• Question: what are you opinions on marine biology?

    Asked by dubstepcallum to Lyn, Katy, Paul, PB, Ruth on 20 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Peter Balfe

      Peter Balfe answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      Important, but seriously underfunded.

    • Photo: Paul Waines

      Paul Waines answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      Vital to the health of the planet. I think it is sometimes presented to students as being all about playing with Dolphins and Seals all the time, but actually it is a very broad subject. If I wasn’t a microbiologist, I’d be a marine biologist…

    • Photo: Ruth Mitchell

      Ruth Mitchell answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      I’m not sure I’ve thought about this enough to have an informed opinion on it. If pushed I would say that it is important as marine life is improtant to the world functioning properly.

    • Photo: Ee Lyn Lim

      Ee Lyn Lim answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      Considering how much there is we don’t know about life in the sea, I’d think it would be very interesting and important! Because of the conditions in the deep sea (dark, extremely high pressure, cold water and/or hot thermal vents, and all sorts of strange chemicals like sulfur and arsenic) life under the sea is unbelievably different from above – you can get some really really weird things down there! Learning about those might give us new ideas about how to cope with changes in the environment too, for example there’s a kind of bacteria that we can now use to clean up oil spills. Deep sea – the final frontier!

      (That’s not to say there’s nothing interesting on the surface – plankton, which are tiny plants or animals that float in huge swarms near the surface of the water, can affect anything from the world’s food chain to climate change!)

    • Photo: Katy Brown

      Katy Brown answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      I also think its important – there is a lot we don’t know about marine biology, especially species living in very deep parts of oceans. A recent research expedition taking samples from oceans around the world found one million new species (read about it here: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/09/26/tara-research-vessel-discovers-one-million-new-species_n_1915814.html). By leaving so much of the oceans unexplored we lose a lot of information, which may be able to be used in unexpected ways. For example, a very common enzyme used in the lab (Taq polymerase), which I use all the time, comes from a bacterium (Thermus aquaticus) only found deep under the sea around volcanic vents.

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