Exploring Pristine Seas | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic

Foreign filming this colony of rockhopper penguins and then all of a sudden we see the water boiling offshore. Wow! What's that? Explorer Enrique Salah found himself in the southern tip of Argentina on a remote island called Isla de Los Estados. It's been off limits to tourism since 1923 when it was set aside as a reserve for fur seals. It's home to a forest of twisting Southern Beech trees and two of the largest known rockhopper penguin colonies in Argentina.

We see these dozens of penguins coming onto the shore, and they were not just swimming; they were jumping and zigzagging. Wow! This is a behavior that we've seen in other places where animals are trying to escape from killer whales, from orcas. Wow! Is there an orca here? Right? No! No orca! Stupid!

And then in front of me, this big brown head comes out of the water, grabs a penguin, and takes it down. That was a bull sea lion, a huge sea lion with a huge head. He was there underwater waiting, and when the penguins swam over him, he just snatched one and disappeared.

I'm Amy Briggs, executive editor of National Geographic History magazine, and you're listening to "Overheard," a show where we eavesdrop on the wild conversations we have at Nat Geo and follow them to the edges of our big, weird, beautiful world. This week, I sit down with Enrique Sala, founder of National Geographic's Pristine Seas, a project that combines exploration, research, and media to inspire countries to protect the last wild places in the ocean. We'll hear about some of his coolest expeditions and find out what we need to do to keep the ocean pristine.

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I am Enrique Salah, National Geographic Explorer in Residence, and for a living, I work to create big protected areas in the ocean—national parks in the sea. Enrique is the founder and leader of National Geographic's Pristine Seas project, which leads worldwide expeditions to explore the ocean and supports the creation of marine protected areas, or MPAs for short. Since 2008, Pristine Seas has helped to establish 26 marine preserves with a combined area of 6.5 million square kilometers of ocean—more than twice the size of India.

So when did you learn how to dive, and what inspired your interest in the ocean? I grew up on the Mediterranean coast of Spain and the Costa Brava in Catalonia. I was very lucky because the summers I spent on the shore on the beach with my mom and my brother. My father worked at the restaurant during the summer, so I spent my days on the beach basically. But then on Sunday evening, the entire family was glued to the TV set watching "The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau." That was my inspiration. You know, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a diver in Cousteau's boat in the famous Calypso. This is when my passion for the ocean started.

Did you start wearing a red beanie as a teenager? Or, uh, no, but I had a Speedo, of course. So this podcast episode is for Shark Fest about people's fear of sharks, and I just talked to you a little bit before about one of your early presentations that I saw at Nat Geo where the sharks were everywhere. But you seem pretty relaxed swimming with them. Were you always so relaxed around the top predators?

When I was a kid and watched the film "Jaws," I was terrified of sharks. And then I started diving with sharks, and we started going to pristine places which are full of sharks. The more I dove with sharks, the less worried I was. More people kill themselves every year taking selfies than people being killed by sharks. So I'm not more worried about the iPhone than about sharks.

I'm an amateur diver myself, and I remember the first time I was in the water with one and had the same sort of feeling and just this respect for how big and powerful and graceful. But then they seemed so completely uninterested in people. Totally! Yeah! They were on their reef; they were swimming. They would occasionally kind of like side-eye you but then keep going.

The things that scared me were barracuda. They're creepy! I don't know if it's just the big teeth, but they tend to swim in my blind spot so I can't really see them, and then I turn around and they're there.

So anyway, you mentioned that you had started diving around the time you were finishing up your PhD, so you're doing Pristine Seas now. How did you decide to make the transition from academia and launch Pristine Seas?

Yeah, well, in my previous life, I was a professor of marine ecology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. My job was to teach and conduct research, and my research was on the impacts of humans in the ocean—the impacts of fishing and global warming mostly. Every paper, every new paper had more data and more precision, and we were more confident that yes, we are killing marine life everywhere. One day, I realized that all I was doing was writing the obituary of the ocean, actually rewriting it with more and more precision.

I thought, well, I don't want to look back 20 years from now and say that all I have done is refine the obituary of the ocean. I felt like the doctor who's telling you how you're going to die with excruciating detail but not offering a cure. You know, you may want to change doctors, right? So this is what I did. I left academia to work on the cure, to work on the conservation of ocean life full time.

So what would you say is the most immediate threat to the ocean? Is it climate change? Is it overfishing? Is it microplastics? What's the biggest one or most immediate?

All of them! Actually, historically, the biggest threat has been overfishing, taking fish out of the water faster than they can reproduce. Overfishing continues, but now we have ocean warming and acidification, which is killing coral reefs and other marine life around the world. The plastic pollution is very conspicuous, but also we have pollution that we cannot see, like heavy metals, for example. So it's the three of them: pollution, global warming, and overfishing, which is killing the ocean faster and faster than ever.

I know we're talking about those as very, very big things that make impacts, but I think it was Pitcairn Island, this remote island you went to that only has about 50 people living on it, and you saw like degraded ocean environments there. I mean, if it only takes 50 people to degrade an area, how can we protect the ocean?

We can protect the ocean by not killing marine life everywhere! Right? Something I—I don't want this discussion to be doom and gloom, so people, you go and listen to fun music. There are good news! The good news is that if we protect areas of the ocean, if we set aside areas without fishing, without mining, without drilling, without destruction of the coast, these areas come back spectacularly. I've seen it with my own eyes all around the world. The ocean has an extraordinary ability to bounce back, and we know that when you have more fish in these protected areas, now the fish are also larger because we don't kill them.

They take a longer time to die; they reach their maximum sizes. We know that the biggest females are the ones that produce most eggs in the fish populations that are going to help replenish the areas around these protected areas, these marine reserves. So if we set aside at least 30 percent of the ocean in no-take areas, this 30 percent will help regenerate, will help replenish the other 70, so we'll have food for everybody into the future.

So how do you identify candidates to become an MPA? Does it need to start out pristine, and you preserve it? Or is it, like you were saying, if you create these places, they can bounce back? Walk me through the process.

So we have places that are in the ocean; we have this spectrum that goes from totally pristine, remote, and inhabited islands that are not fished, all the way to completely degraded areas that are like underwater barrens and everything in between.

So we need to protect those places that are left that are still pristine. We need to save them, but also we need to protect as many places that are degraded so they can restore themselves and they can get closer to pristine and help to regenerate the rest of the ocean.

In terms of the areas that we target with our National Geographic Pristine Seas project, the last four years we spent a lot of time with a group of over 20 scientists and economists to identify which areas in the ocean are the top priority. What are the areas that, if fully protected, would preserve marine life and all the benefits it provides to humanity?

When you look at those maps, the priorities are basically spread all over the world. It's interesting because in my own mind, I think of some of the more tropical places that have coral reefs being, I want to say, maybe the more popular or the more well-known. But what about some cold-water environments? What are the things we're protecting where there aren't beautiful tropical fish and coral reefs?

Well, there are beautiful kelp forests in southern Chile and Argentina, for example. Diving in this kelp forest, which you can also find in California and Oregon, is like flying through a tropical forest. You have this brown seaweed that goes from the bottom all the way to the surface, forming a canopy through which the light penetrates like the stained glass in a cathedral. They are full of starfish and little invertebrates, and in California, you have all these big fish like black sea bass and sheephead and this beautiful orange Garibaldi fish, which is the state fish of California, by the way.

Every country in the world has areas that are top priority for protection, which means that every country has a responsibility to do something about it. So how much—you're saying, you know, 30 percent is sort of what we're looking at—how much of the ocean is currently part of an MPA or is currently protected?

That's the problem. Today, less than eight percent of the ocean is under some kind of protection, and less than three percent is in no-take areas that ban fishing and other damaging activities. So we need to basically quadruple the amount of ocean that is protected by 2030. So we have eight years left.

Still a long way to go towards protecting 30 percent of the ocean, as Enrique suggested. But there's been a number of recent wins. In March and April of this year, Pristine Seas led an expedition in the waters near Colombia, and in June, Colombian President Ivan Duque Márquez announced three new marine protected areas, which will get Colombian waters over the 30 threshold.

Pristine Seas was just awarded a $20 million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund. So there is a long way to go, so Enrique and Pristine Seas will be busy. Enrique's team sent us some audio from his travels, and listening to these clips is probably the closest I'll get to setting sail with Pristine Seas.

They run into all kinds of amazing animals on these expeditions, like sea lions. Wow! We were diving, and then 25 sea lions came in. They started swimming around us like crazy! Spectacular! One of the most playful groups of sea lions I've ever seen!

There's the male. The male is growling, saying, "Don't get too close to my females!" I guess! I want to talk to you a little bit about your job job—about what's a Pristine Seas expedition, and how do you get ready for one? Can you sort of walk me through what you do when you decide to go on an expedition?

So let’s say we decided to go to some remote islands in the middle of the Pacific. The first thing we need to do is identify who our local partners are going to be, right? We always work to support local conservation efforts. Then we need to find a vessel, and the good thing is that now we have chartered a vessel, the Argo, the exploration vessel Argo, which is going to be our home for the next five years, starting in 2023. This is going to be our Calypso.

Usually, a day in the expedition is we wake up at six or seven, depending on where we are in the world, have breakfast, prepare for one or two dives in the morning, come back, enter data, have lunch, maybe a little nap, and then go diving again. And then basically, usually before 10, we collapse in bed, absolutely exhausted. You know, day two—repeat, day three—repeat for four weeks at a time. It’s exhausting, but it is so fulfilling to go to bed knowing that we've experienced such a wonderful place and that we have got so much done.

Well, especially too if it’s a place that hasn’t been well-studied. I mean, you're definitely pioneers!

Oh, these are the best! These are the best! Because we don’t know what we’re going to find. That’s pure exploration!

What’s been the most surprising thing you found in a region like that?

Well, I would say the first time we went to a pristine coral reef and jumped in the water on the Line Islands in the middle of the Pacific, and jumped in the water and saw that, wow, as soon as the bubbles cleared, we were surrounded by sharks. And after counting the number and the size of the sharks and the fish, we realized that if you put all of the fish together and weigh them, the top predators, the sharks, they weigh in more than all of the prey together.

This would be like going to the African savannah and finding more lions than zebras and wildebeest. Wow!

So that must have just sort of upended everything we thought we knew about what a healthy reef looked like.

Oh, absolutely! Because most of the studies on coral reefs have been done on reefs that are easy to access, which means if you can get to them easily, people can get to them easily. So these reefs have been overfished, overexploited, polluted, degraded over time, so our view of coral reefs was really biased. So we came out of that first expedition basically ripping entire chapters of marine ecology books!

Are there any other examples that leap to mind of, you know, basically other chapters that have been ripped out based on, you know, the work that Pristine Seas is doing?

Well, one thing that we found that wasn’t trivial is that that pattern we found on the Line Islands was repeated everywhere else where there was no fishing, right? So that was not a one-off. But something else that we also found, also on the Line Islands, is that fully protected areas can help us buy time in this era of climate change.

That means that reefs that are fully protected, they are more resilient. They are more likely to bounce back after a warming event. In the first expedition we did with Pristine Seas in 2009, we went to the Southern Line Islands in the South Pacific, and these were the most pristine reefs we’ve ever seen. Fish abundance off the charts, and the corals were spectacular—eighty percent of the bottom was covered by live coral.

The government of Kiribati protected this place a few years later, and we thought, wow, this place is safe forever. But then in 2016, a calamity happened. 2016 there was the strongest warming event, an El Niño event, the strongest ever measured, and half of the corals died over that summer. Half of the corals in the most pristine coral reefs on the planet!

We thought, wow, is there hope for coral reefs if even the most pristine reefs are suffering so much? We decided to give that place some time, and we returned last year, five years after that warming event. I was terrified. I didn’t know if the corals would still be dead or there would be some sort of recovery.

I just, my body was getting ready on the inflatable boat, and I couldn't wait. I just jumped in the water, and I couldn't believe it! The reef was back! It had fully recovered—100 percent! Like, wow! Was there ever any bleaching here? Was there ever any coral death?

And the reef came back because the fish were there. Because there were these big parrotfish, schools of hundreds of certain fish, and these are fish that graze all the time, nonstop. They munch and they gobble all the little seaweed that try to grow on top of the dead coral skeleton, so they keep the reef clean and allow the corals to come back.

Parrotfish are my favorite! I love when you're in the water, like you can hear them. You know that's a good sign! Yeah! They're just—I mean, they're cute too!

Enrique's production team sent us some footage from his expeditions, and wow, has he seen a lot, like unicorn-like narwhals with their distinctive clicks! [Applause]

And then Enrique's gone from tropical coral reefs to coral formations with spurs and grooves and canyons and coral pillars, and played corals forming terraces everywhere. It's so absolutely gorgeous! To swimming in Arctic waters! You know, in this case, when we were in the Russian Arctic, the northernmost archipelago on Earth, the water temperature was -1 degrees Celsius. It was below freezing! It doesn't freeze because seawater has so much salt that it freezes at lower temperatures, but it was literally freezing.

And that was in the summer. We just finished our dive. I'd get fligly—the northernmost point of Franz Josef land, and this is as north as it gets. I go, "My lips! I cannot lift! I cannot feel my lips or my fingertips!"

Now during the interview, I also asked Enrique to show me a couple of his photos and explain the story behind them. In one of them is this big black fish with a wide frowning mouth that kind of makes it look like a grumpy old man. It's a Mediterranean dusky grouper, and behind him is a colorful backdrop of orange, blue, and yellow coral.

Enrique says this grouper was about three feet long, which seems pretty big to me as an amateur diver, but Enrique says that's a pretty typical size in pristine areas. According to him, they can grow up to four feet long, and the girth—because then they become at one point! They don’t grow more in length, but they become really fat! That's why they produce so many more eggs, right? Because their volume increases to the power of the cube!

Because these groupers grow in height, width, and depth, they've got a lot more space inside to house their eggs! And not only do these groupers get huge, but they also reproduce in an interesting way! When it's time to reproduce, these males display this flashy, spectacular color pattern saying, "Hey! I'm ready! This is my territory!"

So they chase each other out of their territories, and then the females go around looking for suitable males. When a female decides that, "Oh, this is a good one," then they start a courtship, and they start swimming up towards the surface, and they get closer and closer, cheek to cheek, and start swimming up, spiraling.

Sometimes you have other males trying to sneak in, and when they reach their climax, they split and you can see they release sperm and eggs, so you see this white cloud.

Wow! And they go back to the bottom. In other places, groupers reproduce not in pairs like this, but you have three thousand, four thousand groupers, males and females, all together, and they form this ball. Same thing—they swim up to the surface and they release these clouds of sperm and eggs, and that's the way they reproduce.

Spectacular! But it's all—yeah, it's all external reproduction. So what can the average person listening to this podcast do to protect the ocean?

There are so many things that people could do. The worst thing we can do is to give people a longer list, basically, because people feel overwhelmed. But there's something that people can do every day that helps not only the ocean but also helps the land and the climate, which is eat less animals and more plants.

That means that if we ate more plants, if we had a flexitarian diet, if not a vegetarian diet, we still would get all the proteins and nutrients that our body needs. It could be better for our health. We wouldn't require so much land because today, in the United States, for example, 41% of the land is used to grow livestock.

41%! We don't need to eat all that red meat. So if we had the flexitarian diet, we would require only half of the surface of the land to produce our food. That other half that is now mostly degraded industrial agriculture, we will be able to give back to nature, so nature will be able to give us all many more benefits in exchange.

Also, livestock produces huge amounts of greenhouse gases; they are a significant contributor to climate change as well. So eating more plants and less animals would be good for our health, for the environment, and for our climate.

If you like what you hear and want to support more content like this, please rate and review us in your podcast app. And please consider a National Geographic subscription. That's the best way to support "Overheard." Go to natgeo.com. Explore more to subscribe. Learn more about the recovery of the coral reefs around the Southern Line Islands in November's National Geographic magazine.

There will be an in-depth article written by Enrique with some gorgeous photographs of this pristine ecosystem, and the article will be available on the website in mid-October. Learn more about the work of Pristine Seas on their website. Just search for Pristine Seas on natgeo.com. That's all in the show notes right there on your podcast app.

This week's "Overheard" episode is produced by Kyrie Douglas. Our producers include Alana Strauss. Our senior producers are Brian Gutierrez and Jacob Pinter. Our senior editor is Eli Chen. Our manager of audio is Carla Wills. Our executive producer of audio is Davara Ardalan. Our photo editor is Julie Howe-Honsdale. Sue sound designed this episode and composed our theme music.

This podcast is a production of National Geographic Partners. The National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world, funds the work of National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Enrique Sala. Whitney Johnson is the director of visuals and immersive experiences. Nathan Lump is National Geographic's editor-in-chief, and I'm your host, Amy Briggs. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!