The Panthalassa project: The future of ocean research for conservation

‘Our business is to rectify Nature to what she was…’. Unless you are standing in the Hajar Mountains in eastern Oman or on the Troodos Ophiolites in Cyprus, the ground beneath your feet was once, 250 million years ago, part of a single supercontinent surrounded by a single ocean, Panthalassa. The time it took the scientific community to accept that continents can move was, arguably, equally geological. Indeed, a 400-year old suspicion only accelerated into scientific consensus in response to large-scale, high-quality datasets, and the lessons learned furnish a rich and instructive analogy about how we might create a global consensus in ocean conservation today. In the 16th century, mapmakers gazed, perplexed, upon the coastlines of distant continents: why on Earth did they fit together, like a jigsaw puzzle? It was only in 1912 that Alfred Wegener made the first convincing case for continental drift, proposing that the world's continents were once part of a single landmass, Pangaea, and had moved to their current positions. The evidence was overwhelming. Nevertheless, until the 1950s, many geologists preferred to believe that some continents had simply sunk to create the modern map of the world, with long-gone land bridges acting as intercontinental highways. In the 1960s, large-scale, high-quality maps of the ocean floor and earthquake hypocentres finally became available, and the sheer explanatory fire power of plate tectonics in support of Wegener's case finally sank the land-bridge theorists. The key point is that ocean-scale, uniformly high-quality datasets exploiting relevant new technologies, integrated by multidisciplinary thinkers and well communicated to policy makers, are needed to drive action around urgent planetary problems like the crisis in marine extinctions, our subject here. The oceans are on the cusp of a crisis of biodiversity loss due to overfishing, climate change and plastic pollution. Indeed, this year marked the first year that a species of marine fish has gone extinct in modern times. Many top marine predators, including the hammerhead shark, oceanic whitetip, shortfin mako and bluefin tuna – the Rolexes of Richard Dawkins’ 'blind watchmaker' – are on the verge of extinction. The number of fish stocks that are overfished continues to rise and the twilight zone, home to 20 billion tonnes of wildlife – 40 times the weight of humankind – is poised to become the global fishing industry's next target (John et al., 2016; Martin et al., 2020). Yet platforms that obtain compelling data in support of marine conservation remain expensive and underfunded. Ocean science accounts for just 0.04–4% of national R&D budgets and just three countries, Japan, the Russian Federation, and the United States, own over 60% of the existing 325 research vessels (IOC-UNESCO 2017). Of these vessels, 43% are limited to coastal research and only one-fifth are large enough (>65 m) to conduct research at a global scale. Moreover, the global research fleet is increasingly decrepit, with 96% of large (>55 m) research vessels over a decade old, and an average age in Australia, Canada and Mexico of over 45 years. Philanthropists are increasingly, and, presumably, gingerly, inviting marine biologists onto their superyachts, but the cumulative capacity of this fleet remains small compared to publicly funded vessels or, indeed, the rusty old trawlers that impoverished PhD students are often forced to hire in order to research remote areas. (Think Steve Zissou's Belafonte, where the most advanced technologies are in the galley.) Moreover, most ocean-going research vessels have low cruising speeds, precluding rapid data collection at large scales. Here, I present my vision of Panthalassa, the first of a series of next-generation research vessels that I hope will rapidly generate the irrefutable, ocean-scale evidence that is a prerequisite for scientific consensus and policy change. Panthalassa's trimaran hull will allow her to safely reach speeds in the open ocean of up to 40 knots – almost four times that of the average research vessel. Multibeam sonar will allow her to map the seafloor at depths of up to 8,000 m and estimate wildlife biomass using a ground-truthed library of species-specific acoustic 'signatures'. Long-range autonomous aerial vehicles (AAVs) will conduct wildlife, plastics and illegal fishing surveys, and map surface environmental variables such as chlorophyll. Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) will sample the same variables but at hitherto unprecedented vertical resolutions, allowing exploration of complex, depth-dependent processes in, for example, submarine canyons. These tireless robots will stream live footage to both scientists and to the public, for, as Baba Dioum wrote in 1968, 'in the end, we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand; and we will understand only what we are taught'. Automated surface vehicles (ASVs) will deploy and retrieve miniature versions of stereo underwater camera systems, which will estimate the diversity, abundance, size, and biomass of pelagic life (Bouchet & Meeuwig 2015; Forrest et al. 2020). The ASVs and AUVs will also collect and deliver filtered water samples to the home ship to be analysed for microplastics and other pollutants (Figure 1). Panthalassa’s most defining technologies, however, will lie in the field of genomics and bioinformatics. The power of sampling fragments of genetic material (eDNA) from the ocean is well understood, but single cell sequencing, applied to intact whole cells, will transform marine conservation. When I learned of this technique through Minderoo Foundation's Collaborate Against Cancer initiative in 2018, its potential applications were immediately clear: how transformative it would be if we could rapidly document ocean wildlife – not only species diversity, but also age, sex and population size – using nothing more than a cup of sea water? Such an advance would not only revolutionise our ability to protect endangered species but also provide an early warning system to detect declining wildlife. `Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?' wrote Robert Browning in 1855. Many of you are probably thinking: this sounds like heaven, but is it actually achievable? In March, we established Minderoo's OceanOmics initiative to develop this program. In the second half of 2020, COVID-19 permitting, we will pilot single cell sequencing methods on Panthalassa’s little sister, the 58-m Pangaea Ocean Explorer, at the Great Barrier Reef. Some techniques will fail and be discarded; others will fail and give rise to new ones; some will succeed dramatically. A prerequisite to achieving our ambitions will be the development of a whole-genome library for marine life: fewer than 0.5% of Australia's saltwater fish species (20 of 4,379) have been fully sequenced to date, according to the National Centre for Biotechnology Information database. Will Panthalassa’s ocean-scale, high-quality datasets catalyse rapid change in marine policy, given the slow response of policy makers to other scientific evidence (e.g., climate change)? I would argue that policy processes must evolve rapidly in step with our research platforms, becoming almost automated in their responsiveness to robust scientific evidence. Indeed, governments wishing to use platforms like Panthalassa to monitor their Exclusive Economic Zones will need to agree a priori to apply IUCN II or stronger protection to any habitat identified as ecologically valuable before data are released – thus ensuring that sensitive information (e.g., locations of biodiversity hotspots or populations of endangered species) is not misused. Philanthropists are uniquely positioned to innovate, to take and absorb risk – in contrast to governments, which are risk-averse, wary of the political consequences of failure and accountable to taxpayers. Once Panthalassa has tested the hypothesis that high-speed, large-scale data collection can accelerate ocean conservation, I challenge my peers, globally, to replicate her approach and support their governments, providing them with the platforms they need to protect the immensely valuable assets that lie within their Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs). With global fishing fleets increasing in range, fuelled by absurd subsidies, modern slave labour and dwindling local fish stocks, distance and depth no longer represent an obstacle to exploitation. We must act now, if we are to return our ocean to a flourishing state. A heaven is within reach – if we are determined and prepared to fail along the journey.