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Nicole Yamase: The ocean is a mirror
93 Plays7 months ago
Micronesian marine botanist and ocean advocate Dr Nicole Yamase meditates on the Pacific with a conversation spanning Hawaiian seaweeds, snorkelling across the Federated States of Micronesia and her submersible expedition to the Mariana trench. She generously shares her cultural perspective as a Micronesian scientist and discusses what lessons she’s learned from the sea.
Bio:
Dr. Nicole Yamase is from the islands of Pohnpei and Chuuk in the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM). Although she is from the FSM, she spent parts of her childhood in the Republic of Palau and Saipan in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. She obtained her Ph.D. in Marine Biology from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa focusing on the ecophysiology of native Hawaiian macroalgae. Nicole is the Director of Impact for OneReef, a non-profit organization that supports community-led ocean management. Through her job, she works closely with local communities and scientists to define, measure, and communicate impact in a meaningful way that interweaves both science and traditional knowledge.
This conversation is hosted and produced by Catherine Polcz with music by Carl Didur.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Plant Kingdom Podcast
00:00:12
Speaker
I'm Catherine Poults and this is Plant Kingdom. I'm recording in beautiful Sydney on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and pay respect to their elders past, present, and future. Plant Kingdom is a conversation series about plants, nature, and environment featuring scientists, artists, researchers, writers, and healers. We release two conversations each month and hear from people who have an intimacy with plants and nature.
00:00:40
Speaker
We discuss their work, stories, and reflections from the field.
Dr. Nicole Yamase's Oceanic Journey
00:00:44
Speaker
Today's conversation is with Dr. Nicole Yamase. I had the pleasure of meeting Nicole earlier this year when she was in Sydney and really loved having the chance to talk seaweed and learn about her many, many travels. In our conversation, she shares her knowledge and perspective as a Micronesian woman and scientist. Her love for seaweed
00:01:05
Speaker
her journey to the bottom of the ocean in a submersible and how all of her experiences weave together in her life's work and commitment to advocating for our oceans. I'll now introduce Nicole. Dr. Nicole Yamase is from the islands of Pompeii and Czech in the Federated States of Micronesia. You will also hear us refer to the Federated States of Micronesia by its acronym FSM.
00:01:31
Speaker
She obtained her PhD in marine biology from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she researched the eco-physiology of native Hawaiian macroalgae. A passionate ocean conservationist today, she also works as the Director of Impact at One Reef, which supports community-led stewardship of coral reefs. Here's our conversation.
Micro vs. Macroalgae: Importance in Ecosystems
00:02:06
Speaker
And thank you so much for talking with me today. And I'm really excited to talk about seaweed, fully knowing that I am very ignorant of all things seaweed. I haven't spent a lot of time ever researching seaweed. I've been trying to learn the Australian macroalgae as I see them on beaches, but it's definitely not something I know much about.
00:02:28
Speaker
Nicole, I did just want to start with a pretty basic question about what are we even talking about when we talk about seaweed or algae or macro algae? Is it a few different kinds of organisms or what's the difference even between micro and macro?
00:02:46
Speaker
Yeah, so seaweed is a general term that describes a very diverse group of marine plant. They can range in size from the tiny microalgae, the phytoplankton, all the way up to the huge bull kelp that are found along the California coast. They come in all kinds of colors. The main ones are the greens, the reds, and the brown. And they come in all kinds of beautiful shapes too.
00:03:16
Speaker
Yeah, amazing. And with your research, it was more on the macroalgae. Are those what we kind of think of when we think of seaweeds? Yeah, so microalgae are usually the microscopic ones that we can't really see or identify without using a microscope. So it's really more of the size. And then macroalgae have bigger cells. So they're also bigger and we're able to kind of identify
00:03:44
Speaker
what genus they are. Some look very much alike to the naked eye. So even with macroalgae, if you want to go down to the species level, you'll have to use a microscope to really look at the cell structure. But for macroalgae, yes, that's more of what I've studied here in Hawaii, the macroalgae. For some reason, my brain just can't work on tiny things. So I'm so glad I work with macroalgae.
00:04:14
Speaker
We live in a big thing bias world right in biology and with with seaweeds are they.
00:04:22
Speaker
kind of across the whole ocean? Or do they like to hang out in kind of warmer, shallow waters? Or what's kind of the distribution? Oh, yeah, they're found in everywhere. They can be found. We have our temperate that are found in the cold areas to the tropical species. And then we even have algae that are found in freshwater all over in our oceans from the shallows to in our tide pools all the way down to even our deep waters as well.
00:04:52
Speaker
Yeah great I wanted to talk a bit about globally like what role seaweed play I went on this big tangent I'm really interested right now and kind of looking at again you know nature and evolution these deep time time scales and seaweed and algae.
00:05:09
Speaker
are really early forms of life, right? And I was just going on a tangent about the oxygen revolution and when cyanobacteria evolved. But even today, seaweeds produce a lot of the world's oxygen. What do seaweeds do for us that we're not really thinking about?
Cultural and Ecological Role of Seaweeds
00:05:27
Speaker
Oh, they do so much for us and a lot of people don't realize it. It's just like our plants on land. So they're basically our forests in the ocean. They provide food for many of our really important marine species.
00:05:43
Speaker
like our turtles, our sea urchins, our herbivorous fish. They provide habitat and nurseries. They even provide natural protection for coastal communities. They absorb CO2 through photosynthesis, which is really important, especially in today of what's going on with carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. People use algae for medicinal purposes, for creating
00:06:12
Speaker
different products it's really it's important for economies they provide oxygen as you said up to like at least 50 percent of the oxygen in our atmosphere and yeah in Hawaii algae or limo as they call it is really important in a cultural sense and i'm sure also across the different pacific islands as well they're also found in our legends and in the songs
00:06:40
Speaker
that have been passed down from generation to generation here in Hawaii, they just love their limo. That's something I really admire about the Hawaii community. Amazing and excited to ask you a bit more about that. But looking at seaweeds in Hawaii, where you did your PhD research, I guess what's the kind of distribution and diversity of seaweed in Hawaii? Are they a major part of the coastal environment and ecosystem?
00:07:08
Speaker
Yes, they are. Like I said, there you can find them in our tide pools. Even a small little tide pool can hold so much different types of lemur. You can find at least five different kinds of species. You can find them all the way in deep waters, like up in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands in Papa Hanamu Kokea. One of the alga I studied is Microdicty on Sicilienum. It's a green alga that produces beautiful lush meadows on the reefs.
00:07:37
Speaker
out there in the northwestern Hawaiian islands and they can go down to even like 64 meter depth. So, limo, algae play a huge role in the marine ecosystem here in Hawaii. And I'm going to try to say it. Microdictaeon sachellina. Say it for me again. Microdictaeon sachellianum. Sachellianum.
00:08:01
Speaker
Yeah, it looks like a lettuce. Its morphology is mesh-like, and it has layers. It's like a rosette. It produces rosettes. So in between these layers, you have little organisms that live in between them. When I collect my samples in the field, you find worms, you find little brittle starfish, you find little seashells, but you also find
00:08:25
Speaker
other little turf algae that grow in between the blade so you find snails and sea slugs so even within
00:08:34
Speaker
each individual rosette, there's already a whole community living within it. So it's so cool because when I collect them from the field and bring them into my tank and then all of a sudden I see all these little crabs and critters in my tank and I'm like, where did these come from? Not knowing that they were in the rosettes that I collected. And of course I put those back. I bring them back into the origins. Amazing.
00:08:59
Speaker
I'm looking at a picture of it and it really is, it's like a net. It's so cool. Like I said, all the different morphologies of different algae is so, some look like cheese, some have the mesh layers, some are transparent, they look like glass.
00:09:18
Speaker
Ulva. I think that's one of my favorite species just because it has this shiny glassy look to it. You have Ulva. U-L-V-A. Yeah, Ulva. It's also known as sea lettuce. You have algae that look like grape and like swirls. It's beautiful. They're just so beautiful.
00:09:40
Speaker
And they have big ranges too, right? The microdicty is also across the Pacific. It's also in Federated States of Micronesia. Is that right? Is that one from home? Yes, that's correct. That's one of the reasons why I chose to study microdicty is because it's also found back home in the FSM. So that's how I got to tie my work here in Hawaii to Micronesia. And you also studied sargassum aquifolium, is that right?
00:10:10
Speaker
Yes, yes I did. So sargassum also known as limu kala. So limu means algae or seaweed in Hawaiian and kala means to forgive. So limu kala is probably the most significant limu in Hawaii. It almost, I think one of the limu organizations here were trying to make it the state limu.
00:10:36
Speaker
So, yeah, Limukala used to forgive because it was used to, I mean, it's also still used today for a traditional practice called Ho'oponopono here in Hawaii. It's a forgiveness ceremony and there are many different ways the ceremony has, like I've learned, like some people
00:10:55
Speaker
take Limukala and if there's conflict between both parties they'll take Limukala and each party will eat a piece of it as a sign of peace has been restored or because Limukala grows in long strands, I've heard that some people exchange it as a lay, as a sign that peace has been restored as well.
00:11:17
Speaker
Limukala has been also found in songs and legends. Limukala has pneumatocysts, these glass gas bladders that help with buoyancy in the water. So that's how it also floats on the surface. And one legend has it that one of the ocean gods used Limukala as a way to save some
00:11:38
Speaker
fishermen out at sea through the flotation devices on it. It's also used as a cleansing limu. So before fishermen would go out to sea because you never knew if they were going to come back alive. And so they
00:11:54
Speaker
made sure that all problems on land were good between families. Any conflicts would be good before they leave because they would put limucala on their head as a reef, and they would slowly walk into the water until the reef slowly floated off of their head, symbolizing that all problems on land is floating away. So when they go to sea, they know that if anything happens, everything will be okay at home.
00:12:24
Speaker
It used to be abundant in Waikiki in the 1970s. We had our little version of our kelp forests, but with climate change, with changes happening in Waikiki, with buildings and construction, it disappeared. It's no longer there. And so that was one of the reasons why I studied Limukala
00:12:47
Speaker
trying to grow them, cultivate them in the tanks on limestone tiles was to try the long term goal was to out plant those tiles back onto the reef to bring back the native populations. So you were doing field work or field collecting and then also a laboratory component to your research, is that right?
00:13:08
Speaker
Yeah, I did my field work. It was out at the Anui Nui Fisheries Research Center. So I had an outdoor seawater system. So not so much in lab, but outdoor. And it, Sand Island is known to be so hot. There's no shade out there. So just blasted with sunlight and heat every day, but the limo like it. And were you propagating populations and mastering the reproduction?
00:13:36
Speaker
cycle of the seaweeds? Yeah, so I go collect reproductive plants, bring them back to the seawater system. I let them float on the water surface, and what they do is release the gametes into the water column. Those get together and form a zygote, fertilize, and then they settle down on the tiles.
00:14:02
Speaker
And then they form these little germlings, these little baby orgasm plants. And they're so cute. And it's so crazy because within three days, the tiles, you go and check them and they are all the surface of the tiles are so bumpy. There's like hundreds of babies on them.
00:14:23
Speaker
So many germlings. Yeah, I wanted to ask. The germlings, it just even sounds cute. And the germlings, they're different than the zygotes? Or are they just a bit further? They're further in development. Developed. Yeah. Yeah, okay. That's when they start to grow their little legs. Not legs, sorry. Their branches, their branches. They start growing their branches and then their little blades and they become a little sarcasm plant.
00:14:49
Speaker
Okay, so totally different forms in these life stages. And climate change was part of your research. What were the research questions that you were addressing?
00:15:02
Speaker
So one of my chapters focused on climate change. It was a bigger project that was conducted out at Coconut Island at the Hawaiian Institute of Marine Biology. And my section for my chapter was to look at the algo portion of it. So what they did was they had 40 tanks with four treatments. It was the control and then the acidic and then the high temperature and then a combination of the acidic and high temperature.
00:15:32
Speaker
conditions for the year 2100. And so towards the end of that experiment, I went and collected all the different algae that grew within the tanks. So I collected all of them, identified them, and then looked at diversity
00:15:49
Speaker
number of species. And really surprisingly, the number of species found in them didn't significantly differ. So that kind of tells us that our native species may still be able to persist under these different climate change conditions. Wow. So was that, that's good-ish news for the seaways. Yeah.
00:16:15
Speaker
Yeah, yes. Because when people think of climate change, it's always like doomsday or like everything's going to die. But some of our species, they already have these built-in mechanisms to, I guess, withstand or still persist under these conditions. I mean, we did
Seaweeds and Climate Change Resilience
00:16:35
Speaker
have like, there's always going to be the winners and the losers. We said the diversity and species composition shifted.
00:16:44
Speaker
So we did lose some, there were the losers and the winners, but the diversity was still okay. The number of species found was still okay, which was really very hopeful. Very hopeful. Yeah, it's interesting. We think about winners and losers a lot in terms of climate change. And of course we look at climate change from our perspective, but for some species, they'll do better. I remember hearing something that
00:17:13
Speaker
You know, there's situations where jellyfish will do really well in the oceans and that there'll be, what was it? There's some term about like slime world.
00:17:27
Speaker
Well, I don't know something about like algae and seaweeds and jellyfish doing really well, but it's a bit. I mean, yeah, I don't have much more to say about it. It was just fascinating, but we want we want healthy oceans, right? And you were you were studying the eco physiological response to seaweed. So I guess what does that what does that mean? It's how the how the plant does its plant business. What were that? What were you looking at?
00:17:56
Speaker
Once they settled on the tiles, I measured their growth, their height, and then photosynthetic rates as well. But for that experiment, for the Limukala, the germlings were very photosynthetic, even as photosynthetic compared to their adult plants.
00:18:17
Speaker
Yeah, photosynthesis, I've been reading this book. It's just an old book kind of generally about plants, green inheritance by Anthony Huxley. And photosynthesis, we have so much to thank for it. And we don't think about it very much in our everyday. But he wrote this quote, which I thought was just really a simple, potent reminder. He wrote that plants are continuously active by day, conjuring the food they need out of sunlight, water, and gases around them.
00:18:45
Speaker
This miracle of living alchemy is called photosynthesis and without it virtually all life on this planet would seize. And it just goes back to all that invisible work to us that plants are just doing for us every day. Yeah.
00:19:01
Speaker
Yeah, because like I said, when I say I study seaweed or algae, people are just thinking of slime from the sun. So it's definitely underappreciated our seaweed. Yeah, I'm sure you have to field a lot of interesting questions about what people imagine your research to be versus what it is. Yeah.
00:19:27
Speaker
I wanted to ask you also about someone that I believe has been referred to as your academic grandmother and the first lady of Lima, Dr. Isabella Abbott. Who is she? So Dr. Isabella Abbott, like you said, she's my academic grandmother. So she was my advisor's advisor. She has done
00:19:53
Speaker
so much work for the Pacific, for Limu in general. She has like authored so many books and over 150 publications. She was the world's leading expert on Hawaiian seaweeds. She's discovered over 200 species of Limu, which hence the name, which is why she is known as the First Lady of Limu.
00:20:19
Speaker
I never got to meet her, but I've heard many stories from my advisor and other graduate students who have worked with her. She was also the first Native Hawaiian to receive a PhD in
00:20:35
Speaker
in science, in any science. And so she was also someone I admired because during her time, woman in STEM was not a thing. And so she also had to endure a lot of challenges of just being a woman in science. She was
00:20:50
Speaker
role model, someone I looked up to, as someone who also is trying to break boundaries in my area, being the first person from the FSM to have a PhD in marine biology, but also trying to be a woman in STEM as well. It's incredible. And that kind of lineage of passing down knowledge in science and academia too is really
00:21:20
Speaker
interesting, you're kind of learning from her through the works that she left and through people she taught and mentored. And I guess going to a different part of the ocean, but another part of the ocean near and dear to you.
Connection to Heritage: Diving to Challenger Deep
00:21:36
Speaker
You've spoken about this quite a bit, but you've had the incredible experience, I think it was at 2020, 2021, where you traveled to the deepest part of the ocean, a place that I think more people have been to the moon than to this part of the ocean, Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench. And this is, of course, in the Federated States and Micronesia FSM waters. What was it?
00:22:05
Speaker
What was it like being on the bottom of the ocean there? There are no words that would ever explain how I felt when I was at the bottom. It was just like a moment. I mean, that was the moment I was preparing for.
00:22:21
Speaker
weeks prior. And then when Victor Viscova was like, we're here, I couldn't believe it. There's so much running through my mind, just like flashes of my family, my community, my ancestors who have sailed the surface of the ocean. And now here I was going down Berkeley at the bottom.
00:22:43
Speaker
And then just thinking about all the legends and stories that were shared with me before the dive of how the deep was, to us, it was a place of life. This is where life started. This is where magic
00:22:58
Speaker
is held. But when I think of other people, their perspective of the deep is scary and dark and mysterious. But to us Pacific Islanders, to me as a Micronesian, a lot of people ask me, were you scared? And I was
00:23:15
Speaker
I was not scared at all. I felt like I was being embraced and going down to get the biggest hug from the ocean. So it really opened my eyes to the perspective of what it means to be a Micronesian. If someone else went down who didn't grow up or wasn't born into this culture of ocean of where our identity came from the ocean, what would
00:23:44
Speaker
The experience would have been completely different. Our perspectives would have been different, but the dive being at the bottom really opened my eyes to really embrace what it meant to be a Micronesian, to be a Pacific Islander, to be of a culture of the ocean. Without the ocean, I am nothing. I guess still following that
00:24:09
Speaker
space analogy a little bit like astronauts talk about when they see the Earth from afar, this feeling of the overview effect and this intense stewardship they feel for Earth. I mean, is that something that was part of your experience? I mean, you are from the ocean. You have this relationship that pre-existed that dive, obviously, very deeply.
00:24:38
Speaker
Did it change your mission with your work? It didn't change it, but it enforced it. One, because the bottom was just so untouched and just to keep it that way. How do we just leave it as is? How do we not put our fingerprints
00:25:00
Speaker
in a place that has just been evolving and has been living and breathing since the very beginning. When I went down, we saw tethers, like fishing. It looked like a line, fishing line, some kind of tether that was laying at the bottom. And in the following year, when we went back to bring Dr. Dawn Wright, as the first African-American woman to Challenger Deep, she saw a beer bottle.
00:25:29
Speaker
And so I see that the moment being down there was special, but it was also very disappointing when I saw that, the tethers. And so it just made me think, what are we doing? A place that only 20-ish people at that time has been to, yet our trash is making it all the way down there. What have we come to? What can we do?
00:25:58
Speaker
What do we have to do to stop it? Yeah, we have a lot of work to do. And I think working on sharing the connection in your experience and sharing what the ocean is and what a relationship looks like I think is definitely part of that. I thought that was so interesting.
00:26:17
Speaker
You just talked about it being living and evolving down the ocean. I think there's probably this idea that it's dead and sterile or just geological at the bottom, but it's kind of that big thing bias again, isn't it? Yes. Oh, man.
00:26:35
Speaker
They found some pretty unique creatures. The landers that went down with us, they are equipped with bait and cameras. And so there's so many footage of all these different kinds of bony fish that live down there. They found all these amphip... Is it amphip... I always get this mixed up. Amphipods. These shrimp-like creatures, eel-like creatures, bony fish. Oh, the deep is full of life.
00:27:03
Speaker
Right? Yeah. And it's all connected too, right? Like the nutrients filtered down to it. It's not just in isolation either.
00:27:15
Speaker
Yeah, a lot of people were asking like, how did you, someone who studies shallow water seaweed, like what did you study down there? How does my research connect to the deepest part of the ocean? On my way down to the deep, looking out from the little window we had, could see marine snow. And so what is marine snow? You know, it's like these tiny particles all the way up from the surface. It could be debris, could be
00:27:44
Speaker
animal poop could be dead animals, but it can also be dead plants that are slowly making its way to the bottom of the ocean, feeding and providing energy still to the life down there. And so although, you know, we think plants just stay at the surface, no, even though they're dead, they're still working. Right? Yeah. They're the source of nutrition for everything. Yeah. Yeah.
00:28:13
Speaker
And so I'm like, see, plants. You find them all doing the surface and you find them all the way at the bottom of the ocean, still feeding.
00:28:24
Speaker
providing life, providing energy. Everything is connected. Yeah. And congratulations. You're now Dr. Nicole Yamase, and you finished your PhD. And since then, you've been doing a lot of different projects and a lot of interesting opportunities that have come up. And you've just, this is a few months now ago, but you've returned from a trip to the FSM, where you were doing some
00:28:51
Speaker
some teaching and some more algae work. Can you tell me a bit about what you were doing?
00:28:59
Speaker
So last summer I was able to teach a summer course through a program called PACMED through UH Manoa. This is a two-year master's course for Pacific Island educators to help them teach them how to integrate the environment into their curriculum to build place-based curriculum. So last summer I was able to teach a marine science course, of course, focused on macroalgae.
00:29:29
Speaker
the lecture section we had and then the field course was a one-week course in Koshray and one week in Ponpei and they some of them have never don't know what algae is they it was so funny because when i met them in person for the field course they were like professor honestly during their lectures you know because our camera was off and our mics were off we were like why is this girl studying
00:29:53
Speaker
seaweed. Why would she spend eight years of her life studying these yucky things? But once we started the field course, they're like, oh my goodness, now we understand. And once they got in the water, once they started to collect them, once they started to identify them and learn about each species, it was just such a beautiful thing to witness.
00:30:18
Speaker
And throughout the field course, we went out, we snorkeled, some of them even haven't even swam in a long time. So it was a great, it was the perfect time for them. This course just opened their eyes to a lot of things in their very own waters. Amazing. Yeah, I think so much of learning
00:30:38
Speaker
plants in botany education. Step one is just learning how to see, isn't it? Yes. And then so much more opens up after you've developed that vocabulary or that you see and then you see differences and then you ask questions.
00:30:58
Speaker
They, when they would collect their black, oh, I would always see this, but I didn't know what it was. Now I know. And now they started naming the, when we were in the water, they would go, oh, this is Halamida. Oh, this is colorful. And they were so proud of themselves when they would actually remember the scientific names.
00:31:19
Speaker
and genus names. And so they're like, wow, now I want to bring my nieces, my kids in the water so that I can show them what we've been learning. So by the end of the week, each educator had a herbarium. They went through the process of going through algae books to identify them, to learn about
00:31:41
Speaker
their ecology and morphology. And so by the end, each of them had a binder full of their pressed algae and they were so proud of themselves. And so they using it as a tool in their classrooms to show their students. It sounds like fun field sampling to do too. And so you have a long history with diving around FSM too, right? I think you told me before that you would dive a lot with your dad and that he taught you
00:32:11
Speaker
a lot of the names of creatures and life around there, is that, yeah. Yeah, that's true. Growing up, because we moved around a lot, I was born in Punpei, but my family moved to Chul, Palau, and Saipan as well. And my dad loves the water. That's how I also came to love the ocean, because we were always swimming growing up. We were always snorkeling, and he would point out different kinds of
00:32:38
Speaker
fish and corals and algae. And it just made me want to be like him. Like how does he know so much? I want to talk a little bit about the naming of things. And I think naming, having the language or the stories helps you see too. It's all connected, right? And did you tell me before that a lot of the seaweeds didn't necessarily have names in Phonpeiian? No.
00:33:06
Speaker
nothing i think only like maybe one or two would that they would call like ears which is basically salen it's the podina species their common name is elephant ears so they just call them ears in punapean and then they also have the sea grape but that's pretty much it
00:33:26
Speaker
It's not like here in Hawaii where they have their native names for their limo. Like that's what I want for our species in ponpe or even across the FSM. That was another activity I tried to challenge my students to do, is to ask their students, what would they name this? You know, whatever fits best, keep it as that and start using the names so that it becomes more common.
00:33:54
Speaker
Mm hmm. Put it in a way that is meaningful for people, which, you know, Latin's not doing that for everyone, is it? Yeah. Mm hmm. Yeah. And so what is the work you're doing
Community Conservation with One Reef
00:34:08
Speaker
right now? You're working with a different ocean conservation organization. Tell me about One Reef and what you're up to.
00:34:16
Speaker
Yes, so now I am working with OneReap and really it will help provide the resources that local communities need to continue what they're doing because we believe if we want to save the oceans, we need to be working with these local communities. They are the
00:34:34
Speaker
tip of the spear. They've been doing this for over centuries. And so if we want to continue to help save our oceans, help manage it, the people who are going to do it best are the local communities. And then also my position at One Reef is director of impact. So working with them to define impact. What does impact mean to the local community?
00:34:59
Speaker
It's amazing and must be so nice after doing the research on kind of plants in isolation to be looking at this holistic approach and the relationship between people and the ecosystems they take care of and are stewards of. Yeah, looking at that system more than just the isolation of it.
00:35:20
Speaker
Yes, yep. We're working with local communities in Palau, Yap and Ponce at the moment. So we have like 15 local partnerships and each of them, impact is going to be different for each community because each community
00:35:36
Speaker
has their own unique challenges, the environments are different, the way they do things traditionally, culture is different. And so it's going to be a really great time to learn more about my home region.
00:35:52
Speaker
I just have two more questions for you. One more about diving. And I think hearing you talk about the creatures and the different seaweeds in the forms has been so interesting. And I listened to another interview with you where you spoke about diving and it looking like a Dr. Seuss world. And I guess, is there a favorite diving spot you have? Yeah. Ooh.
00:36:22
Speaker
One of my favorite would be at Ant et al in Ponce. Like I said, it's Dr. Seuss. You just see all these different colors and shapes and sizes of everything. I think that's what, when I did my first dive, that's what came to mind. I'm like, whoa. I'm in a Dr. Seuss movie because you have all the fan corals. You have all the different colored fish going in and out, swimming in and out of the
00:36:50
Speaker
the crevices and then you have your sea cucumbers and urchins and seaweed. It's just like you're in a cartoon and that's what I want. It's something everybody got to do once in their life at least to try it out because I think it just really gives a whole new perspective of what the ocean is and what it's full of. It's so interesting to do those
00:37:17
Speaker
experiences or those practices that really flip your perspective or change it. I had a conversation with an ecologist who studied the tree canopy but was just talking about the experience of being in the canopy and the light is different and the sounds are different. It's a totally different way of knowing the forest and diving is another version of that, right?
00:37:39
Speaker
yeah oh yeah also how the sunlight just also comes into the ocean just hits corals or hits the angles in certain ways it's just like wow also the rays going in
00:37:54
Speaker
go you know hitting the ocean the water at a certain way it also looks like the how the sun breaks through the clouds and you have different kinds of rays as well so you know what's funny it was also when i dove into the deep i also felt like i was going up into space it was so weird because you know i always i always say that i felt a sense of familiarity but i didn't know what that meant
00:38:21
Speaker
I just knew that it wasn't foreign to me. And so I just had like a light bulb moment a couple months ago when I was like, oh my gosh, I know what I mean now. When I say I felt a sense of familiarity because it was like when I was going down, it was like I was also going up. And so, you know, when we think of our ancestors, we always think of them in the sky as well. And so I think
00:38:46
Speaker
In a spiritual sense, I felt like the deeper I went, the higher I was going up. And so I was closer to my ancestors in that way. It's just like a mirror. The ocean is the mirror of the sky. It's such a weird feeling, but it completely makes sense.
00:39:04
Speaker
I think it's so it's so important, right? Because it is, I think, when we met before, we probably talked about, you know, space sustainability, and it's, it's the same. It's just it's,
00:39:18
Speaker
Western science has broken down Earth into so many distinctive disciplines where the knowledge goes very deep, but it kind of loses that holistic connection between systems and everything, which is very different than Indigenous perspectives and Indigenous science and knowledge, right? And of course, it's the same. Yeah. Yeah, it's amazing. So ever since I've had that epiphany, I guess,
00:39:47
Speaker
Yeah, that's one of the most magical moments of my life, now that I understood what that meant. And it's so much interesting work in thinking about all of these different areas of science. And there's so many incredible indigenous scientists doing really groundbreaking work and sharing that in growing brains everywhere.
00:40:16
Speaker
And I guess this is something, the last thing I wanted to ask you about, and I think you've spoken about this probably throughout this conversation too, but the perspective of you've spoken a bit about studying the ocean as opposed to being from the ocean, what does that mean? I think
00:40:40
Speaker
It definitely hits different. As someone, it's a deeper connection we have. Not everybody gets to say, I'm of the ocean, I'm from the ocean. In Pompeii, we are a matrilineal society, so I inherit my clan from my mother. And so, you know, it was something that I also had to think about later. I guess during college and in my grad school, like, what does it really mean to be a Micronesian?
00:41:09
Speaker
someone who is from, you know, this tiny island, Ponpei, in the middle of the Pacific, and really, life is the ocean. If our ocean is sick, we're sick, and really, we're connected to it, our bloodlines. And so, too, there's just that deeper spiritual connection that we've had, and it's something that has just been passed down
00:41:35
Speaker
for generations and generations. And yeah, I think it really gives more power to us when we study. We're not only studying it just to get a degree, we're studying it because it's our livelihoods, it's our life. We have a lot more on the line for it. Like I said, who are we without the ocean?
00:42:11
Speaker
That was my conversation with Dr. Nicole Yamase. Thank you for listening and huge thank you to Nicole for sharing her work. Plant Kingdom is hosted and produced by me, Catherine Polz, and our music is by Carl Dider. Listen to us wherever you get your podcasts and check out our website at plantkingdom.earth.
00:42:53
Speaker
you