Into the Great Wide Ocean with Sönke Johnsen

Join me for a special one-year anniversary celebration of Book Science as I sit down with biologist and author Sönke Johnsen to discuss his beautiful book, Into the Great Wide Ocean: Life in the Least Known Habitat on Earth.

In this episode, Sönke takes us on a journey into the pelagic zone—the open ocean that makes up the vast majority of living space on our planet. We explore why this "unbearably beautiful" world looks like it is lit by blue LEDs, the evolutionary marvels of transparency and bioluminescence, and the immense challenges of studying creatures that are effectively invisible.

Sönke shares his philosophy on science communication, explaining why he chose to weave his personal memoir—from his childhood in Pittsburgh to his time on research submersibles—into a text about marine biology. We discuss the "physical pain" of the writing process, why humanizing scientists is essential for public trust, and the deep connection between artistic observation and biological discovery.

Plus: We dive into the "observer effect" of deep-sea research (and why trawling nets is like driving a bulldozer through a café), the spiritual awe of biodiversity, and why Sönke believes that conservation must be driven by love rather than shame.

Topics Covered:

• The visual beauty of the pelagic environment
• Bioluminescence: defense, predation, and communication in the dark
• The intersection of art and science (featuring Alister Hardy)
• Writing as "thought made manifest"
• The difficulty of observing deep-sea behavior without disturbing it
• Why admitting ignorance is a scientist's greatest strength
• Conservation strategies: "We save what we love"

Find Sönke Johnsen:

• Faculty Profile: Duke University
• Book: Into the Great Wide Ocean
• All books mentioned on Book Science: View the List

Book Science:

• Website: TrippCollins.com
• Show notes & transcripts: https://www.trippcollins.com/episodes
• Check out the Book Science Book Shop on BookShop.org
• Instagram: @booksciencepodcast

Transcript

Tripp Collins: 0:20

Hello everyone. Hope you're doing well out there, wherever you are. This is a special episode, not only because I'm talking with Professor Sonke Johnson, who is an interesting person and in an inspiring author, but also because this episode marks our one year anniversary here at Book Science. Thus far, I have sort of compartmentalized book science, at least within my, my life. You know, the podcast hasn't really crossed over into my personal life. But to mark this one year anniversary, I decided to make, sort of a little social media announcement. So if you're a friend or a family member or a personal acquaintance that came over because you saw my post and you're curious, well welcome and I hope you enjoy this episode with, Sonke Johnsons, who is the Ida Stevens Owens distinguished professor of biology at Duke University. He is an expert in light and visual systems and pulag biology. And he's author of, a number of books, and this conversation is about one of those entitled Into the Great Wide Ocean, published with Princeton University Press in 2024. All right, today we're talking to Sönke Johnson, author of Into the Great Wide Ocean Life, in the least known Habitat on Earth. This book is about, the life of pelagic species, and that is residents of, say, the top, thousand feet in the open ocean. we have paid a lot of attention to near shore environments and coral reefs and even the deep sea, but we haven't paid much attention to the bulk of the ocean, all that space in between. this book is in part the story of animals that inhabit this world, a world that can feel utterly alien to us. There's more to it than that. in the book you say nature repays a life of curiosity and devotion. this book struck me as like a love letter to nature, which has allowed you live a curious life. but I wanna hear from you, can you tell me a bit about what makes the Pelagic environment special and, what is this book all about for you?

Sönke Johnsen: 2:38

I mean, yeah, I mean fundamentally, I guess first thing comes to my mind is it's beautiful. the pelagic environment is just unbearably beautiful. when we think of the ocean, we think of the beach and the beach is also beautiful, but it's very much beautiful in its own way. You know, we think of the sort of green brown surf and, the sand and all that, but when you get away from the shore, the water is just this extraordinary thing. You know, this unbelievable crystal clear blue filled with all these animals that move around it, like you're in outer space or something everything is the same in every direction. most of the animals are transparent. They all are completely alien. I guess what really draws me to it, I mean it has ecological importance and I could say a lot of biological things, but fundamentally it was the beauty of the habitat that drew me.

Tripp Collins: 3:27

That's amazing. when you're talking about the way it looks, I don't know if anyone listening will have this experience of having been, in the middle of the ocean at some depth. But, as you write in the book, at some point, every direction you look. Looks exactly the same. is that because the light, as it's traveling down, becomes more diffuse and it's hard to tell what direction.

Sönke Johnsen: 3:49

Yeah. The light becomes diffused. I mean, it's always lighter when you look up than when you look down, but it's a really smooth gradation and it really is sort of like falling into some enormous sapphire or something of that sort. It's just the blue is. It's astonishing. I guess we're more familiar with super saturated blues because we all have blue LEDs on everything and it's just like, imagine like the blue LEDs were illuminating the entire world. it just has this extraordinary look to it.

Tripp Collins: 4:18

So you're, uh, professor, of, marine biology. but this. Book isn't just science communication, we get a bit of your life story. we get a taste of what it's like to go through graduate school or work on a research vessel or, board a submersible or work in a lab. so how did this book start for you and how did it develop over time?

Sönke Johnsen: 4:41

so I'd written a couple books before for scientists. I wrote an optics book for biologists and I wrote a book about vision for vision scientists I was having lunch with my editor She said it would be, you know, because of the way you write, it would be really wonderful if you wrote a popular book. And, you know, we talked about different things. But I really wanted, to talk about my great love, which was to go to sea, and what that world is like, both from a kind of a personal scientific perspective, but also from the animals themselves. and I wanted to write a science book that was more honest about the lives of scientists. I think sometimes science books. they're wonderful. I mean, they tell you so much, but they present the idea of scientists as this sort of omniscient, benevolent, kind of good natured smart person. I mean, you know, it's almost like the Attenborough approach that scientists are above the world and have this kind of benign, friendly way of explaining it to you, like this, like gentle parent or something. And we're not really like that. I worry, especially in the United States about distrust of science, I've noticed a lot that people may distrust science, but they will not distrust a person who they're talking to, who they like and know and feel like they understand and feel like who understands them. In other words, they could trust the scientists, but maybe not the science. the first step would have to be to trust the scientists, themselves. I wanted to write a book that was honest about, my dreams, my challenges, the weird aspects of living at sea. What brings us to it, the sort of passions that scientists have, the confusions, the lack of knowing, that sometimes sheer boredom of it, just to write about science in a way that would actually connect to human life.

Tripp Collins: 6:35

That's so true because sometimes people, think of science as somehow separate. it describes some kind of objective reality outside of humanity. But science is done by people, It's a human endeavor. Scientists talk to each other, right? Like, that's, that's who

Sönke Johnsen: 6:49

the time.

Tripp Collins: 6:50

that's why we write papers. That's who we're communicating to, is like other, other people. It is fundamentally a human endeavor done by people. sometimes that gets forgotten, So I think bringing a personal element into the story, it's a way to build connections to everyone else, right?

Sönke Johnsen: 7:06

That's the hope. Yes.

Tripp Collins: 7:07

yeah, it's almost like saying, Being a scientist is just like any other job. we just happen to do things that are outside the usual, I always ask about, why choose the format of a book? because there's so many ways to communicate science these days. I just wonder, why take the time, and energy to write a whole book?

Sönke Johnsen: 7:26

it's a good question because of course, the vast amount of words I've ever written have been digital and travel digitally, via emails and posts and various situations and so on. and they are extremely good way of reaching people. But I mean, there are a couple reasons I think for me about why a book. one is I grew up with books, when I was a little kid. every. Week we were allowed to take 20 books out of the library at a time, and the library was about two mile walk. We didn't have a car at that time. my mother would walk with me those two miles, to the East Liberty Library in Pittsburgh. And I would get my 20 books on dinosaurs or the moon or whatever else, and, just devour them. there's something, I don't know, it's like a book is its own little luscious nugget or something. I was really happy with the way this one looks as an object. it's got this beautiful blue cover with these strange animals that the illustrator drew that are, both inside the book and on the top. I don't know the way the font is on it and it's just like this and it's got this nice texture. It's like when you hold it that even just the, the texture of the paper with the ink on it there's something nice about the tangible. I was an art major and so I think a lot about those things the actual tangible parts of the world and how they feel writing it out on the internet sometimes can reach more people, I think. Um, and some of that stuff has been put out on the internet, like the epilogue of that book was first done as a post for, um, for NOAA. but I just love the feel of a book and the thought of, some kid reading it and stuffing it into a backpack or some, student sitting on a train and being able to just sort of leaf through it and like highlight different parts and bend over a page or something. I don't know. It's just a, it's a personal choice and probably not the smartest and wisest choice. but it's one that I stand by, I guess.

Tripp Collins: 9:21

Definitely. I want to go back to asking about the memoir aspect of the book. we get so much insight into your life. you immigrated to America, as a baby. grew up in Pittsburgh Vacations in the Outer Banks College and Chapel Hill graduate School and so on. And I thought weaving in your personal story really worked well in this book. It never felt contrived, especially when you're relating, your life to what you're teaching. In the book, for example, you talk about backpacking, in the section of buoyancy and gravity or when you. were preparing for your first research crew, you felt like the ship was exploration incarnate.

Sönke Johnsen: 9:55

Oh yeah.

Tripp Collins: 9:56

I love that line. it is just so well done and it always added to the text where I've read other science books where, insertions felt, a bit more contrived. But, I was often just as interested in what your experience was like, especially on the dives and on the research vessels as I was in the animals. can you talk about how you approached that, aspect of it and how you balanced, the personal side and the science side?

Sönke Johnsen: 10:21

It is a really fine line and, periodically I would write my editor and, ask her Am I getting maudlin? Am I saying too much? is this a TMI moment? my guiding principle was to be honest and open and I guess is one of my grad students said Heart forward, in my writing because I want people to identify, even if they didn't like me as a person, they would identify me as a person talking about it rather than some remote educator. Um, but it is a very fine line. I would sort of edit back and forth and think, oh, this is too far. Or maybe here I could say a bit more. it's a hard thing in writing to know, how much to really share. and it's like you don't want to share just to share yourself. Like there can be an exhibitionist kind of aspect to it. I just wanna talk about myself. Um, but I, in the end, at least what, you know, stayed in It wasn't for me to talk about myself because I like to hear about myself. Sometimes it served the purpose of like, some of these things are very hard to describe, like understanding what it's like to be buoyant in the ocean, or understanding why gravity is such a terrible thing when you are in the sea and so on. And I've taught for about 45 years. I often try to explain things in multiple ways. I'll explain the straight up science textbook way, then I'll try various metaphors. I'll come up with a gruesome story, you know, to sort of cement things in people's head. Or I'll tell a personal, you know, story about myself that relates in some way to what's going on. Because I've often found that getting someone to finally have something in their head sometimes takes multiple ties you need multiple strings to attach something inside. And it can't just be the straightforward, textbook approach. pretty much everything in there serves a purpose, even in the opening chapter where I look like I'm just describing my life. it's there in part to describe how scientists come into being, and what they're driven by. You know, I could only talk about myself. That's why if I write something personal, I don't usually talk too much about other people'cause I don't wanna assume I know what's going on in their, their hearts and minds, at least I know my own and wanted to get across how at least one scientist turns into a scientist over their life. starting from when they never even thought about that.

Tripp Collins: 12:49

And do you feel like, some of the material in this book. You know, you've been teaching for 40 years. is this material you've been working on, subconsciously over that period of time? is this a book you've always been, wanting to write in the back of your head and just came to it now or, was this something you had to work to bring out once you decided you were gonna do it?

Sönke Johnsen: 13:11

It's definitely not the book I always thought I would write. It's a topic that I've been in love with since. I first went to sea in 1997, I always like to share what that life is like because I know it is so alien to most people. You know what it's like to live on a boat, for weeks at a time to go down into the water to take a submarine, you know, 3000 feet under water. I always knew that I, I loved that part of my life and I wanted to talk about it, but it wasn't really until, me and my editor in an Applebee's in Portland.'cause I met her at a conference there and we went through a couple different ideas of what might be a good popular book and we both agreed this would be a good one to write and one that I would really enjoy writing.

Tripp Collins: 13:56

So lemme follow that up. so it was really spurred on by, the publisher. Right. And so this, I guess it, it's a academic press typically'cause they publisher academic books, but they also publish more popular science books.

Sönke Johnsen: 14:10

Mm-hmm.

Tripp Collins: 14:11

that's interesting. I think usually. for other people attempting to write a book, the process is more like they write a proposal, search around for an agent, and then try to find a publisher yours was sort of reversed. Your, you had a publisher already and was like, Hey, can you, can you make this for me?

Sönke Johnsen: 14:28

Yeah, I mean, we'd have a relationship for a long time. I mean, she approached me for the first book, you know, the, I think there were a number, there were a couple really good authors in my department, and so there was a few presses that just kept showing up at people's doors saying, you know, have you ever thought about writing a book? And then, you know, usually if you were before tenure you said no, because you know, that's gonna be the end of my career. but then afterwards, you know, took it more seriously. But yeah, I've worked with them since about 2008. and they've been great fun to work with. But thinking back on it, should I have gotten an agent and made more money and worked with, bigger publishing houses. I don't know. I mean, I've really enjoyed working, with the academic press I've worked with, I don't know if I reach as many people that way'cause they're a lot of bookstores, but they're not like in everything like, you know, certain presses but I've really liked them and they let me write what I wanna write

Tripp Collins: 15:19

what about a writing day, do you think about writing days differently than any other day at work? Can you talk about that a bit? Like.

Sönke Johnsen: 15:25

brutally, at least for me, is. It's hard. It's kind of like thought made manifest. thinking is so wonderful and easy when you're just thinking, but it's not until you try to either explain something or write it down that you, at least I realize how wooly my thinking really is. And now I have to actually know it for real. It's like our mind, at least my mind lies to me and tells me I understand something, until I try to explain it. Then I'm like, wow, I don't understand this at all. And then I have to think about how, you know, how to explain it to myself. And then I have to figure out how I'm gonna explain it, you know, to whatever audience I'm trying to explain it to. And it's really hard and painful. I mean, it's weird to say, but it's physically painful to write. I write really quickly. about a thousand words an hour pretty fast. Um, and what I write usually is. Not completely like, like done, but it's close to done. I don't write a really rough draft. for a book that's, about 70,000 words long. that's only 70 hours of work. but it took four years, because I would endlessly put it off and when I did write, I would have to be like, the very first thing I did in the morning when I got into work. I couldn't look at a single email or anything. And then I would sit down and write until about lunch write a few thousand words and I couldn't stand it anymore. And then I would go do something else. and during COVID this was especially hard I kept waiting for the world to improve, and then finally wrote my editor and said, the world's just not getting better, is it? so then decided, okay, I'm gonna do a writing retreat and I'm gonna write even harder and get this done. And then the day I showed up in the mountains for my writing retreat in North Carolina, I got COVID. that was the end of that. I find writing. At least this kind of writing, not like writing emails or something. I find it really painfully hard.

Tripp Collins: 17:20

yeah, a couple things in that response stood out to me. One is, about. polishing your thought, almost by writing where you thought you understood something and you really didn't. until you saw how you wrote it out, I think that's part of the benefit of writing. It's like thinking in a totally different way, something about the physicality of writing allows you to think through something in a different way. maybe this is a bit of a tangent, but I know a lot of people are worried about, AI and everyone using AI to write, if you're using AI to write you're not gonna get that benefit, you know? And I understand writing is painful, but it's like working out, right? it's something that improves your thought. I don't worry about AI because it's the process of writing that's important not the end product.

Sönke Johnsen: 18:02

I totally agree. writing is thinking in its purest form because it's thinking where you have to be completely honest with yourself about like getting it across, I mean, getting it right. Whereas when you're just ruminating in your mind, it's like your mind's really good at saying, eh, you kind of got this, you know, you don't even really need to think about it until you start putting it down. It's like, wow, I so don't have this. and I think that's why it is hard. It's one of the hardest kinds of thinking. like composing music and other creative acts that force you to finally turn what's in your mind into reality.

Tripp Collins: 18:36

Speaking of creative acts, you said you were an art major and you often use photographs in your public talks. the book is full of really beautiful black and white illustrations. can you talk a little bit about how you use photography and the illustrations and how you decided on what images to include in the book?

Sönke Johnsen: 18:53

Oh yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, none of those drawings are mine. They're done by an amazing illustrator, Marlon Peterson, who I think now is in Kazakhstan. I mean, when he was done, he said, you can find me in Kazakhstan if you need more pictures. I was like, wow. but he was amazing.'cause for him, again, drawing was the perfect thinking in that he wouldn't, I didn't just give him a photograph and say, draw this, make a line out.'cause you would almost do that like with Photoshop. But he would look at Dozens of photos of the same animal from all different directions. Then he would ask me what every single part was so that he knew what was really connected to what and what looked like it was connected and so on. And so, like many of the great old biologists, you know, who were also artists, they used art as their way of understanding biological form. and he's fantastic. what I've done is mostly photography and we photograph everything we find at sea and, try to make the photographs as good as possible, both so that we can learn about what we're seeing. But also because it's a great outreach thing. I mean, you know, we put the photographs in, you know, art festivals and donate them to charitable trust and for ways of conserving the oceans and, you know, any number of different things, in papers and so on. photography's, something that I can do. I can't draw the way Marlin draws. I still, you know, really enjoy it. Um, I think art and biology are really linked because to understand all the complexity of biology, you need to interact with it pretty carefully.

Tripp Collins: 20:27

Yeah, definitely. I found at least one of your book talks on YouTube. I think it was at the Lewes. Public library and that was really fun because you get all the visuals, you're walking through the pictures and talking about each

Sönke Johnsen: 20:38

Oh yeah,

Tripp Collins: 20:38

so if listeners are interested, I'll definitely put a link in the show notes. So yeah, like you said, there's a rich history of, blending art and science, especially in biology. I'm thinking of even back to Robert Hook and, micrographia

Sönke Johnsen: 20:52

Mm-hmm.

Tripp Collins: 20:53

in your book you mentioned as an inspiration, Allison Hardy. and that you admired him specifically because he combined good writing with art. He had these beautiful color illustrations. can you talk about, Allison Hardy and what you liked about his work?

Sönke Johnsen: 21:08

he was a really good watercolorist, which is something I always wanted to be good at, but wasn't And he would sit on the back deck of the ship, with the animals and he would paint them, despite being, mostly a biologist. he was doing this at a time where, photography existed, but it wasn't that great. he was doing this in the forties and fifties. there wasn't, color photography with the close up abilities that we now have with the lenses and so on. Painting things was sort of the way to go and I admired that. And scientifically, he was very creative. He came up with a lot of interesting ideas and put a lot of'em together in these two books. One all about the plankton and the open sea and the other, all about fishes and the open sea. And they were just a, I don't know, a nice inspiration for me. It was a neat mix of a really creative thinker and also just a really nice artist.

Tripp Collins: 21:53

whenever I see that combination, it's so inspiring to me. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it seems like when you see that you know, that person has tapped into, both their creative side and their intellectual side in a very complimentary way. And there's just so something so satisfying about seeing that.

Sönke Johnsen: 22:10

It's beautiful.

Tripp Collins: 22:12

I wanna ask you about this one particular passage in the book. you write about, this, I guess you might call it a vision you had, precipitated by the death of your family dog. you were in a church and piza, and you were thinking about like the inner connectedness of life on earth. And I thought, I mean, that was a really powerful passage to me, and, and it's just one of those facts. It's hard to keep in the front of your head. everything on earth has a common ancestor. we are. Fundamentally a product of this planet. and each species on earth has adapted to their special environments. And these pelagic species evolved an environment that seems foreign to us. but the strange strangeness of that, of the animals there simply reflect the evolutional pressures in that environment. and once you understand the environment, what appears strange at first starts to make more sense. so this is a long way of asking, both about that, particular passage in the book and then maybe transitioning into the problems of living in the water column.

Sönke Johnsen: 23:12

Yeah, so that passage is one that I thought long and hard about keeping in or taking out and ask different people about it. And I liked it for a couple reasons. One is that biologists, many of them, I mean, not all of'em for sure, but there's almost like a general idea of biologists as confirmed atheists. you know, like in all forms, I mean, not like saying, they're not Christian or this or that, but more so than physicists or chemists or astronomers. They tend to be really hardheaded about rational reality and nothing else. and I think sometimes that's not right. I mean, I'm not. Sort of traditionally religious in that way. But, and even though, evolution explains, so much natural selection explains so much. It is nevertheless, and even more so because you can understand it miraculous. the fact that we can, this idea that there's the supernatural world which involves these amazing things and all that. And then the natural world, which has a bunch of humdrum explainations is kind of a false dichotomy because the natural world is extraordinary. I mean, you know, I go take my dog for a walk pretty much every morning in the woods around the farm and just looking around. blows my mind every time to know that all this is here and that, we're here and we can appreciate it. it is understandable to a large extent, you know, that we can actually get a sense of. Why these little things are, but the fact that they're here, we can't really get a complete handle on, I mean, we understand how things move forward and so on, but just the fact of existence is pretty remarkable. and it's hard for me at least to be a biologist and not be completely awed by it. And I became more and more awed by it when, we moved to a farm, because then you're endlessly confronted with nature. every form of animal and plant life and fungal life is trying to break into our house at all times. It's relentless. And just seeing, this sort of relentless, pressure and creativity and adaptability of nature on a daily basis is, I mean, there's a reason they put Yoda on a swamp planet and, you know, empire strikes back, you know, like the, basically the force, you know, if you wanna call it, you know, the interconnectedness of all life, would naturally be. The holy place of that would be a tropical rainforest because that expresses that tremendous amount of energy and complexity and connectivity, better than almost anything else. so yeah, I mean that's why that passage is in there. One, to kind of break the fourth wall on religion and biologists, but also to get across this incredible awe that many of us feel despite being able to explain a lot of it.

Tripp Collins: 26:02

Definitely there's this. Video of, Richard Feynman, I think it's called The Pleasure of Finding Things out. he must have gotten this question a million times, but it was something along the lines of doesn't your scientific understanding take away, from, you know, from your all of nature? And, and he, he argues, you know, basically beautifully that, his scientific understanding can only compliment and color his, his view of nature make it even more all inspiring. yeah. And so I want to kind of ask about, some of your research topics and some of the topics you cover in the book. one thing in the water column, light, luminosity decays with depth, I think exponentially even. so it's quite dark once you're a few hundred feet down. but many creatures evolve methods for producing their own light, which, is. Known as luminescence. what do we know about, how some animals use their luminescence and why is it so hard to understand, how luminescence is used from a behavior standpoint

Sönke Johnsen: 27:02

so bioluminescence in the open ocean is extraordinarily common. about 80 to 90% of the animals do it, and they use it for a host of different things. It makes sense because, once you get deep enough, you've run out of the sun to take care of like your ability to see things. some, use light for defensive purposes because since it's so dark, everybody's dark adapted and it's like setting off a flashbulb in their face. Um, you know, you can escape from an animal by blasting them with a lot of light. Some of them actually have, will have a sacrificial organ that they'll light up and float away. And then, you know, the animal that's attacking'em will go for the sacrificial organ. Some release, like a whole bunch of tiny spherical, light bombs that all just like float away in different directions. It's actually called the Green bomber worm. some use the light, to predate on things. So you know, they'll either have a lure, like a bioluminescent lure hanging over their mouth or a lure hanging below their chin. Some use light to hide. They'll light up their ventral surface, their bottom surface so that they hide their silhouette. If anybody's trying to see them from below, where normally, they would stick out, like a big plane flying overhead, you can make that go away. as far as we know, a fair number of'em are using it to communicate with each other. And that's the hardest thing to figure out because doing any kind of behavioral research in the open ocean is almost impossible. It has almost like quantum mechanical aspect in that whatever you try to measure something behaviorally down there, you disturb it. the habitat is so simple, the water's very clear. There's nothing around, you can't just like get a little GoPro camera and put it inside a beaver lodge and learn all about beavers. anything you put in there becomes an incredible focus of interest. you need almost like an invisible camera system or something like that. And those habits. Is vast, which means that the animals are spread out over enormous distances. And again, you can't just like set up that GoPro because it'll just be filming water for the next two months. Um, so, and just going down there and bringing your own lights, sometimes you end up blinding the animals if you're deep enough and their eyes are too sensitive, or most of the time you just freak them out and they run away. So getting undisturbed observations of behavior in the open ocean is extremely hard, especially at depth. Um, near the surface it's a little easier, but mostly all we observe is like feeding behavior. So, you know, blue planet has beautiful footage of sharks coming in and eating a whole bunch of small fish and things like that. And then when they're occupied doing that, you can do it. but try to observe social behavior in ocean animals is, it's almost impossible, just because it's so hard not to disturb what's going on.

Tripp Collins: 29:42

And one of the traditional methods of studying, pelagic species is trawling a net, at some depth, and you might bring up an animal. once you do that, you've disturbed the animal from its natural environment. Whatever behavior it's displaying, probably isn't characteristic of. what it was doing before the net grabbed it. Even if you bring the animal up and observe it, in a lab, you might not expect the same behavior.

Sönke Johnsen: 30:06

No, not remotely. I mean, the way I usually describe it when I give talks is like somebody pushing a bulldozer down the main street, going through a bunch of cafes and scooping everybody up, and then dumping'em in a big pile like three miles down the road. And a bunch of anthropologists have to figure out who is sitting next to who, who was, you know, interested in maybe getting married, whose kid was having a tough day that day, and so on. All you're gonna get is just a, basically a pile of bodies. Um, and that's the problem. Yeah. I mean, net sampling is pretty much what we were stuck with for a very long time. And we have some improved techniques now, but they're not great. we're going down in a week, you know, using robot submersibles to look at things, but it's like, ET or something. This giant glowing spaceship, comes down from above with 20 huge floodlights and about 25 propellers and this giant electrical signal and all these noises it makes, and the animals are supposed to pretend it's not there. It's like not gonna happen. Right. You know? So even with fancier techniques that we have now, we're mostly just seeing animals gape at us in astonishment, um, or fear or whatever else. Just like we would if some huge spaceship plopped out in the middle of Central Park.

Tripp Collins: 31:20

and like you say, it's so sparsely populated that a lot of what you see is just by chance anyways.

Sönke Johnsen: 31:27

A lot of it is, it's tough to figure out how they find each other sometimes.

Tripp Collins: 31:31

Yeah. That's interesting, because you talk quite a bit in the book about ways of signaling it does seem improbable, right? Life in the deep sea. how to find a mate, how to find food, how to not get eaten, can you talk about some of the common strategies.

Sönke Johnsen: 31:46

the food thing is, tough, but it might be the easiest of them. many of the animals, if they're doing the classic chase something bite it until it dies and then eat it. I mean, they'll have these insane teeth. I mean, they'll have these very long swordlike teeth that are so long they, they go into sheaths in their upper head so that they don't impale their brain. And they do that because once they grab something, which isn't gonna happen very often, they never wanna lose it again. some animals find more reliable ways of eating, which usually involves what we call filter feeding, where they're dragging some sort of a net like we do fishing through the water, except their nets are usually made out of mucus and they'll pull'em through the water and catch lots of small stuff and then bring in the net and see what they got. so there are a lot of animals. basically just fish. some fish with lights like the angler fish with lures and so on. And that's a way of better chance things coming in. when it comes to like mating, it's like worse'cause I mean, you know, you can eat a lot of things, but you can only m with your own species and so you have to find that animal. And of course you get famous things like the male angular fish showing up, finding a female angular fish and. Basically grabbing onto her with his mouth never letting go for the rest of his life. Um, because, you know, what are the chances you're ever gonna see another female angular fish of the same species? You know, this is your chance. Go for it. and then they just resorb and dissolve the rest of their body. Um, and there's like really not much left of them after that. but they're stuck on for good. And there might be multiple ones stuck on one poor female angler fish.

Tripp Collins: 33:15

They just become like baggage.

Sönke Johnsen: 33:17

yeah. Yeah. That's a nice way of putting it. Um, so, um, yeah, it, how they do it, I mean, one that always blew my mind is there's a beautiful transparent octopus and we know it, it mates,'cause we have footage of the mating, so we know that they actually have to find each other in mate to make more octopuses. but they're completely clear. they're invisible. they're not that huge and they're pretty rare. We have absolutely no idea how they find each other to do this. most octopuses only live a few years. Um, so we have no idea how they pull this off. And yeah, everything about reproduction and the open ocean, is ranges from like mysterious to, we have absolutely no idea.

Tripp Collins: 33:58

the last chapter of your book, is about unknowns and limitations of our knowledge, which there seem to be so many, because of the difficulty of studying, at depth. I really appreciated that last chapter. I feel like, a lot of, science books, popular communications, skip over that whole part. there's so much more to learn. why was it important for you to include that chapter, and why'd you frame it the way you did?

Sönke Johnsen: 34:22

Yeah, I mean it's pretty much for the reason you mentioned. going with the benevolence, whitewashed kind of science narrator is the idea that we know more than you do. scientists, especially in their own fields, they can know a lot, but what they don't know is so much bigger. Right. And I think a lot of people who aren't scientists, don't like the idea of somebody coming in and saying, you know, here are all the answers. when in fact they know for their own lives that there are so many more questions than there are answers. Even if they haven't thought about questions in that particular field. They've thought about questions in their own lives, for example. It's just worth acknowledging our ignorance. I think our ignorance is probably one of the most exciting things about us is, the fact that there's so much we don't know and that we're curious to know it. it's a funny thing about humans that way. I mean, it's, you know, maybe there are other animals doing it too. And more we learned about it. We probably find that out. but it's a remarkable thing that the world has created life that is interested in itself. it didn't have to be that way. nobody had to be aware of anything. I mean, there could be all this life and none of it would ever be self-aware, but the fact that we know at least we are, and probably a lot of other animals are too, and that we're curious about it and that we're curious about what's evolved, also did not have to happen. I mean, we could have. Been creatures of complete indifference to the natural world. And we know, I mean, you talk to any five-year-old and they're always excited about animals, right? I mean, almost always, whether it's dinosaurs or sharks or big dogs or horses they all love it. one of my grad students we were talking to some folks about a week ago and she said, you know, and I had brought up the idea that life is probably the greatest wealth on the planet. And that you can't just make it. I mean, there's nobody who has the power to make a grain of rice. You can get a rice plant and grow some rice and, get a grain of rice. And the way she put it is Jeff Bezos with all his money, can't have a giant oak tree in his front yard. He can't make it. He can buy a house that has one. He can plant one and wait a hundred years, but with all the resources he has and all the resources that the whole human world has, we can't make something as simple as a grain of rice. We can't make a tree. the wealth of that, the wealth of what's out there and the fact that we value it, I think is remarkable. And that the unknown is what that chapter tries to get across. Just this vast unknowable amazingness of the world, I guess is what that's trying to get at. And to be honest about the fact that scientists know far less than they admit, I mean, scientists can be like politicians and not answer the question you ask, but answer the question they know the answer to. and it is remarkable. I mean, I watch professors do it all the time'cause they don't wanna look stupid in front of their students and eventually they can't stop doing it. but there's so much we don't know. the vast majority of things somebody asks us like, I have no.

Tripp Collins: 37:31

Yeah, definitely. I think bringing that level of humility to it makes it, easier to connect to. like you point out how life can't just be bought or created. I mean, like that's, that's an excellent argument for conservation, right? And, so one, one of the premises of this podcast is that science has a role to play in society. for this book, it gives us a view into this underappreciated ecosystem. full of creatures, often strange and beautiful, but also about your life and the life of other scientists dedicated to studying this environment. at some point in the book you say, we save what we love and we love what we see, which felt like a motivating statement. what do you hope this book does in the world?

Sönke Johnsen: 38:14

Yeah. I mean, I think that's very true, that it's impossible to ask people to give up something in their lives, to save something they know nothing about and they've never gotten to see, or at least nobody is, you know, maybe somebody will never get to go out and dive into deep Ocean, but they've never even like gotten somebody to talk to'em about it honestly and clearly. and then to ask them, you know, you should really be excited. it becomes like a shaming argument, you know? Like, you're not a conservationist, you're a bad person, and that never works. Right. You know, you can't get conservational work by telling people they're bad for not doing it. I mean, they have to do it because they're in love with what's there. the two examples I always give are the Show Flipper, which is a really stupid show. my wife loved it when she was younger. I've watched a few episodes. It's a really dumb show, but it got people really excited about dolphins. I mean, you know, when that show first came out, we were still eating Mahi Mahi and calling it Dolphin and the fact that, you know, we didn't care as much about bycatch dolphins and didn't care as much about marine mammals and so on. And something like Flipper just sort of put, you know, dolphins, they mean like kind of people fell in love with them. And those old shows where they showed the poor little sea turtle babies crawling to the ocean, from their nest and the horrible things that would happen, you know, along the way where a bird would eat'em or they'd flip upside down or they'd die the sun or whatever else. And that just created this like. Like sort of passionate love in people for sea turtles. where we go to the beach, there's a lot of turtle nesting and people volunteer to watch the nest for weeks, you know, before, you know, these turtles come out and they, they, they guard these turtles with their lives. and there's something about that. I mean, it works better with like, you know, as we call'em charismatic megafauna. but there's a lot to be said for conservation coming from a positive point, which is, here's something, let me show you how wonderful it is. see if you fall in love with it and if you do, you know, here are things that might, you know, keep it there, you know, on this world. instead of like, you need to do this, you need to do this, or you're a bad person.

Tripp Collins: 40:20

Definitely. I think it's important to remember that all life on earth is connected. if you're passionate about preserving, turtles, you should be passionate about conserving all life on earth, it doesn't make much sense to pick and choose who you want to live

Sönke Johnsen: 40:34

Yeah, there's definitely that, right? You know, people do love certain animals more than others. I guess I can respect that, but I do think that we should think of, what it actually, Pope Francis, who just died, said that, the gates of heaven are open to all of God's creatures,

Tripp Collins: 40:49

There you go.

Sönke Johnsen: 40:50

which I thought was a remarkable statement.

Tripp Collins: 40:54

I wanted to ask about, science books. is there any other books you would recommend? it could be for anything people wanting to learn more about your topic or just books that were inspiring to you while you were writing. we already touched on, Alister Hardy and his books, how they were inspirational to you, but I was just wondering if there's anything else you wanted to, note.

Sönke Johnsen: 41:14

Oh God. is there a book that, I read like a Fish. I mostly read fiction though. I mean, it's funny when you work in, yeah. When you work in a particular field sometimes, you don't read it that much because it's too much of your life. Um, I remember what, but when I started out that wasn't true. I remember there were so many of Stephen j Gould's books I absolutely loved. he had one I loved the most and in the end convinced me to stay in graduate school Was Wonderful Life, which was about the. Original explosion of Multicellular life about 550 million years ago, what was called the Cambrian explosion. it's a very like slow explosion. I mean, it took 50 million years, but, in geological time it was fast. And we went from very, very simple, animals that looked like quilting patterns, to just all these incredibly strange things. Um, and he had actually the, um, I think it was the same artist because when Marlon Peterson showed me his portfolio, when I was deciding what to do, those drawings were in it. the drawings that I'd loved so much, which is why I went for those line drawings in the book.'cause I love the line drawings of the fossil reconstructions in wonderful life. Um, so that was a, a big inspiration for me. Um, but yeah, much of my inspiration comes from reading fiction books. Funny enough.

Tripp Collins: 42:37

Yeah. You have quotes. I think some of your opening chapter quotes come from fiction.

Sönke Johnsen: 42:42

A lot of them. Yeah.

Tripp Collins: 42:42

you mentioned, as a kid having, um, I forget what the circumstance was, but you were given a, like a stack of books. You mentioned Anna Corina and I was like, wow. As, I forget what age it was, but even as an adult, that's not a easy book to read. So you were tackling difficult fiction as a kid.

Sönke Johnsen: 42:58

Yeah. I would get sick periodically. I had a vulnerability to tonsillitis and I would get these very high fevers and be stuck sick and dead for weeks at a time. And my mom had a really weird idea of what six and 7-year-old kids should read. Um, and, you know, we were from Germany and so most of the books she knew were German, but I had switched over to English by then. she would just get these books that she had read, you know, as a, you know, 30 some year old woman. And yeah, she would gimme like To Kill a Mockingbird or Anna Corina or something like that. and to me, biology is, it's kind like. Those, those big Tolstoy books and that it's like this enormous family history. Um, you know, it's like, you know, it's 4 billion years of family's history with all, the strange uncles and funny cousins and huge feuds and giant dies and battles. And a little bit also like those, those Marquez books, like a hundred Years of Solitude, things like that where they follow these families over time. I think of that a lot that, you know, we're watching, you know, sort of the hugest version of that going on.

Tripp Collins: 44:00

Yeah.

Sönke Johnsen: 44:01

for me it was fiction more than nonfiction.

Tripp Collins: 44:03

yeah. It's amazing. I love that. a hundred Years of Solitude. amazing book. so sort of wrapping towards the end here, I was just curious if you had any book writing advice for anyone out there who's thinking about producing a book from their science?

Sönke Johnsen: 44:19

Oh yeah. I do give advice actually a lot. oh God, what would, yeah, I mean, one is make sure that what you have at least a rough idea of what you wanna say. I think a lot of times writing can seem really hard. my students, like graduate students, sweat their way through writing, but they're thinking more about how the writing looks and whether it's complicated enough and so on. But they haven't thought as much about what they truly want to say. And so it's good to think about that. Which, I mean, it sounds like ridiculously like pointless, like to bring that, but, but it's, it's weird, like people will start writing something and not really be sure what it is that they wanted to say and, that's a big one. It all comes down, especially for science, popular science, things like that. I mean, it, it comes down not to showing people everything, you know, but giving, basically teaching. it's not an accident that research and teaching are so tied together and, you know, in academia, I mean, it didn't have to be that way that, you know, most of the people doing research are also teachers. researchers get a lot out of teaching and students get a lot out of learning from them if they're able to cross that divide. I think that's the hardest part to take that highly specialized knowledge in your own head, and then think about somebody in front of you who's never thought about anything like this. then think about what have they thought about, you know, if they thought about a tea kettle, if they thought about driving an old clunker car, you know, if they thought about, you know, a smoggy city, whatever, you know. cross that divide. Um, you know, fundamentally, I mean, and this is true in scientific talks, it's true in writing, you know, proposals for professional scientists to get money and so on. Fundamentally, it's teaching. you lose it if you can't explain what you do in simple words, to a 10-year-old who's interested, you can't convince some highly, you know, specialized person in your field, you know, who's been doing it their whole life, that it's exciting. It's like if something's exciting to a 10-year-old, it's exciting to the rest of us. And if it's not, well then it's not, we're really not that different despite, you know, we get older and we become more specialized and we learn more things. we all kind of start with about the same amount of smarts. I used to teach kindergarten many years ago, and I remember watching these two girls sitting at a table, basically gossiping about everyone in the class. they were just laughing and laughing sort of smacking each other on the shoulder when somebody said a good one and all that. And they were no different than two 65-year-old women, who'd known each other forever, laughing about a bunch of stuff that had been going on. it made me realize that, we learn more and get more information, but we're about as smart the whole way through. And so it's worth thinking about things in terms of, you know, what, you know, like what would a, you know, if you had like an 8-year-old daughter, what would your 8-year-old daughter think about what you've written? And if you know, she doesn't think it's neat, then maybe nobody does. I mean, that's sort of my main advice for most people is, you know, write for the whole world. Even if you're writing a scientific paper for like an audience of what's probably 15 people, you know, write with the idea that you. Get some of that excitement out of those 15 people as if they were anybody.

Tripp Collins: 47:43

Yeah, definitely. and what topics are you excited about exploring in the future? I know you have some research cruises coming up. Is there maybe another book in your future?

Sönke Johnsen: 47:55

There is another book, well there's another book that's about to come out. we finished it. It's about all the things that deep sea animals do with light. it's really heavy on the imagery. so it's a really pretty book and, you know, it's photographs, me and a friend of mine in, in Monterey Bay. Um, we did it together and it's a combination of our photographs and then explaining like all that's going on, that they do that. So it's got, you know, transparent animals and iridescent and bioluminescent fluorescent and a lot of pigmented, all different kinds. So that's coming out in September. and then I've agreed to write another one with a former student of mine on, on how animal signal. To each other and camouflage from each other in the marine world. And that'll be another one of these more like word books with a lot of drawings in it, things like that. Like this one. But I'll be doing it with a former student. So that's on the writing front. On the research front, we sail out next week for 2000 miles away from Cape Cod to work on vision and bioluminescence on a chain of deep sea volcanoes. if we can get there and it all works out well, it should be great fun.

Tripp Collins: 48:59

Cool. if people are interested to find out more and support your work, where should they go? How do they best find you?

Sönke Johnsen: 49:05

I'm very easy to find because I don't think any other person in America has my name. it's an unusual name and so if you type it in, you know, you get it. Other than that, that generally gets to my website. Um, but if you go, to Duke University's webpage, you find mine pretty quickly. That's an easy way to get. I typically answer all emails I get. I get stuff from, eight year olds wanting help with their homework, to people wanting to tell me about their lives every year, um, to long haul truckers who have like new theories about things that they wanna share with me. long haul truckers think a lot, um, really impressed. They spend a lot of time on that road that they have a lot of time to think. And so, you know, they'll, they'll write me about their, you know, an idea that they have and they wanna run it by me. So I tend to answer just about everything that comes in'cause it's great fun.

Tripp Collins: 49:52

All right. I really enjoyed this book. it's a great read for anyone curious about fascinating life forms that fill the ocean. And on top of that, you'll get insight into the people that study the pelagic realm. this has been Sönke Johnson, and we've been. Talking about into the great Wide Ocean, Sönke. Thank you so much.

Sönke Johnsen: 50:10

Thank you.

50:25

Hey, trip here. One more thing before you go, I want to thank you. Yes, you Thank you for listening to Book Science. If you got something out of today's conversation. Please share with a friend. That's the best way you can help spread the word about the show. If you wanna learn more and keep the conversation going, head over to TrippCollins.com That's T-R-I-P-P collins.com. There you'll find show notes and transcripts and our full R archive. I'm Trip Collins and this has been book Science. Your invitation to think deeply. Stay curious, get off the scroll and get out into the world. Take care. This show was produced on the outer banks of North Carolina on the traditional lands of the Roanoke and Croatan Peoples.