Peter: Rae, sometimes I think about just how much photography and video can really change people’s attitudes towards animals and conversation. Like when people get to see drone footage of a herd of elephants, or a glimpse of endangered Mexican Red Wolves, thanks to photographers’ long lenses. That’s powerful.
Dr. Rae: Yeah, and you know photography is so important with storytelling, right? I mean, we’re in the business of, you know, making film and television to tell stories about conservation, but man, oh man, I mean photography, I am a very amateur photographer, so I have so much deep respect for the true professionals.
[THEME MUSIC IN]
Peter: I’m Peter Gros, wildlife expert and educator.
Dr. Rae: And I’m wildlife ecologist Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant. This is Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom: The Podcast. Episode 4: Kelp Forest Photoshoot.
[THEME MUSIC OUT]
Dr. Rae: Today’s guest is someone who began her career as a marine biologist, but these days makes a living as an underwater photographer. And the photos that she prints in National Geographic, Huffington Post, Vox and other platforms can show the rest of us who spend all our time on land exactly what’s going on in our deepest waters.
Jenny Adler: I call myself a photojournalist now or a science communicator, but I feel like I sometimes have an identity crisis because people are like, are you a scientist? And I'm like, well, I'm not doing my own research anymore. I think being a scientist is part of my identity. But I would I'd call myself a journalist or a storyteller because the work that I do tells like truthful and journalistic-style stories about what people are doing. Like, I would never use Photoshop or anything like that.
Peter: Jenny Adler joined me underwater for a Wild Kingdom Protecting the Wild episode we did on kelp forests. Now, if you watch the episode you might be saying “I don’t remember her” and that’s because Jenny was behind the camera.
Peter: Nice to see you again. You're one of the few people I know that's probably spend as much time underwater as you have on land, but I think last time we were together, we were in the Monterey Bay diving in the kelp forest there. There's really nothing like it because you are floating weightlessly. You feel like in your own little underwater celestial environment, so removed from what's taking place in the rest of your life. It's an exhilarating experience, and it's surreal. It really is.
Jenny Adler: Yeah, it really is. And I mean, I like exactly what you said, Peter, is when you're diving and when you're in the ocean, that's the only thing that you're thinking about. It's really hard to get distracted by anything else. You might get distracted because you're getting wrapped up in the kelp, but that is a way better problem, I think, than having to respond to emails and text messages and, you know, distractions and stuff like that and just being able to float there and be actually, like, completely weightless is something that I just feel like there's nowhere else on earth that you can experience that.
Peter: That is a perfect description.
Dr.Rae: That sounds beautiful.
Peter: It was a great, great time to spend with you while we were there diving, that you probably recall, we were in about thirty feet of water with about six feet of visibility. So I was a little concerned about what you might be able to photograph. When a harbor seal came out and started playing around with one of my fins, it was sort of a bright yellow, and he would grab the end of it, and you were apparently over my shoulder or the side because you captured the entire thing, and it was one of the thrills of the day to have marine life come to me. Well, I was just sort of floating there thinking my fin was, was a toy. And I decided, I'll just lay there until he's through playing with it and you've captured it all. So I have to say, well done.
Jenny Adler: I think that I was just as excited as you were, honestly. And I was just like setting up my camera because we had just gotten in the water and I was like, oh my gosh! already. And I think on the bad visibility days, they find you right away because there's no one else in the water, and there's nothing else going on. They're like sea puppies is what we call them, and they just get really excited to come play with your fin. We had one try to take a dive watch. They try to grab onto the dome of the port of your camera, I think partially because they can see their reflection in the dome. But they're just such curious little, little sea puppies.
Dr. Rae Oh, gosh, Jenny. So, you know, I don't think Peter was exaggerating when he said that you have probably spent as much time in the water as you have on land, which is not, you know, something that a lot of people can say. So we want to talk all about what you do, but we're not going to start there. We're actually going to start with like, what was childhood like, where are you from? And how did water play a role in how you grew up?
Jenny Adler: I am actually from north of Boston, so also very cold water, just like here in Monterey. All of my earliest memories are with the ocean, honestly. My parents owned this wooden sailboat when we were little that they did all the work on us because of Thunderbird, and we were always out on it as kids in these life jackets, you know, the big thing behind your head where they could just pick you up if they needed to with like a little crotch strap and stuff. And those are all of my earliest memories. And actually, before I started diving, which wasn't until college, I sailed competitively. And so I sailed competitively growing up, near Gloucester and then also also in college for, for a year or so before I kind of discovered this underwater world. I was on top of the water all the time.
Dr. Rae: Wow! I would not have guessed that you didn't start diving until college. That surprises me, but it shouldn't. You know, part of my story is that I didn't see my first wild animal. I didn't even get into nature until I was in my 20s. So, you know, there's some of us that – that's when we find our spark.
Jenny Adler: So I studied marine biology at Brown as an undergrad, and so I was kind of spending these long afternoons on the water, sailing in circles as fast as I could in four twenties and FJ’s, but at the same time, spending summers, in the salt marshes studying the impact of climate change on salt marshes. And there is this one particular course I took my senior year of college. I was a senior seminar about communicating science for policymakers and the public, and that was kind of the first time that I really started thinking about science communication and ways that we can take science and get it kind of outside the pages of the peer-reviewed literature. But at that time, I was still a scientist, and I ended up moving to Florida to work at USGS as a marine biologist and then doing my PhD in ecology. And so if there's a– one of my friends once said that my path and my career was, sort of like the winding limestone tunnels of the aquifer, and I've never heard a more accurate description of it.
Dr. Rae: Very poetic. That is extremely poetic. So when you were a student of marine biology or when you got your first marine biologist job, like, what did it look like? Were you in front of the computer a lot? like, give us the real deal.
Jenny Adler: I was definitely in front of the computer a lot, and I also had learned in this job at USGS, it was in Gainesville, Florida, which for those of you who don't know where it is, like, I didn't come from New England. It's smack dab in the middle of the state, two hours north of Orlando, kind of in the middle of nowhere. The University of Florida is there.
Dr. Rae: And decidedly not on the water.
Jenny Adler: No, like the farthest from an ocean in my entire life. And I got there, and I was so miserable. And then also, one of the first big projects I did was monitoring the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on mesophotic reef communities in the Gulf. And so I was out in, like, steel-toed boots and a hard hat on this big oil rig boat out of Port Fourchon, Louisiana. It was like 0% of what you would envision as this, you know, like wetsuit-clad, dolphin trainer [laughs]
Dr. Rae: Wow, yeah, for sure. Hard hat, steel boots, oil rig, but doing biology.
Jenny Adler: Yeah, it was it was a lot. We had like an ROV that was monitoring these mesophotic reefs because they're down at like three hundred feet, and we were trying to see like how the populations had changed like after the oil spill. And, we were working like these crazy shifts and so we were up at all hours of the night, and it was just like your typical, like, science on a boat experience.
Dr. Rae: Which are all the same [Laughs]
[MUSIC IN]
Peter: On that oil rig, Jenny was using an ROV– or Remotely Operated Vehicle to take photos three hundred feet under the water, but later she took to the seas to operate a camera herself. Some of her most impactful work has been in underwater sea caves.
[MUSIC OUT]
Jenny Adler: So underwater caves are not for everybody. And a lot of the pictures that you see, there are probably upwards of twelve lights lighting these kinds of winding limestone underwater passageways of the aquifer. And so without those lights, it is completely pitch dark, and a lot of kids will be like, “What are you going to see down there? Are you going to see sharks? And are you going to find gems and what's down there?” And it's honestly a lot of rock, and a lot of it looks the same, and so it's really, really easy to get lost in, and one of the main rules of cave diving is to have a continuous guideline to the surface at all times. So we kind of swim around with these little reels or spools and always have a way that if we completely lost visibility, you could get out of the cave basically with your eyes closed by feeling your way back with these kinds of strings. It's sort of like Hansel and Gretel style, like a breadcrumb trail.
Peter: So you really don't know what's around the next corner when you're making your way into these caves?
Jenny Adler: Yeah, in a lot of caves, there's what they call a main line through the through the main part of it. And then you can do what's called the jump where you tie in and go off of that main line. And so I was just really interested as a communicator in taking pictures and making my first– actually grant with National Geographic was making a three sixty virtual tour of these caves and showing people what it looks like and trying to connect people with this place that's kind of so foreign and so off limits to most people and is actually the source of main drinking water in Florida.
Dr. Rae: You just described yourself as a communicator, but where we left off in your career was a marine biologist with her first job and then someone who went on to a PhD, but still in science. So I– you know, Jenney, you and I, like, have similarities in that like, we studied science very, very seriously, still are scientists, bonafide scientists who do science. But along the way, science communication became this core value. And you do a lot of photography, right? So you dive now with cameras. But when did that spark happen? You've had a couple of sparks. So like, when did you realize, like, I gotta capture what I'm seeing and bring it to the masses?
Jenny Adler: Yeah. The first time that I really wanted to capture anything was because it was so foreign to me, honestly. And I think I'm sure you've felt that in your work, too, like, you see something, you see like a baby bear, and you're like, the people want to see this [Laughs], but you feel like you see these things while you're working that not everyone gets to see and then you realize how important they are, number one and number two, as an ecologist, I think it's it can be a very kind of amazing but depressing job in some ways because we can also see what's wrong with the ecosystem that we're studying. And so I started diving in these freshwater springs, and while I was swimming in these springs, I started in studying them, I started realizing that a lot of them that used to be full of this beautiful, like flowing underwater meadows, like native green grasses, they were disappearing. And all these springs are now kind of choked with this nuisance algae. And I started documenting it with a camera to show people both how beautiful these places were and how threatened they were. And it started off really taking a lot of bad pictures, and I kind of learned photography through underwater photography, but it was just kind of a way to share what I was seeing when people that didn't find themselves in the water every day.
Peter: And then how did you transition from these beautiful, clear springs to diving in the ocean and photographing there?
Jenny Adler: Yeah, so I worked in Florida for almost ten years, and I fell in love with the fresh water, and it kind of became a way for me to get into underwater photography, especially as a newcomer, because my work looked different than a lot of people working in the ocean, right? And I transitioned the day I handed in my dissertation. I had two back-to-back assignments for the Nature Conservancy, which now that I've been freelancing for a decade, I will tell you never happens. And what's like a really, like, explosive way to start my career.
Dr. Rae: And that's how you became part of the Wild Kingdom family, too. So, you know something that Peter and I have actually, even before we brought you on, I found ourselves talking about how imperative you have been to one of our favorite episodes of season one, and yet your face doesn't appear on camera because what it is, is your footage, the footage that you've taken underwater as the footage that kind of dominates one of our episodes.
Jenny Adler: Well, I appreciate that. It's very, very kind of you. And I was watching that episode, which I am like, obsessed with, partially because of the sea otters that you got to visit at Aquarium of the Pacific, but I watched that episode, and it drives me nuts in some ways because we only had a little while to film the Kelp Forest and now that I lived here, there are some days when it's just, you can see like forty feet in the kelp forest. And, Peter, I'm sure you remember going down in there, you could not see very far, we didn't have the greatest visibility.
Peter: No, like we had six feet at best.
[MUSIC IN]
Dr. Rae: I grew up as a little kid in California, and I would see kelp on the shore, right on the sand, like that was my understanding of seaweed is like it's the the little vegetation that washes up on shore. I never knew that there was something that we would describe as a forest.
Jenny Adler: Yeah, I think kelp forests get overlooked a lot because they're in cold water, and like you said, Rae, you can grow up in there, but it's not like growing up on a coral reef where you can kind of maybe see the reef because it's so clear and you can see the cut washing up on the shore, if you look out at the ocean, you can kind of see some of its fronds making their way to the surface, especially in the summer. Winter storms tend to like rip a lot of the kelp out. But I think coral reefs and even mangroves and warm water ecosystems tend to get more, you know, more attention maybe in the media and more funding. And Kelp forests actually line about 70% of our world's coastlines, and so they're on every continent except for Antarctica. And they do actually stay on sub-antarctic islands. So, like just the continent of Antarctica itself is the only one that technically doesn't have kelps. And so they're incredibly important, you know, they photosynthesize, they take up carbon. Like, mainly they form this huge habitat like you said, it's a full forest, so think about if you were to cut down a forest on the land, which Rae, I'm sure you could tell us a lot about the impacts of that, these underwater forests when they disappear, everything that lives in them and relies on that structure also doesn't have a home anymore.
[MUSIC OUT]
Dr. Rae: Jenny, I just this is just a little anecdote, but you just talked about Antarctica for a split second. Why? Why did Antarctica come to you? And have you ever maybe been there? Have you ever maybe taken a dive in Antarctic waters by any chance?
Jenny Adler: Yeah, I went to I've been in Antarctica twice now. I can't get enough of it. But the first time I went was actually for kelp, ironically, because I just told you there was no kelp and Antarctica, which probably makes it makes it sound like it doesn't make sense. But these sub-Antarctic islands, like South Georgia and South Shetland and like the islands surrounding Antarctica are the southernmost kelp forest in the entire world. And interestingly enough, the species of kelp that's their giant kelp or macrocystis pyrifera is the same species we have right here in our backyards in California.
Dr. Rae: Oh, wow.
Jenny Adler: You should do an episode there. It is the most incredible place I've ever dove in my entire life, and the kelp forest there are absolutely just incredible and I think it reminded me what places looked like before, like, humans almost, because it was so remote. I mean, it took four days, three or four days by ship from the southernmost city in the world, Ushuaia, Argentina, to get to the Falklands, and then another three days from there to get to South Georgia, so you just felt so remote. And these kelp forests, they always say that kelp forest will go down to like, I don't know, thirty, forty meters, we were reading like ninety, sixty ninety meters on the depth reader, and you could just see these forests go all the way down to the bottom.
Dr. Rae: That's like taller than some of our tallest trees. That is just amazing.
Jenny Adler: Yeah
Dr. Rae: But what– what is it about these Antarctic kelp forests that are they visually different? Are they ecologically different?
Jenny Adler: Yeah, that's a great question. climate change is happening in the Arctic, but the water is already so cold there, and there hasn't been a huge disruption to the ecosystem because people don't really live around South Georgia. In the South Orkneys, there might be like ten people that live there. Those kelp forests haven't seen the same human impacts as others. A lot of the kelp forests that I started kind of looking at, telling stories about in different parts of the world, in Japan and in California and in Baja, are all facing kind of similar threats of climate change and ocean warming, and these urchin barrens. So in California, for example, after we killed a lot of the sea otters, and then sea star wasting happened in about 2013 or 2014, we lost two, like major keystone predators that eight sea urchins, and these sea urchins exploded. And like a field of cows that eats grass, these urchins just mowed down the Kelp forests.
[SHOW ARCHIVAL STARTS]
Peter: But the ocean now is much different than it was instead of a lush kelp forest, we found purple sea urchins everywhere. 96% of the kelp along the west coast has been eaten away by a swarm of these tiny creatures.
[SHOW ARCHIVAL ENDS]
Peter: What about the other kelp forests that you've seen around the world? You're the expert. You've been almost everywhere. There seems to be kelp and even places where there was thought to be none for the longest time. There's progress being made there, they’re reintroducing sea stars. Are you hopeful at all that maybe we can check this loss of kelp beds?
Jenny Adler: I hope so. I mean, the one thing that really scares me is that water is warming so quickly, and there's a thermal tolerance of kelps, right? I don't know exactly the degree it is, but it almost like melts in warm water. It won't survive. And so I think these ecosystems in places like South Georgia, where the water is barely freezing, I mean, there's a lot of hope for that. And I think– I've been interviewing this woman who runs the herbarium at Berkeley, Kathy Ann Miller, and I tried to ask her the same question because I was– It gets hard to, like, keep hope sometimes, right? you're like, these kelp forests are just disappearing before our eyes, and it gets depressing when you see it firsthand. And she said something that really keeps me hopeful, which is that she says, the weeds are wily, and seaweeds have always lived on this planet, you know, like they're ancient. They've always been here in the ocean, and they've survived so much before, and they might not look in the future like they look now, but they will exist in some form, maybe, that we don't understand yet.
Peter: So there's a little bit of hope there. There's a possible chance of seaweed, like some species of wildlife, adapting.
Jenny Adler: Yeah, exactly. And I think there's been a lot of, like, interest, more, coverage of kelp in the media, which really helps in a lot more research and funding going towards it. And so I think like it's kind of playing catch up to places like coral reefs that have had this focus for, for so many decades. And now that more people are interested in it, there definitely is more hope.
[MUSIC IN]
Dr. Rae: Before I met you, one of the things I knew about you was that you were trying to increase representation of people in your field. And I remember seeing a photo of you teaching young black girls in Florida how to stick their heads underwater and explore. And I think it must not have been scuba but must have been snorkeling or something. But can you tell us just a little bit about why you have spent your time, you know, because there's – we're in this mission-critical field, right? Like you're doing conservation work. You're trying to identify issues and challenges in ecosystems, but you're also spending some of your time with kids and kids from underrepresented groups in these sciences. So like, what is that like for you?
Jenny Adler: I love working with kids, and I just I mean, as you know, being like the first black female host of a science show, which is incredible and inspiring, like representation matters. I started going to the springs, and I think a lot of people, you know, there's a decent amount of diversity at the springs, but not necessarily in who's learning about them. So there's not a huge curriculum, and I started realizing that the students in quote-unquote, like not as “good schools on the east side of Gainesville,” which is just a terrible narrative in the first place. But they were not learning about springs because it was just the teachers in the magnet programs that were like, “Oh, we're going to teach our students about the springs,” and so they weren't being given the same opportunities, and so I thought, what would happen if I took kids out to the springs and gave them cameras to tell their own stories, which resulted in me like learning how to book field trips as part of my PhD, which was a whole adventure [Laughs]
Dr. Rae: I can only imagine.
Jenny Adler: Yeah, it was a lot, but I ended up getting over two hundred kids from Gainesville in the water, half the students were in a magnet program, and half or not. And these students, like from the non-magnet programs, didn't know how to swim. They got to the springs, and I was like, “Here's a life jacket we're going to get in,” and they were like, “Okay,” and I was like, “Wow,” the amount of like energy and excitement that there was surrounding something that like probably was also really scary. It was 30 degrees out that day like North Florida has seasons. It was cold. And these kids, not knowing how to swim, strapped on a lifejacket, grabbed a camera, and jumped in the water with so much enthusiasm, and I did a pre and post-knowledge test to just asses attitudes just to assess like how this experience was for the kids and the magnet program students who are like mostly white, had a really high knowledge going in and then students from the non-magnet program was mostly black, and they had really low knowledge of the springs coming into it, and they completely caught up with the other students at the end of it and knowledge. So like, if given these immersive outdoor educational experiences, like there's no difference in the in the students by the end of the experience. And so I think just seeing that was really eye-opening, and when people ask, like, what's your biggest achievement? I'm like getting kids in the water.
Dr. Rae: Yeah, and before they're in their 20s, right?
Jenny Adler: Yeah.
Dr. Rae: Like, you know, you weren't diving or looking underwater taking photos until that part of your life. And you're introducing that to students who come from communities that are typically left out of these careers, these conversations, and I just want to applaud you about that because that is just truly unique work.
Jenny Adler: Thank you.
Peter: Well, we've shown the problems with kelp forests. What can you tell the young audience what they can do locally to help?
Jenny Adler: I think like number one is just get in and see the place for yourself. The aquarium here has a cool like underwater explorers program where they get kids into the ocean, but like, get out into the into the water and look at it and then read about it and talk about it, because I think not knowing about a place in the first place is like the number one thing that's going to hold people back, because if you're not going to protect what you don't know, which I think is really overused but in some ways, it's also just like really important and kind of the basis of everything. And so the thing that I love about working with students and working with kids is that sometimes when you start talking to them about these issues, they say things you just never predicted and never thought about yourself, and so I think involving them in the conversation is really crucial because they think in different ways a lot of times.
Dr. Rae: Oh, I love what you're saying about like, get out there because we're not just talking about oceans, right? Like you started diving in freshwater systems, which is everywhere, right? So if you don't happen to live on a coast and you're a young person who does want to get out there, you could actually find a river, a stream, a spring, a lake, right? I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, you can dive or just go underwater in these places, and there's this whole amazing ecosystem there that probably needs protection. Just off the top of your head, like if I were to ask, like, what has life underwater kind of shown you or taught you or emphasized for you about life on land?
Jenny Adler: Life underwater has taught me patience.
[MUSIC IN]
Jenny Adler: Every time you jump in the ocean, you're not going to get the exact visibility you want or the exact creature interaction you want. It’s taught me that something or someone else is usually in control, and that would be the ocean. I've been chased by a lot of hurricanes on the water, on in fieldwork, waited on a lot of boats to get in the water because the ocean wasn't ready, and there were too many waves. And so I think it's just taught me to have patience, and I think a lot of times, like, as you know, like going through grad school and doing a PhD, like, it can be like, it can be pretty stressful and anxious. And being a photographer, you're always dealing with a lot of rejection because you pitch your story ideas, you pitch, you know, you kind of put your yourself into your work so much that, like any rejection, is personal rejection. Dealing with kind of setbacks caused by the ocean causes me to be like, more flexible and more accepting person on land.
Dr. Rae: Jenny, we love you. And, you know, keep us in the loop of everything you do. And you know, Wild Kingdom loves you, and you are essential.
Peter: Thank you.
Jenny Adler: Thank you. You guys are the best. I really appreciate you thinking of me and asking all the water questions.
Dr. Rae: Okay, Peter, so you know what time it is, it’s time for us to go through some fast facts.
[MUSIC OUT]
Peter: Oh yeah, let’s rip off some Kelp facts! So let’s see how many we can get through in a few seconds.
[WATER BUBBLING SOUND EFFECT]
[MUSIC IN]
Dr. Rae: Did you know kelp can grow underwater to be a hundred and fifty feet, which is roughly the size of a twelve-story building!
Peter: Many different species of fish use kelp forests as nurseries for their young. Also, seabirds and marine mammals like sea lions, sea otters, and even gray whales use them as shelter from predators and storms.
Dr. Rae: Similar to trees, kelp have root-like “anchors” called holdfasts that keep them from floating away.
Peter: Kelp are actually not plants, technically, they’re brown algae, and many different species of kelp make up a kelp forest.
Dr. Rae: Kelp forests produce a massive amount of oxygen for the waters that surround them.
[MUSIC OUT]
Peter: Kelp forests are just as important for a healthy environment as our forests on land. By producing oxygen for surrounding waters, as well as serving as safe havens for sea creatures and being a reliable food source. The ocean’s kelp forests are important for a healthy planet. Sadly these beautiful and towering ecosystems are threatened by warming seas and invasive species. They’re a good reminder that if we protect wildlife and the environment today, we can ensure magical moments in the wild kingdom for future generations.
Jenny Adler: Any day in the water is a good day in the water, and when the sun comes out it is this kind of magical-like cathedral as it comes through the fronds of kelp at the surface.
Dr. Rae: Join us next week on the podcast when we talk to bat expert Nate Fuller. Nate joined us on our Bats of Texas episode, and his enthusiasm and passion for bats is absolutely contagious.
Nate Fuller: If you like bats, tell people about it. Change the narrative, change the story, change the attitudes that people have toward “oh, bats are gross” They're not they're very helpful animals.
Dr. Rae: That’s next time on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom: The Podcast
[CREDITS]
Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom The Podcast is a production of Pineapple Street Studios and Mutual of Omaha.
Our Senior Producer is Stephen Key
Producers are Xandra Ellin and Jenny Van Soelen
Associate Producer is Lisa Cerda
Editor is Darby Maloney.
Executive Producers are Bari Finkel, Gabrielle Lewis, and Jen Wulf.
Pineapple’s Head of Sound & Engineering is Raj Makhija. Senior Audio Engineers are Marina Paiz (pie - eez), Davy Sumner, Javi Cruces, and Pedro Alvira. Additional engineering by Rob Miller and Jason Richards.
This Episode was mixed by Davy Sumner.
Production Music courtesy of Epidemic Sound and Hearst Media Production Group.
Episode Clips courtesy of Hearst Media Production Group.
Fact-checking by Justine Daum.
Marketing and Promotion by Emily Poeschl.
This podcast is hosted by me, Dr. Rae Wynn Grant.
And me, Peter Gros.
Special thanks to Katelyn Williams, Sophie Radmilovich, and Stephanie Diaz
Today’s episode is based on the Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom series created by Don Meier (My-er).
Our next episode will be out in a week. Make sure to listen on the Audacy app or wherever you get your podcasts.
