The Fragile Biosphere We Call Home — Salmon in the Classroom May Save the Planet
This is a choose-your-own-adventure blog. We’ll all start in the same place, and then as the reader, you can decide which story you want to read.
Mr. Lee’s Science Room
Mr. Lee’s science room was venerated and feared. He was a strict educator. He’d taught generations of students with dedication, instilling an understanding of the essentials of scientific inquiry and exploration. He was a fixture of my elementary school.
His classroom had a distinct “science room” smell. A large jar sat above the chalkboard, filled with water. We measured how long it would take to evaporate — beakers, Bunsen burners, Newton measures and miscellaneous jars filled shelves, housing different creatures. Astronaut suits made by 6th graders hung from the ceiling. And, quizzically, a big fish tank sat on the counter on the right side of the classroom.
Every year, Mr. Lee conducted a special project with 7th graders learning about the lifecycle of salmon. In Western Canada, Pacific salmon are an important part of nature’s landscape. Mr. Lee would bring salmon roe to his classroom every year, and week-by-week, we would watch the roe develop, seeing how many would hatch to alevins (tiny fish with the yolk sac of the egg attached to their bellies) and then how many would develop into fry. The process took several months and ended with the class releasing the surviving fry into a stream where they could continue their journey.
Now is the fun part. Do you want to read about the challenges of being a fish and how this is being addressed today through innovation? If so, read “The Challenges of Being a Fish Today and the Innovations Solving These Problems.”
Or, if you are interested in how science and the humanities can work together to advance innovation, skip down to read: “Why Science Needs the Humanities.”
Option #1 The Challenges of Being a Fish Today and the Innovations Solving These Problems
The journey of salmon to reach growth and maturation, fight upstream to spawn, and begin the cycle again is grueling. It’s a miracle when any salmon survive to reach the spawning stage.
Salmon aren’t the only fish with challenges. Being a fish today is tough. Overfishing, pollution in waterways, and ocean acidification all impact sea life's survival.
Innovators around the world are developing solutions to improve life under the sea. Israel’s innovation ecosystem has become globally known for its ability to tackle some of the world’s most pressing climate change issues. Here are some of the solutions being developed in the Startup Nation.
Alternative Proteins Can Reduce Overfishing
Israeli companies are at the forefront of alternative protein development. In the fish arena, Oshi (formerly Plantish) aims to eliminate overfishing and sea pollution and produces whole-cut seafood fillets made exclusively from plants. Others like WandaFish, E-FISHient and Sea2Cell utilize cell culturing methods to produce fish products using only source fish cells. Cell culturing technologies utilize cells (whether fish, meat, dairy or otherwise) that grow and multiply in reactors and ultimately are harvested to create cultivated fish meat. Each company takes its proprietary approach to cultivation, but all have a mission of protecting and rehabilitating marine ecosystems and providing a more sustainable fish option.
Combatting Ocean Acidification Improves Marine Ecosystems
The world is mostly ocean — more than 70% of the planet is covered in water. The oceans serve as one of our most essential CO2 sinks. CarbonBlue, a company that removes CO2 from oceans and locks it away where it cannot impact our atmosphere, explains that our CO2 emissions have risen above the ocean’s capacity to absorb them. Its solution combines calcium — one of the ocean’s most abundant elements — to mineralize, separate and remove dissolved CO2 from oceans.
This process not only “frees” the ocean’s ability to absorb additional CO2 from the atmosphere, but it also prevents ocean acidification. This is crucial for sea life, which has evolved to survive in an alkaline ecosystem.
Preventing Waste from Entering Our Waterways
Whether at the beach or in a forest with a river running through, we sadly see garbage in our environment almost everywhere. This waste doesn’t just sit in the water — it can harm animal life and contaminate our water supplies. It’s become well-known that our oceans are filled with microplastics. These microplastics find their way into the food we eat and into our bodies.
How we deal with our waste on land matters to our waterways. Companies like UBQ Materials are finding better solutions for our waste. Instead of dumping garbage into landfills or allowing waste to pollute our water, UBQ Materials converts all organic and unrecyclable waste into a novel thermoplastic. This helps prevent waste from going to landfills and polluting our environment and provides a circular material solution for manufacturing — everyone wins!
These are just a few solutions to tackling oceanic challenges and hardships facing fish today. When it comes to innovations helping out oceans and sea life, the world is our oyster.
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Option #2: Why Science Needs the Humanities
Mr. Lee wasn’t my only life-influencing teacher during 7th grade. I had an incredible Language Arts teacher as well. Reading, writing, research projects and book reports were her wheelhouse. She once asked us to write a descriptive essay about our bedrooms. We were tasked to explore every inch and detail of our rooms, painting a picture in colors, textures, sounds and smells. I had always been a bookworm when I was young, but this was when I learned that my words could make an impression.
As a college student, I studied English Literature. But, for my science requirement, I studied biology. I loved making sense of the stories biology had to tell. Descriptions of human body systems and how each worked together were like reading a novel with disparate threads woven together to form a tapestry.
The environmental sciences, too, are filled with heroic narratives of glaciers forming landscapes, tectonic plates shifting over the Earth’s crust, and even salmon fighting their way upstream to spawn in the very riverbeds in which they were born.
The Adventures of Science Are Composed by Communicators
Why is science fiction such a popular genre? Why do kids (and adults) love science museums? We love to engage in what is possible — and what may have once seemed impossible. We want to watch a rocket ship make it to the moon, and then watch movies repeatedly telling the story with greater detail.
We want to understand why and how a virus, such as COVID, could spread so rapidly and bring humanity to a halt, and how scientific advances in biology, immunology, computer science and other fields came together to solve this problem. Then we want to read a book about how it all unfolded or watch a documentary on the evolution of mRNA vaccines.
While not everyone may understand the “science” behind these stories, they can appreciate the value and societal impact of the discoveries. The sciences all have their stories to tell. But it takes writers and storytellers to bring these adventures to life.
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Of course, these two disparate ideas are ultimately connected, so let’s end the adventure together again.
Mr. Lee’s Science Room, the Challenges of Being a Fish, and Communicating Science’s Stories
When I was in 7th grade, Mr. Lee taught me about the lifecycle of salmon. He created a biosphere to sustain and support salmon life. We examined this biosphere, learning that temperature, food supply, water cleanliness and oxygen transfer all played a role in whether the roe developed into alevins and fry strong enough to be released into streams.
Today, we are the salmon swimming upstream in the biosphere we call Earth. The odds may be against us to overcome the climate change and environmental challenges we are up against. We’re working to understand how to reduce our impact on the earth’s temperature, how to secure our food supply, clean our waterways, and ensure we have the oxygen needed to sustain life on our planet. Brilliant scientists, engineers and policymakers are solving these challenges (see: The Challenges of Being a Fish Today above).
However, scientific exploration and advanced innovation can’t remain with researchers and scientists alone. Good communicators must illustrate why these global environmental challenges matter, and how we will innovate to counter their dangers and speed them into the economic cycle. With any luck, we will journey upstream to renew the cycle of life once more.
