Steve Simpson is Professor of Marine Biology and Global Change in the School of Biological Sciences. He talks about the lure and strangeness of the underwater world, the importance of ‘active hope’, and being a scientific adviser on the Netflix documentary Our Oceans.
Some of my earliest memories are of family holidays on beaches in Yorkshire, Devon and Dorset, exploring rock pools and finding these entire worlds filled with alien–like creatures. In my teens, I went scuba diving on holiday in the Mediterranean and discovered the thrill of exploration – and quickly pivoted from medicine to marine biology as my career direction. I’ve never lost that sense of wonder, and I have the privilege of passing that on to students and collaborators around the world.
Underwater heroes
I’ve had several inspirational figures in my career. As an undergraduate, I was taught by Professor Trevor Norton – an incredible sprite of a man. He brought the audience into his world while teaching us about, say, chemical warfare between seaweeds and sea slugs. Another was Dr Mark Meekan, an Australian marine biologist I was lucky to work with during my PhD. Both Trevor and Mark had a very creative, almost artistic approach to science; I channel them every time I get into the lecture theatre.
More recently, I’ve been lucky to work with Dr Sylvia Earle, the marine oceanographer extraordinaire: people call Sylvia ‘Her Deepness’. She’s in her late 80s now, but still full of life and passion.
The right stuff
There are lots of reasons not to get into the ocean. It’s an environment that can kill you if you make mistakes or panic, get lost, run out of air… So you do it with the right preparation, equipment and training – and to begin with, you need to be a calm person.
You’re really the equivalent of an astronaut, entering another universe. Our senses have evolved to work in air, so our perception of the world is primarily visual. We can see long distances, but sound doesn’t travel so well up here. Underwater, you can’t see that far, but you’re physically part of the ocean, so you move with everything else – swells and currents – and sound travels straight through you.
I think there’s something very ethereal about getting back to our evolutionary origin in the ocean. We probably feel our animal selves more than we do on land.
The work and the wonder
If you’re diving down to do an experiment or a survey, you always make sure you’ve got a quarter of an hour at the end. Sometimes you lie on the bottom and look up at the surface, or you just stop swimming and see where the current takes you. It’s like flying: you’re just being washed across the seabed.
The ocean’s full of surprises, which can interfere if you’re trying to focus. Once I was in the Bahamas on a field course, teaching students how to take photographs of seagrass. As they got started, I heard the clicking, whistling sound of dolphins. They soon found us, and for about 45 minutes they swam with us, wanting to play and to check us out. Probably the lowest moment in my teaching career was having to tell my students that they had to leave the dolphins and get back to photographing seagrass!
Noises off (and on)
The ocean is full of animals that make noise. There are tens of thousands of species of fish, marine mammals, crustaceans, mussels opening and closing, sea urchins grinding away on rocks… but we’re also adding our own soundscape with human noise pollution.
Acoustic science now allows us to make a direct measure of the health of the ocean, since biological noise is a key indicator, and we’ve done a lot of research into the sources and effects of human noise pollution. Some effects can mean life or death, or failure to breed. Thankfully we’ve now moved towards finding solutions: What happens if we move the shipping lane further away? Or if we redesign propellers, or shift from petrol engines to electric engines?
Our Oceans and our students
Bristol really is Green Hollywood – it’s where most nature documentaries are made. I’ve developed relationships with the production companies, so if producers are starting with a blank canvas, I get the chance to go and bounce ideas around and discuss the breakthroughs we want to communicate to viewers. We can also help the research team make connections and relationships with scientists.
For us, it’s a huge privilege to be able to reach audiences far greater than our scientific community, and for them it’s essential to have the latest science. We’ve had three Masters students working on Our Oceans, each of them doing valuable research which has changed the script – effectively putting words into Barack Obama’s mouth!
There have been other outcomes, too: when three students on our Masters programme, Science Communication for a Better Planet, spent their summer working with the Our Oceans team, they produced a podcast series, The Voice of Our Oceans, which links to each episode and features a lot of the filmmakers and scientists.
Hope in action
Nature is hugely resilient: if we stop fishing in a particular population of fish or trawling a region of the seabed, they almost always bounce back. That’s something we can bank on when the time is right: things like coral reef restoration, gene banks and marine protected areas will be critical to recolonising areas currently threatened by human practice.
Climate change is the existential challenge to many ocean ecosystems. Some political movements still try to downplay the impacts, but scientifically we know what climate change is and what’s causing it. Politics and economics must now allow the solutions to become the new path forward. It may currently feel expensive, difficult and painful, but it could become the most economically viable path.
I guess I’ve always been an optimist. Within our research field, and in our teaching, we’re trying to move from optimism to active hope, which is the daily practice of making that optimistic vision a reality. I think if that spreads wide enough, we really can change the narrative of the future into something very positive.
Want to find out more? Try these videos.
Changing the Soundtrack of the Ocean: Professor Simpson’s 2019 TEDx Talk
Fish Sounds: Do fish talk to each other?: from BBC Earth
Restoring Our Reefs: from the BBC’s Our Changing Planet series (on iPlayer until March 2025)