The Accidental Ecologist
Think citizen science is all about bird counts? This OpenExplorer interview with Laura James will make you rethink everything. It’s a weird, wild, and hopeful new frontier.
Sorry for the subtle technical difficulties. The full transcript is below.
David: Hi everybody! My name is David Lang. I’m here at OpenROV HQ and I’m really excited today to talk to one of my big heroes, Laura James. Laura, you’re up in Seattle is that right?
Laura: Yes, I’m up in Seattle. It’s a beautiful sunny day up here too.
D: So I have to ask how do you self-identify? As a diver? As a videographer? As a citizen scientist? What do you say your title is?
L: That one is really hard. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. First and foremost, I’d say I’m an advocate for Puget Sound or an advocate for our waters, because I don’t fall into any of the categories specifically.
D: Do you have any formal science training? How did you fall in love with the water? How did it happen? What’s the timeline?
L: I got certified in 1990, so that means I’ve been diving for a long long time! The water has always been a part of my world. I grew up here in Seattle in the Northwest. I was in college and my significant other at the time was a diver. He went for a dive with his buddies (they worked for a crab dive up at Mukilteo) and I sat on the beach. They came out of the water ear-to-ear grinning, and this guy was a pretty stoic character, so I thought, “Diving makes him that happy? I’ve got to get a piece of this action!” So I got certified. I was a premed major in college with a heavy leaning towards physics, and my actual interest was neurophysiology. That degree became available at UW literally the year after I graduated. I was like “that would’ve been nice!” But then I started diving and ended up with competing interests — college and diving. I opened a dive shop around ‘91-’92, and got very interested in deep shipwreck diving. I actually took some time off from college because you kind of can’t be a crazy deep shipwreck diver and a full-time student at the same time — at least not the way I was doing it.
D: So you opened a dive shop?
L: Ya, I had this crazy idea that I could do a better job than the shop that trained me. I had a lot more bravado and maybe not as many brains (laughs)
D: I know about that! (laughs)
L: So I opened a shop and it was a little niche market store. We specialized in deep shipwreck diving and we were the first mixed-gas dive shop north of Northern California. We were the first nitrox trimix training facility. There’s a guy, down in CA, but we were it! We had the corner on the crazy market.
D: That’s interesting. Fast forwarding a little bit, tell me the story of what happened with sea star wasting syndrome, because that’s how I came to know about you.
L: I’d probably say five or six years ago I really got into studying the environment and environmental impact on on Puget Sound. I got involved in stormwater education and was shooting video of storm drains flowing into Puget Sound. So I was already become very aware of baseline surveys. I had noticed changes in Puget Sound since I had started diving. There’s been biodiversity shift. There’s been what appears to me less diversity and less marine life in areas that I’ve been diving now for 25 years.
I maybe pay a little bit more attention than the average bear when it comes to the environment. I call it “mindful diving.” I look and I try to really experience it. We heard about the seastar wasting disease going on up in Canada. I just thought it was probably a localized issue with their sewer outflow, or I don’t know what. It was like “Ya, ya, ya, that’s their problem.” And I really honestly didn’t think that much of it. Then because of my endeavors in the environmental stuff I have this great network of friends and extended friends and internet friends who report stuff to me. Anything weird, anything underwater, they report it. They send me pictures. Everyone’s got my [phone number to] text and email and Facebook. One of my good friends, who strangely enough knew me in college, texted me a picture of a washup that was occurring probably about three miles from my house. We both live in West Seattle. All of the sun stars, which are solasters, had washed up on the beach — like hundreds of them: an unprecedented event. I talked to the old people along the shoreline to see, is this a cyclic thing? Has this happened before? We talked to people who had lived out there for 50+/60 years, and this was the first time they’d ever seen anything like that. So I thought, uh oh, this is a big problem.
Almost at the exact same time, other people starting noting it. I’d actually called up the Seattle Aquarium and texted my biologist friend over there and said, “Do you want me to get samples? This is really weird!” They weren’t super interested — they were like, “Meh.” I was going to pile them all into a big garbage pail and take them over and set them there because I was like, this is something bad. Within less than a week we actually started seeing the sun stars dying, and I got out and my dive buddy and I went out. Literally two days after we saw the washup with the sun stars (the solasters) we went out to a really heavily-dove site where everyone does their training, and that’s where I shot the very compelling video of the purple starfish falling off of the pilings, and the dead bodies.
The big thing with the seastar wasting syndrome is that it peaked in the media and then it died off. You’d hear some things and then it died off. That’s what kind of goaded me into real action, because I just felt like, as I said in the one video for PBS, this is the change of my lifetime, because I immediately recognized that there was going to be something wrong.
I follow the newspaper. My dad cuts out newspaper articles for me. I could even show them to you — it’s very cute. August or so the year before last, ages before now, he cut out this article about this local professor, Dr. Paine, who is an ecologist. He’s like the grand-daddy of ecology. He did the penultimate work on keystone species. He’s the guy who coined the term “keystone species,” and he’s right here in Seattle. He’s in his 80's now, or probably late 70's, and he got this award from Japan for his work on keystone species. They wrote it up in the Seattle Times, and he won like $200,000 or something.
The article fascinated me because it talked about pisaster ochraceus, which is the purple sea star. It talked about his research, whereas before he did his research ecologists just kind of sat there and watched what happened. And that was really boring, so he decided that he was going to move stuff and see what happens if you remove something from the food web. What he found out was that [if you remove] keystone species like the purple sea star from the food web, you have a massive and dramatic impact that is unprecedented. You’d never guess that a sea star would have that much of an impact when it was removed. When you removed it from the sea shore system where he did all of his work at — on Tatoosh Island — all of the sudden mussels move in, and the mussels take over the beach and choke out biodiversity. It turns out that sea stars are kind of messy eaters, and so when they’re gobbling up all of those mollusks food goes everywhere and then other things eat that food, so you get more anenomes and sponges. Sea stars really bring life essentially.
So I’d read that article and filed everything away in the back of my noggin. When I saw all of these sea stars dying I thought, “Oh my god, what’s gonna happen?” So it wasn’t just the fact that sea stars were dying, it’s that I had this kind of mild background, having read this story and got very interested in keystone species sometime before.
D: Can I go back to something you had mentioned? You said that there was media coverage about the issue and then it kind of went away, and that was something that spurred you to action because you thought…
L: Yea so I’ve been kind of working with the media and local news stations and KCTS9 and PBS now for four or five years. With regards to storytelling, it’s almost as if I’m a science communicator helping push stories out to the general public in a way that can be consumed. This felt like something that should be noticed and paid attention to, and the fact that it was just doing these little flashes in the pan bothered me. I knew that I could get compelling footage, and if I could get compelling footage it wouldn’t die. The big thing is that there were photographs of like, here’s “pre” and here’s “post,” and as soon as I got out there and saw the stars like hanging and dying I thought: this is money. I mean literally in my head that’s what I thought. I thought, this is amazing. I can’t believe my good fortune to actually capture this event as it’s happening.
D: Mm hmm.
L: And I’m like, I’ve just been given a gift and I am the voice of this in a way. I mean it sounds kind of arrogant, but…
D: One of the things that surprised me about this story is when I first heard about it, I heard about [the disease] at the same time that I heard about this “citizen science” initiative to kind of monitor all of these things. Was that something that you were involved with or something that you got involved with?
L: That was interesting. The marine intertidal network had been documenting. They had a site and then the Vancouver Aquarium had a monitoring site. The problem was the sites were very very cumbersome. To do data entry they wanted full-on protocol, and they had reasonable — moderately reasonable — success, but all the people that I noticed reporting were all scientists. They were all researchers. They were all students. There was no data for our area, and I’m like sitting there looking at the sea stars, but you don’t see like, “Sea stars dying!” So I’d already been paying attention to using social things like that to reach out and connect to the general public.
I’d go these local science talks. The Seattle Science Center puts them on. They’re like, I dunno, beer and science. This one lady, Stephanie Zimmerman, had given a talk about crowd-sourcing for science, and I already knew about Litterati, whose mission is to make a litter-free planet by having people take a picture and Instagram and hashtag #litterati when they pick up some trash wherever they are. What they did with that is make a heat map of the trash which you could then take to your municipality and push for change. Do you need more garbage pails? Do you need more frequent pick ups? What’s going on? Why is this place a litterbug? Who’s littering and why? And so that gave me the idea, and then Stephanie Zimmerman’s presentation — I can send it to you, it’s absolutely fascinating — goes into zooniverse and old weather and all of these super cool ideas to crowd-source for science. I thought, I can harness this, because no one is really harnessing it.
I talked a lot to the scientists. Scientists are very touchy about citizen scientists because we mess up their protocols, or we get great ideas and we go out and do something that’s cool, but they can’t use the information. They’re like, “Ya, would’ve been nice if you’d talked to us.” You know? “We can’t use any of this.” And so, what I decided to do was make something with my dive buddy because I’m not that good at hacking at all, and my dive buddy is a hacker. [We] put together an early morning [monitoring?] system so that the general public could be roped into helping us. The general public was interested.
Part of why the story didn’t pick up steam is because the public couldn’t be involved, and so the other thing I wanted to do was figure out a way to give this thing legs. One way to do that is get the public involved. It’s kind of like a campaign, if you will. It’s kind of like the Obama campaign with the four dollar, one touch donation in my mind. It’s something super simple that the masses can do that makes them feel connected to something bigger.
By making #sickstarfish, we made a little webpage, and I pushed it out to the media to anyone who would listen. We put it in the starfish story on PBS News Hour. Instead of having to do this big cumbersome protocol, people could just go #sickstarfish, and it seemed kind of fun. I wouldn’t say that we had astonishing results and masses of participation, but it really gave the story legs, because here we were doing something that involved the general public — that let them feel connected. It did work. We actually found out about the wasting disease hitting the Oregon Coast before the scientists saw it. We actually had beach watchers down there who reported it a couple weeks — maybe two or three weeks — before the actual scientists got out and did their surveys. So in theory it worked and in practice it actually worked. The scientists, Pete Raimondi I believe, used some of the data. What I really wanted to do was put together a system in real time, with exportable files, where we could build a 3D heat map of a disease or the spread of something based on the public’s eyeballs. We need more eyeballs out there. Just like OpenROV, it democratizes science.
D: Right. Absolutely. I love that story, and there are so many things that I personally am going to take away from all of the things you’ve said. I think there are a lot of lessons. So, now they’ve figured out that [what’s happening to] the starfish was caused by a virus, wasn’t it?
L: Ya, they actually haven’t figured out why, though. They know that the virus is there and causing genetic changes in the [cycles], but we still don’t have a real reason.
D: Okay, so the story continues. The story is ongoing.
L: Oh yea — totally, and we’re seeing the biodiversity shift that Dr. Paine predicted. We’re seeing real changes at dive sites. Like, animals are changing. Pilings where there used to be lots of biodiversity are now barren, and areas where there haven’t been green sea urchins in years are getting piles of adult sea urchins. So they’re moving in from somewhere. They’re coming in because of the lack of predation by the sea stars.
D: And that’s something you’re doing now — is it called “urchin watch?” What is it called?
L: Well it’s still part of #sickseastar because they’re potentially going to get the wasting disease too, so I tried to keep it super simple. If you notice something that has to do with the seastars, hashtag it #sickstarfish and write in the comments what you saw. It’s stupid simple.
D: What I’m really curious about is that it is something that’s ongoing. So it’s not like, we’ve figured out the virus so we’re done.
L: Oh yeah. So that’s what we’re going to do with the kid groups with the OpenROVs. I’m going to enlist — there’s probably a dozen or so — OpenROVs up here, and try to get everyone to continue surveying and rope them all into helping, because the one thing we don’t have right now is any deep water information. Everything has cycles. The purple starfish move up to shallow water and down to deep water depending on the season. So now we’re seeing some bigger stars and they wouldn’t have grown from plankton-size to adult sea star size in a year or eight months. They’re coming from somewhere. The question is where? The scientific divers all stop at about 80 feet because of restrictions and regulations. We don’t have deep water information. We don’t have 100–200 feet. What’s going on with the stars way down there? What is our breeding stock?
D: Wow, interesting. So that’s where you’re using the ROVs. And you mentioned that you’re doing this with students?
L: Mm hmm. I targeted inner city schools and under served communities — [for instance] these after school programs for STEM learning down in Burien, which are basically college prep for the rest of us. You know? Trying to give kids who may not have had such a good chance to go to like, Seattle Prep, or somewhere, the skills they need to get into college and into good science and technology jobs in the future.
The two places I was really lucky to hook up with were the Technology Access Foundation (TAF), and the Environmental Science Center. Both of them just leapt on board. TAF actually has a lego mine storm lab that was donated, I believe, by the Gates Foundation. They have two inner city high schools — very diverse population of students — and it’s part of their STEM training. So again, it’s kind of this college prep for inner city kids who don’t have a lot of options.
They’ve got a little lake, Hicklin Lake, right next to their educational facility, which is a King County facility. I was thinking things like, “How do you get kids outside and doing something hands-on?” One thing led to another. I was already doing some environmental work with the “friends of Hicklin Lake” which [consisted of] this kind of curmudgeon-y, dear-hearted gentleman who passed away. He had lived in White Center, which is this area around Seattle in unincorporated King County. When he was a kid and when his kids were kids, they swam in this little lake. It was like a kid’s swimming pond. Because of stormwater issues and changes it got so polluted that it now has signs and it’s just disgusting. It’s crappy.
He actually got a $60,000 grant to get these cool floating islands put in. They’re made in Scotland. It’s this cool technology where you put these living islands of plants floating around. They’re anchored but their roots, the rhizomes, are supposed to pull all of the nutrients out of the water and help clean it instead of using chemicals every couple of years to kill the cyanobacteria.
What we figured out was that the lake is too polluted and they didn’t have enough money to put in a lot of islands. They were only able to put in a couple, and they needed four or five because of it’s pollution levels and stormwater levels. They need aerators to help stir it up with oxygen in there because the cyanobacteria kills everything.
I got involved with it because when I used to work with Puget Sound Keeper Alliance I had good insider information on how you navigate the Clean Water Act stuff. They had applied for a grant from the Rose Foundation, which has it’s Puget Sound Litigation Fund, and so if Puget Sound Keep Alliance sues a big company like Burlington Northern, or BNSF Railroad for polluting and they get a million dollars, that goes into this remediation fund. The remediation fund can only be spent on restoration projects and projects that impact Puget Sound from a Clean Water Act angle. Because this little stormwater pond didn’t have any official outflows, it’s a stormwater retention pond, no one could connect it to Puget Sound, so it wasn’t really a Clean Water Act issue, and so everyone was kind of blowing it off. I got some of the county people, friends, involved. They were already involved but they weren’t really digging. I asked them, “So where does the water go when it gets full?” Because it when it rains all of the storm water goes flowing into it.
It turns out that King County has big pumps, and they pump water out of it so it doesn’t overflow over everything into this storm water system. So they’re pumping nasty, disgusting, cyanobacteria-laden, polluted-with-tire-rubber-and-hydrocarbons-and-PAHs water, into the storm system that then feeds out to right offshore from a place called Salmon Creek. So technically, King County, is discharging polluted water into Puget Sound when it rains — indirectly-directly. So it becomes a Clean Water Act situation. Knowing what I know, my hope was, well Dick Tourneau, who is the guy who started the “Friends of Hicklin Lake,” was to help him rewrite the grant that he had written using that informatio,n and put them on the hook for this, talking the county into giving some more money, and getting some more money from the Rose Foundation to put in more floating islands. They needed more money, basically, to do this. They had a start. This was an amazing project five or eight years ago, and then he passed away from cancer, so I’m doing all this in his legacy.
D: There’s an overlap between citizen science and civic science: where you guys are getting this information and actually taking action in the community.
L: Yes. And that to me is very important. One thing that frustrates me is when you get all of this great information and you can’t do anything with it and you just sit on it. Like, you just sit there and nothing happens. I’ve always been very action-oriented, and I think that’s also how you get the public involved. The big problem with getting the public involved with environmental activism is that they really don’t see anything happening. They’re like, “Ya, I want to help, but I do this and nothing happens.” That’s why I think that people don’t get really long-term involved, and for retention you need people to feel like they’re part of something.
D: Interesting. Stewart Brand has written a lot about this idea — slow science — this science that takes place over really long periods of time, and these disparate forms of citizen science have actually done a fairly decent job of achieving that. I think what you’re talking about — participation- is a really interesting aspect of that.
L: Well for instance, birding, the Audubon Society, or amateur astronomy, are two huge examples where great things were pushed forward by citizen scientists.
D: Right. No doubt about it. I’ve written a little bit about that. I think that there’s a lot to learn from those two disciplines. What is your vision for the future of citizen science? Where do you think this is going?
L: I think that citizen science is going to be the way that we empower the general public to basically fix the problems that are too big for the government organizations and the nonprofits. Our biggest problem right now, say for Puget Sound, is the stormwater runoff, but there is absolutely no way that we can fix that problem without personal actions by the general public. Again, this whole concept of giving them a reason to be involved and making them feel like their actions count by involving the general public in many multiple ways.
Not everyone is going to need to be a citizen scientist, but once they start seeing the impact and change that the general public can incur, I think that the grassroots approach is going to be key to basically everything. We need to pull back, become hyper-local and be really interested in our own backyards. I’m not going to tell everyone that they need to be interested in Puget Sound. If they don’t like water, I don’t care! I just want them curious and interested in something. Citizen science [is for] the general populace. Science has become inaccessible for too many people. Maybe they don’t have a science degree or they didn’t know it was an option, or they got some other fancy degree and they just never got a chance to follow their curiosity because they were supposed to go make money and babies and stuff. Citizen science makes it okay to not know everything and to be curious and to follow your curiosity and learn. I think it’s a great avenue for this adult learning, or even not adult: college, high school, for people to follow their curiosity. It makes it okay to not know the answer. I guess that’s the big thing for me: learning on the go, just in time.
“We need to pull back, become hyper-local and be really interested in our own backyards. I’m not going to tell everyone that they need to be interested in Puget Sound. If they don’t like water, I don’t care! I just want them curious and interested in something.”
I’m interested in ecology, and I give a presentation now called “The Accidental Ecologist,” and I talk about how I became fascinated by ecology with the sea star wasting syndrome. I was not an ecologist prior, but then I read this article about Dr. Paine, and sea star wasting disease happened, and I email with him all the time now. I went down to his office and we chatted for hours. I’ve sat in discussions between the preeminent scientists on ecology: Dr. Paine, the godfather of ecology and his star student, Drew Harvel, who is the Cornell researcher who is the researcher for sea star wasting syndrome. I got to hear them discuss whether or not this is going to cause extinction in a species. I mean — I got to listen to that! He was worried that it was, but then he was like, “No, species are resilient,” and now eight months later she’s no longer using the word extinction and she’s happy about it. I get involved in these amazing discussions because of the initial trust I’ve built with the scientists. I’ve been let into their world a little bit, and that’s key as well: this kind of collaboration between science and non-science. That’s something that I kind of wanted to touch on. That trust-building and letting go of your ego is really key, because I’m really smart in some areas, but that doesn’t mean I know everything. Just like a scientist can be really smart in their areas, and maybe not know how to reach the public so well, or do a campaign.
One of the neat things about the sea star wasting syndrome, is now we’ve got the Emergency Disease Marine Act. I think it’s in the House right now. A congressman actually saw the story, and was like, “How did we not have enough money to study this appropriately?” He wrote a bill to set aside 12 million dollars a year for emergency marine diseases in the future that are coming from us [humans]. If this becomes the law, it’s got everything written into it: emergency preparedness, a task force, a committee that will mobilize within x-number of days, etc. That would’ve been super helpful.
D: Will that involve citizen science? Will that have a place for citizen scientists?
L: I hope so. It’s not specifically listed as that, but part of the task force is figuring out how to utilize resources, and if the same people who were involved in the sea star wasting syndrome — then yes.
Back to the original discussion: the scientists put together a beautiful protocol. There was really just a lot of stuff in it. It was like, you had to be able to tell the grade of disease and the size of the sea star. You had to do a 50' and you had to know whether 5% had grade I and 15% had grade II, and so for the general public that’s a lot like work. And they’re not as intrigued by that kind of stuff. So that’s why the scientific protocol wasn’t quite so popular [with] the general public. What I’m hoping is that as it becomes clearer and there is this space for crowdsourcing in science, that we think of more creative methods to get the general public involved if that makes sense. Ya!! (laughs) So that’s sea star wasting syndrome in a big-ass nutshell!! (laughs)
D: I could sit here and talk to you for probably the whole day, and I think we should do that at some point, but I want to end this one now just so we have a bite-sized hour that people can watch, and then we’ll see what questions emerge. Maybe we can have more specific follow-up discussions.
L: Ya! The really amazing take-home is that individual action can have such a big impact. Like the fact that I got interested, went out, shot some video — Katie Campell and PBS made a story that caught some congressman’s eye, and he wrote a bill and now we’re gonna campaign for it — you know? We’re going to try to get a flash mob of people to put on purple tee-shirts and stand in a giant sea star shape. I don’t know when and where (laughs) — a giant star mob — building support for this. We’ve got bipartisan and bicoastal support, and we’ve got the kids! The whole reason we did the robots was to take these kids from Arkansas “diving” in a place where they did the fundraiser. I think it’s the most powerful thing, because it helps create and activate and empower the public, and that is the best instrument of change that we’ve got going for us.
D: I love it. Cool. You’re my hero. Thank you so much! We’ll do it again.
L: Sounds great!
