Living At The Edge of the Unknown: Deep Coral Reef Pioneer Dr. Richard Pyle on A Life of Exploration

Jason Elias: 0:54

Hi and welcome to the Big Deep podcast. Big Deep is a podcast about people who have a connection to the ocean, People for whom that connection is so strong it defines some aspect of their life. Over the course of this series we'll talk to all sorts of people and in each episode we'll explore the deeper meaning of that connection. Today, I speak with an explorer and fish scientist whose passion for exploration has driven a rethinking of the world's coral reefs. Hello, this is your host, Jason Elias. Welcome to the Big Deep podcast. In today's episode, I speak with explorer, renowned icthyologist and deep coral reef pioneer, Richard Pyle. Richard's life story has been one of adventure and exploration, particularly a fascination with deep coral reefs far below where most recreational divers dive. And this points to a deeper aspect of Richard's personality, a part I resonated with, which is challenging and rethinking deeply held assumptions about our world. Because of this, he is now seen as a true pioneer, evidenced in a popular TED talk he did about the deep reefs, which he calls the Twilight Zone. So came as no surprise that Richard was engaging, energetic and full of life, And we spoke about how his family first saw his connection to fish when he was just a little baby, his unexpected path to a groundbreaking career and a seminal dive experience he had with a prehistoric fish the world knows as the sea-lacanth.

Richard Pyle: 2:27

My name is Richard Pyle. I'm the senior curator of ichthyology at Bishop Museum in Honolulu And I mostly study coral reef fishes.

Jason Elias: 2:36

So I always start off by asking people to talk about when they first remember their connection to the ocean, but I think yours comes even a little bit earlier than most. Could you talk a bit about that?

Richard Pyle: 2:46

I was born in Hawaii and my family at the time lived near the beach in Kailua on the island of Oahu. I was a little bit of a fussy child And according to family lore my mom would prop me up in front of the saltwater aquarium in the living room and that would cause me to stare at the fish as they swam back and forth. That's where this fascination for fishes began, and I remember as a kid there was a pet store near our house And I remember those saltwater fish were so unbelievably exotic. They were just so colorful and so graceful that I fantasized about one day seeing these things in real life.

Jason Elias: 3:28

So you obviously had a connection to the ocean and fish from a very early age and you might have thought that your life's path would be preordained. But you took a little bit of a longer journey to get there and I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit of that story.

Richard Pyle: 3:43

I guess my life story was a fascination for fishes throughout most of my childhood and teenage years And after my first semester at college I started realizing is this going to be it? Is this the same old grind? I was looking for adventure at the time because, as a teenager, adventure was what was driving me. So I dropped out of college and I spent six months in Palau in the western Pacific to set up an aquarium export business And, coincidentally, a guy named Jack Randall came down to Palau. Now Jack Randall, by multiple metrics, is the greatest ichthyologist who ever lived Most number of discovered new species and 100 more publications than the second most prolific ichthyologist in history. So Jack was truly a one-of-a-kind person and I didn't fully appreciate that at the time, but I did know that he was one of the greats. He had a grant from the National Geographic Society to go do some fish surveys down in Palau and he needed someone with a boat. And guess what? I had a boat. So I spent two of the most magical weeks of my life going out diving with this amazing, historically important person. So towards the end of his trip, the last day of diving for him, i hadn't yet found something he'd never seen before And I wanted to find something. So I decided to push the limits deeper And I got down to about 250 feet on a single tank of air, pushed my luck and stayed beyond the time that I needed to stay. So out of air at 180 feet I essentially did a free ascent, barely made it to the surface. I was approaching shallow water blackout And about that moment I started feeling pain in my joints and my legs and I realized right, i just blew off a lot of decompression. I climbed in the boat and within minutes I started losing control of my arms and my legs. I started seeing stars and I knew this was the real deal. They were getting the recompression chamber ready on Palau. I spent eight hours in that chamber and I came out quadriplegic. They flew me back to Hawaii and then I spent a month in chamber treatments, gradually regaining my ability to walk. It took me another year before I could walk without a serious limp and a cane, and you would think that that would have been among the worst days of my life. But in retrospect I mostly recovered. I do have some neurological deficiencies 35 years later. I'm okay with that. In order for my father's insurance to cover me. I had to be a student, so I had to enroll back in school. That led me to getting a PhD and becoming a true academic. While I was in school I met my wife, and so my kids wouldn't have existed because I never would have met my wife. But probably most of all, jack Randall felt guilty. He wasn't, he held no responsibility of that incident, but Jack offered to be my PhD advisor. So I was the last student of the greatest ideologist in history And he offered me a job at Bishop Museum. That was 1986. Here I am in my same office I started using 36 years ago. So everything good in my life I can trace to that accident and pull out. That was the single best day of my life.

Jason Elias: 7:37

Wow, that is a truly incredible story, and I think what it points to is a willingness to stay open to opportunities or even challenging deeply held assumptions about the way things should be, and I also see a parallel in that in some of your science, in particular, your interesting take on evolution. Could you talk a bit about why you think there are no defined categories of species and what that means?

Richard Pyle: 8:05

There's been a debate in the biological community What is a species? And only one definition is true which is a species is what a taxonomist says it is, and what I mean by that is evolution does not produce species. Evolution produces populations of organisms that interbreed or don't interbreed with each other, which we as humans want to fit into boxes. Now, while it's a continuum, it's not a smooth continuum. It's a lumpy continuum, and those lumps are where we draw our boundaries between species. The continuum part is, every living thing on the planet can trace its ancestry back to the same origin. So a fish, a coelacanth walk evolution backwards, generation after generation after generation, hundreds of millions of years. We shared an ancestor. That's the continuous part of it, the unbroken chain of reproductive events that all life on Earth is plugged into.

Jason Elias: 9:04

I get a thrill when I hear stories that challenge assumptions that we've always had, the underpinnings of what we always believed to be true. That might not actually be so solid, and I think that speaks well for your science, because that's the way science should always be approached. But even with all that, it seems like there's some personal things that drive you. So what is it that underpins that sense of exploration and discovery that really seems to motivate you? And why specifically the ocean? Is there something there for you?

Richard Pyle: 9:36

I grew up in a family of bird watchers. My father was the president of Audubon Society in Hawaii And my brother is widely known as a world expert on certain kinds of birds. So I was oversaturated with birds as a young child, and I think that helps solidify my interest in going to the other world, a place where humans don't normally tread, and I think that taps into the passion of mine, which is I like to see things that nobody else has ever seen before. It's the real deal. For me, it's something that's absolutely fundamental to my core. There's a certain thrill and an excitement in knowing that you're the first person to see anything. The ocean still holds enormous swaths of biodiversity that still has not yet been encountered by humans. Part of my thrill of understanding and exploring the ocean is discovering things, and that's another one of those core passions that just gives me a sense of euphoria. The world now knows something that it didn't know before. Some of the things I do, it's sort of like in those precious moments where you're right on the edge of something, you are somewhere where nobody's ever been before. The motivation for doing this is not the thrill, it's not the adrenaline rush. The thrill is filling a gap in human knowledge about this planet. Yeah sure, risk of death on these deep dives can be exciting and it might be dangerous, but the upside is the thrill of closing gaps in our knowledge about this planet while we still can. Looking at the outer edge, at the frontier of where the known meets the unknown, that's what I find most exciting.

Jason Elias: 11:47

Wow, that is so inspiring. Okay, so we take your passion for discovery and exploration, your motivation to challenge assumptions we might have about the world, and that takes us to a topic you're very well known for, which is deep coral reefs, or the Twilight Zone as you call it. And what's interesting is that you argue the coral reefs we think of the warm tropical waters off the beach in Tahiti are really the smallest and maybe even least important part of a larger ecosystem in the ocean. So can you talk a bit about that and tell us why you think deep coral reefs are so important?

Richard Pyle: 12:27

Most people, when they think about coral reefs, they imagine what you see in magazines and on TV lots of colorful fish swimming around in brightly lit shallow reefs. And that's what, honestly, most scientists think about when they think about a coral reef. But coral reefs don't stop at 100 feet just because scuba divers stop at 100 feet. Coral reefs keep on going. Now there is a discrete line somewhere around five or 600 feet. deep Sea water gets deeper. less and less light reaches there at some point, across as a threshold where there's not enough to drive photosynthesis. Now we as humans know a whole lot about the top 30 feet of that. We know a bit more about the 30 to 60 foot range and we know a little bit about the 60 to 100 foot range. But even if you give it all the way to 100 feet, we're still looking at only one-fifth of the total depth range, just a small percentage. let's call it 20%. And you know what? That's a very anomalous 20% because it happens to be at the edge of coral reef habitat, that's, right near the surface, where the light is brightest and the temperatures are warmest and the effects of storm surge is greatest and the effects of siltation are most direct. The reason I frame it this way is because we're terrestrial humans and we're limited in how deep we can go underwater. We're biased in our perspective of what matters into what's proximal to us. But my realization of the importance of these deep coral reefs is this is where the real action is. This is where the meat of coral reefs resides, and we're finding up to 12 new species per hour of time we spend in this stuff. You can't do that with any other vertebrate anywhere on earth. So most coral reefs are the deep coral reefs And the world is kind of woken up to the importance of these deep coral reefs and I'm really happy to have played some kind of role in that.

Jason Elias: 14:09

Well, I think you certainly have, And I think it's pretty evident even from the energy and passion you show just talking about these things why you have had that impact. And I think that takes us to a story which I feel really encapsulates all the essential aspects of what we've been talking about today. It happened for you on a dive off the coast of Africa, And I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about that dive and why it meant so much to you.

Richard Pyle: 14:36

A few years ago we had the opportunity to go to South Africa for a National Geographic film, to dive with a living fossil, the coelacanth. The sea lacanth was a fish that was known from the fossil record and was thought to have gone extinct 70 million years ago, when all the dinosaurs went extinct until the 1930s when someone found one on a fishing boat in South Africa. It shocked the world. Still considered to be one of the greatest biological discoveries of the 20th century, It was essentially the discovery of a living dinosaur that somehow managed to survive all the way until this time. It was discovered in the 30s. People searched and searched and searched for it. Over time People founded up the coast of Africa Madagascar but oddly nobody ever found it again in South Africa. Then, in around the year 2000, a group of deep divers using rebreaters were diving off of Sadwana Bay in South Africa and they came up from a dive and a fellow said Hey, I saw one of them sea lacanths down there. And sure enough, he saw seven sea lacanths in one cave. A fellow named Peter Tim who was a dive instructor and leader at the group. He knew at that moment this was a big deal. So National Geographic wanted to tell this story And they reached out to us to be the scientists to go down and dive with these sea lacanths. So we did a long series of dives with this guy, Peter Tim, And dive after dive after dive, we dove the same stretch of ledge where Peter has known the sea lacanths to show up from time to time. Nothing, nothing, nothing. And then on the 13th dive, my partner, Rob Whitten, and I were up shallow waiting for Peter and the other photographer to come up and they weren't coming up. So Rob and I start swimming out over the ledge and look over the edge of the drop off And we saw a guy filming a sea lacanth. They had found one. So I got to go face to face with a sea lacanth. The sea lacanth is one of the holy grails of all of biodiversity And here I am face to face with it. It's seven feet long. It's probably two feet in diameter. It's enormous and amazingly graceful. One of the characteristics of the sea lacanth make it special is its fins are almost like limbs. It's almost got legs And people speculate that that might be how fishes originally walked out onto land Watching it sculpt the water with those fins. It was incredibly graceful, But the moment that stands out for me is finally the other diver said look, we got to get out of here, It's time to go. We're like 15 minutes into the dive. We're really screwed. We're going to be having a horrendous decompression. But I wasn't ready to leave yet. So there was a moment there where it was just me and the sea lacanth. We were the only two large vertebrates around The sea. Lacanth didn't swim away from my light, Kind of gracefully sat by me, And then it started swimming in a direction where its tail came towards me And I cautiously reached out and I put my hand on its tail as it glided by me And I felt the scales go across my fingertips. At that moment we bonded Me and my 400 million year distant ancestor finally met. We touched each other. That's something that's etched in my mind forever.

Jason Elias: 19:25

Finally, we end every interview and every episode with a single open-ended question. we ask everyone we talk to What does the ocean mean to you?

Richard Pyle: 19:36

The ocean, to me, is the planet. In the same way that the deep coral reefs represent the bulk of coral reef habitat and the parts we're familiar with are the fringe, the terrestrial world is the fringe of planet Earth. What makes Earth special is its oceans. The ocean is the true deep biodiversity on this planet.

Jason Elias: 20:01

Thanks for listening to the Big Deep podcast Next time on Big Deep. We really appreciate you being on this journey into the Big Deep as we explore an ocean of stories. If you like what we're doing, please make sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, please like and comment, because those subscribes, likes and comments really make a difference For more interviews, deeper discussions with our guests, photos and updates on anything you've heard. There's a lot more content at our website, bigdeepcom Plus. If you know someone we should think we should talk to, let us know at our Big Deep website, as we are always looking to hear more stories from interesting people who are deeply connected to our world's oceans. Thanks again for joining us.