Dr. Edie Widder is a Vero Beach-based researcher with a rich and storied career in marine biology. You can watch her life unfold in a brand new documentary, A Life Illuminated, charting her story from the days of her youth all the way to now. She joins us today to talk about the movie and to give us insight into the exciting world deep below the ocean surface.
First of all, Edie, thanks for joining us.
E: Happy to do it.
I can tell you that this film looks absolutely stunning. So tell us about it.
E: Yeah, this has been quite a journey. I was kind of skeptical about the whole thing initially, but I'm certainly thrilled beyond words at how wonderfully it turned out.
It was a very different experience because most of my experience with documentaries has been as kind of a talking head scientist. This is much more personal, and I was kind of nervous about it initially, but they did a really superb job.
Well, that's an incredible opportunity. Without spoiling too much, can you give us a hint of your favorite part of the movie?
E: Well, the bioluminescence that was filmed in the documentary, especially the climactic scene at the end, is the best I've ever recorded of the particular phenomenon that I was searching for.
It's just so thrilling to me to be able to show it to people because so much of my career is I've just had to depend on trying to describe what I saw because there weren't cameras good enough to record what I was seeing. But these come very, very close to what the human eye can detect.
Gosh, that sounds gorgeous. I'm curious, how did the documentary come to be?
E: We were looking for an opportunity to go use a submersible, and this was right after the OceanGate disaster with the Titan sub that imploded. And we were looking around, and there was an operation we were considering, but actually after a lifetime of diving in submersibles, my husband finally pulled the husband card and didn't like the idea of me diving in this particular operation.
It was a little bit dicey, so we were kind of in the lurch, and then OceanX came along and offered up three days of dive time on their Triton submersibles. It's important to note the difference between Titan and Triton. This was in the Azores. We went out, the first day we lost to bad weather, the second day we lost to some technological problems, and the third day everything worked. And that's what you see in the film, it's just how it all came together.
Well, I'm glad it all came together, and those underwater shots you mentioned must be breathtaking, but the movie isn't just about underwater exploration. It also dives into you and your career, which I imagine must be such a humbling experience. How does it feel now that it's all done?
E: Yeah, that was the part I was most nervous about, because I actually didn't see any of the film as they were developing it along the way. When I saw it, it was pretty much near done, and when I was sitting down to watch it the first time, I was thinking of every lame thing I ever said on camera when they were filming me and imagining just how embarrassing this could be, but they did a wonderful job editing out the lameness.
They went through old family 8mm film that my dad used to take. He was a terrible cameraman, but there were pictures of me from when I was a kid with my parents. It was so heartwarming for me to see that arc of my own life up on the screen. It was a joy.
So let's talk about that career. Where did your journey with the ocean begin?
E: So my parents were both Ph.D. mathematicians, and the year I was 11 was a sabbatical year where we traveled around the world and got to see just amazing art in Europe, and I decided I wanted to be an artist.
I explored the pyramids in Egypt and decided I wanted to be an archaeologist, and saw great poverty in India, and I wanted to become a great humanitarian, climbed trees after koalas and held a wombat and experienced the biology of Australia and decided I wanted to be a biologist. And the last stop was Fiji, and I got to explore a coral reef and decided I wanted to be a marine biologist.
So the family joke was if we had traveled from west to east instead of east to west, would I have ended up an artist? I think a complete lack of talent might have been somewhat of an obstacle.
I decided I wanted to become a marine biologist. I ended up getting my Ph.D. in neurobiology with the idea of working on marine organisms, but when I was doing my Ph.D., I was working on a bioluminescent dinoflagellate, recording the electrical activity that triggered its flash, and I got fascinated by this ability of animals to make light.
And then I got to make a series of dives in a deep-diving suit called Wasp, which was developed by the offshore oil industry for diving on oil rigs. And my first dive into the depths was in the Santa Barbara Channel. I went down and turned out the lights, and I turned out the lights because I knew I would see bioluminescence, but I just had no idea what it would look like because, as I said, there were no cameras that could record it at that time.
And it was just so breathtakingly, phenomenally beautiful, and also so mystifying because it was so much energy that these animals were using to produce light. It had to be important, and I couldn't imagine why more people weren't studying it. But of course, the inability to actually record it in any kind of meaningful way was a bit of a challenge.
But anyway, so that's what I've spent my career doing, developing ways to record it and better understand how the animals are using light in order to help them survive.
That first dive you mentioned just sounds so magical. What was going through your head in that moment?
E: As they were dropping me down through the water, I was on a tether, and so they were lowering me down, and that first dive was down to 800 feet. I was a trained scuba diver, and so I was used to seeing a lot more animal life.
But this was out in the deep sea. There was very little in the water. There was marine snow, all the kind of particulate stuff in the water, but almost nothing else out there. And I was thinking, you know, this isn't going to be very exciting.
And then I got down to 800 feet and turned out the lights, and I thought, you know, I'll probably have to dark-adapt and wait for a while to see a flash here and a flash there. Oh my God. It was incredible. There was just light all around me, flashes, glows, sparkles. If I activated the thrusters, you'd see these vortices of light just spewing up out of the thruster and sparks mixed in with it.
It looked like when you throw a log on a campfire and the sparks swirl up out of the campfire. Only these were blue embers. It was just incredible.
Do you think the movie was able to capture the magic of that moment for you?
E: Yeah, I think they do a really great job of capturing that. In fact, I gave them an audio tape that I had made in one of my first dives in Wasp, in that diving suit. And so they have the audio recording of me describing what I'm seeing and my just amazement at the amount of light I'm seeing.
And what they did when they showed that is they just showed a black screen to indicate that this was before there were cameras that you could record it. I actually said on the tape, how am I ever going to be able to share this with people? They did a wonderful job of conveying that arc over time as I got better and better cameras. So it shows some of the things I was able to record.
You mentioned how it's basically been a lifelong goal of yours to show the world just how amazing this bioluminescence is. How does it feel knowing that you've achieved that?
E: It's a really amazing feeling. It's just really wonderful. And especially because it's been very gratifying to have it shown at various film festivals because the audience response has just been absolutely wonderful. Just so enthusiastic.
And I think it's a documentary with a positive message about the need for exploration and how much there is left to explore on our planet. And I think that that's something that people need to be hearing right now.
It's been said that Martin Luther King did not mobilize the civil rights movement by preaching "I have a nightmare." That's what the environmental community is doing and wondering why nobody wants to listen to us.
With a career like yours, I'm sure it's hard to pick just one moment. But when you look back on the arc of your career so far, what would you say has been your crowning achievement?
E: Well, for me, one of the most exciting expeditions was in 2004 in the Gulf of Mexico. I had been trying to get a camera built that I called the Eye in the Sea that I wanted to leave on the bottom of the ocean.
It was battery-powered, so it would be quiet because thrusters are noisy, and I thought they might be scaring animals away. Other people had done that. But the tricky bit was I wanted to be able to see without being seen.
I wanted to use red light. We use infrared light on land when we want to observe nocturnal animals without disturbing them. But you can't do that in the ocean because infrared light is absorbed so thoroughly by seawater.
So, I was trying to find just the right level of red light that would allow me to see without being seen. I had just had a terrible time getting this funded because when I went to the funding agencies and described what I wanted to build, they would say, but what are you going to discover?
And I had to say, well, I don't know. That's the point. I think we've been scaring all this stuff away. And so, I had to put this together on a shoestring, and the first time I had all the pieces working was on that 2004 expedition.
It was the red-light illumination camera, and then I had an optical lure that I developed that imitated certain bioluminescent displays that I thought might be attractive to large predators.
So, instead of putting a camera down with just bait in front of it, which is what has always been done in the past, this was with this optical lure. And the first time I turned that optical lure on, 86 seconds after it went on, we recorded a squid over six feet long, completely new to science, could not even be placed in any known scientific family.
I went back to the funding agencies and I said, this is what we will discover. And I got a half a million dollars to do it right, which was the world's first deep-sea webcam.
Edie, it's obvious just listening to you, how passionate you are about our oceans. What keeps that passion burning?
E: Oh, there's so much to be excited about in this ocean planet that we live on and so much of it yet to be explored.
I was motivated to start the Ocean Research and Conservation Association in Vero Beach because of my desire to protect the ocean I love, so we're developing a tool chest of technologies and assays that we can use to be able to track pollution and try to get it stopped at its source. Because where we live here on the Indian River Lagoon, that was once called the most biologically diverse estuary in the United States. It's a nursery for the ocean.
And so even though it represents a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of the ocean as a whole, it's a huge impact because so many open-ocean animals spend some portion of their life cycle in an estuary. And so we've got to figure out how to protect these nurseries for the ocean.
Well, Edie, just to wrap things up, I have to ask, what's next for you?
I'm working with engineers on a number of fronts, developing new assays for tracking pollution is one, but also a new camera system that can better document the phenomenon that is recorded in that documentary, something I call the flashback phenomenon.
So I got a lot I want to still do.
You can view A Life Illuminated, a documentary on Edie's life and storied career, directed by Tasha Von Zandt, at the Vero Beach Theatre Guild during the Vero Beach Film Festival on April 12.