1: http : / / www.ted.com / talks / stephen _ palumbi _ following _ the _ mercury _ trail.html

2: There 's a tight and surprising link between the ocean 's health and ours , says marine biologist Stephen Palumbi . He shows how toxins at the bottom of the ocean food chain find their way into our bodies , with a shocking story of toxic contamination from a Japanese fish market . His work points a way forward for saving the oceans ' health -- and humanity 's .

3: fish , health , mission blue , oceans , science

4: 899

5: Stephen Palumbi : Following the mercury trail

7: It can be a very complicated thing , the ocean .

8: And it can be a very complicated thing , what human health is .

9: And bringing those two together might seem a very daunting task , but what I 'm going to try to say is that even in that complexity , there 's some simple themes that I think , if we understand , we can really move forward .

10: And those simple themes aren 't really themes about the complex science of what 's going on , but things that we all pretty well know .

11: And I 'm going to start with this one : If momma ain 't happy , ain 't nobody happy .

12: We know that , right ? We 've experienced that .

13: And if we just take that and we build from there , then we can go to the next step , which is that if the ocean ain 't happy , ain 't nobody happy .

14: That 's the theme of my talk .

15: And we 're making the ocean pretty unhappy in a lot of different ways .

16: This is a shot of Cannery Row in 1932 .

17: Cannery Row , at the time , had the biggest industrial canning operation on the west coast .

18: We piled enormous amounts of pollution into the air and into the water .

19: Rolf Bolin , who was a professor at the Hopkin 's Marine Station where I work , wrote in the 1940s that " The fumes from the scum floating on the inlets of the bay were so bad they turned lead-based paints black . "

20: People working in these canneries could barely stay there all day because of the smell , but you know what they came out saying ?

21: They say , " You know what you smell ?

22: You smell money . "

23: That pollution was money to that community , and those people dealt with the pollution and absorbed it into their skin and into their bodies because they needed the money .

24: We made the ocean unhappy ; we made people very unhappy , and we made them unhealthy .

25: The connection between ocean health and human health is actually based upon another couple simple adages , and I want to call that " pinch a minnow , hurt a whale . "

26: The pyramid of ocean life ...

27: Now , when an ecologist looks at the ocean -- I have to tell you -- we look at the ocean in a very different way , and we see different things than when a regular person looks at the ocean because when an ecologist looks at the ocean , we see all those interconnections .

28: We see the base of the food chain , the plankton , the small things , and we see how those animals are food to animals in the middle of the pyramid , and on so up this diagram .

29: And that flow , that flow of life , from the very base up to the very top , is the flow that ecologists see .

30: And that 's what we 're trying to preserve when we say , " Save the ocean . Heal the ocean . "

31: It 's that pyramid .

32: Now why does that matter for human health ?

33: Because when we jam things in the bottom of that pyramid that shouldn 't be there , some very frightening things happen .

34: Pollutants , some pollutants have been created by us : that can 't be broken down by our bodies .

35: And they go in the base of that pyramid , and they drift up ; they 're passed up that way , on to predators and on to the top predators , and in so doing , they accumulate .

36: Now , to bring that home , I thought I 'd invent a little game .

37: We don 't really have to play it ; we can just think about it here .

38: It 's the Styrofoam and chocolate game .

39: Imagine that when we got on this boat , we were all given two Styrofoam peanuts .

40: Can 't do much with them : Put them in your pocket .

41: Suppose the rules are : every time you offer somebody a drink , you give them the drink , and you give them your Styrofoam peanuts too .

42: What 'll happen is that the Styrofoam peanuts will start moving through our society here , and they will accumulate in the drunkest , stingiest people .

43: There 's no mechanism in this game for them to go anywhere but into a bigger and bigger pile of indigestible Styrofoam peanuts .

44: And that 's exactly what happens with PDBs in this food pyramid : They accumulate into the top of it .

45: Now suppose , instead of Styrofoam peanuts , we take these lovely little chocolates that we get and we had those instead .

46: Well , some of us would be eating those chocolates instead of passing them around , and instead of accumulating , they will just pass into our group here and not accumulate in any one group because they 're absorbed by us .

47: And that 's the difference between a PCB and , say , something natural like an omega-3 , something we want out of the marine food chain .

48: PCBs accumulate .

49: We have great examples of that , unfortunately .

50: PCBs accumulate in dolphins in Sarasota Bay , in Texas , in North Carolina .

51: They get into the food chain .

52: The dolphins eat the fish that have PCBs from the plankton , and those PCBs , being fat-soluble , accumulate in these dolphins .

53: Now , a dolphin , mother dolphin , any dolphin -- there 's only one way that a PCB can get out of a dolphin .

54: And what 's that ?

55: In mother 's milk .

56: Here 's a diagram of the PCB load of dolphins in Sarasota Bay .

57: Adult males : a huge load .

58: Juveniles : a huge load .

59: Females after their first calf is already weaned : a lower load .

60: Those females , they 're not trying to .

61: Those females are passing the PCBs in the fat of their own mother 's milk into their offspring , and their offspring don 't survive .

62: The death rate in these dolphins , for the first calf born of every female dolphin , is 60 to 80 percent .

63: These mothers pump their first offspring full of this pollutant , and most of them die .

64: Now , the mother then can go and reproduce , but what a terrible price to pay for the accumulation of this pollutant in these animals -- the death of the first-born calf .

65: There 's another top predator in the ocean , it turns out .

66: That top predator , of course , is us .

67: And we also are eating meat that comes from some of these same places .

68: This is whale meat that I photographed in a grocery store in Tokyo -- or is it ?

69: In fact , what we did a few years ago was learn how to smuggle a molecular biology lab into Tokyo and use it to genetically test the DNA out of whale meat samples and identify what they really were .

70: And some of those whale meat samples were whale meat .

71: Some of them were illegal whale meat , by the way .

72: That 's another story .

73: But some of them were not whale meat at all .

74: Even though they were labeled whale meat , they were dolphin meat .

75: Some of them were dolphin liver . Some of them were dolphin blubber .

76: And those dolphin parts had a huge load of PCBs , dioxins and heavy metals .

77: And that huge load was passing into the people that ate this meat .

78: It turns out that a lot of dolphins are being sold as meat in the whale meat market around the world .

79: That 's a tragedy for those populations , but it 's also a tragedy for the people eating them because they don 't know that that 's toxic meat .

80: We had these data a few years ago .

81: I remember sitting at my desk being about the only person in the world who knew that whale meat being sold in these markets was really dolphin meat , and it was toxic .

82: It had two-to-three-to-400 times the toxic loads ever allowed by the EPA .

83: And I remember there sitting at my desk thinking , " Well , I know this . This is a great scientific discovery , " but it was so awful .

84: And for the very first time in my scientific career , I broke scientific protocol , which is that you take the data and publish them in scientific journals and then begin to talk about them .

85: We sent a very polite letter to the Minister of Health in Japan and simply pointed out that this is an intolerable situation , not for us , but for the people of Japan because mothers who may be breastfeeding , who may have young children , would be buying something that they thought was healthy , but it was really toxic .

86: That led to a whole series of other campaigns in Japan , and I 'm really proud to say that at this point , it 's very difficult to buy anything in Japan that 's labeled incorrectly , even though they 're still selling whale meat , which I believe they shouldn 't .

87: But at least it 's labeled correctly , and you 're no longer going to be buying toxic dolphin meat instead .

88: It isn 't just there that this happens , but in a natural diet of some communities in the Canadian arctic and in the United States and in the European arctic , a natural diet of seals and whales leads to an accumulation of PCBs that have gathered up from all parts of the world and ended up in these women .

89: These women have toxic breast milk .

90: They cannot feed their offspring , their children , their breast milk because of the accumulation of these toxins in their food chain , in their part of the world 's ocean pyramid .

91: That means their immune systems are compromised .

92: It means that their children 's development can be compromised .

93: And the world 's attention on this over the last decade has reduced the problem for these women , not by changing the pyramid , but by changing what they particularly eat out of it .

94: We 've taken them out of their natural pyramid in order to solve this problem .

95: That 's a good thing for this particular acute problem , but it does nothing to solve the pyramid problem .

96: There 's other ways of breaking the pyramid .

97: The pyramid , if we jam things in the bottom , can get backed up like a sewer line that 's clogged .

98: And if we jam nutrients , sewage , fertilizer in the base of that food pyramid , it can back up all through it .

99: We end up with things we 've heard about before : red tides , for example , which are blooms of toxic algae floating through the oceans causing neurological damage .

100: We can also see blooms of bacteria , blooms of viruses in the ocean .