stimulate your imaginations. The point is that, surmounting limits to knowledge, we can construct the history of marine animal populations.

Here let me repeat what I see as the essential tasks of HMAP:

1. To create pictures of what lived in the oceans before fishing became important. In some places the time is 50 years ago, 500 in others, and one thousand or more in a few. More broadly, we might compose a set of snapshots of marine life, say, in the year 1, year 1000, and years 1500, 1600, 1700, 1800, 1850, 1900, 1925, and 1950.
2. To dissect the influence of fishing, climate variability, and other factors on changes in marine animals populations since fishing became important. Nature includes human nature and so must its history.
3. To create and make accessible long time series on marine animal populations and related factors so that future researchers could more effectively study why marine animal populations change. I hope our legacy of data will show not only a course of exploitation but the path to a Reversal and Great Restoration of marine life.

We must also keep in mind the schedule of the Census of Marine Life. In 2007 the all the elements of the program have agreed to issue a Progress report en route to the 2010 “First Census of Marine Life”.

The work prepared for this conference suggests some ways forward. One is to expand the set of a dozen or so regions where HMAP is already working to give a more globally representative picture. HMAP’s whalers have already pointed a second way forward with their global approach. Groups concerned with other groups of animals, such as seals and other furred animals, might ally to create global pictures as well. Earlier I mentioned a third way forward, partnering as in the Gulf of Maine with CoML field projects, allying for example with those concerned with the ice oceans, reefs, and top predators to bring a historical dimension. A final promising way forward presaged in HMAP’s Wadden Sea work is “backcasting”, running models backwards in time where data permit, on occasion in partnership with FMAP experts.

Conclusion

The HMAP community is young and growing strong. Your subject, your landscape, is as valid within history as the industrialization of Britain. In fact, it is fundamentally the same. As the exciting research prepared for this conference shows, recognizing and lowering limits to knowledge, you can write an epic history: global, deep, human, with imagination and with profit for nature. Let us intensify our work together so that in 2010 we offer to our colleagues and the world for the first time richly documented and beautiful answers to the question “What did live in the ocean?”


Acknowledgements: Thanks to Poul Holm, Andrew Rosenberg, Tim Smith, David Starkey, and Paul Waggoner.