2019-06-01_New_Scientist

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1 June 2019 | New Scientist | 31

Book
Ocean Outbreak:
Confronting the rising
tide of marine disease
Drew Harvell
University of California Press

CORAL bleaching has become
something of an everyday
apocalypse. Researched,
documented and foretold,
it is a biotic meltdown to
which we have become all
too accustomed. But the seas
hold other more insidious
disasters, as much our fault
as the heating of the oceans.
They tend, though, to be
less covered by the media,
which is why Ocean Outbreak
is such an important book.
Its author, Drew Harvell,
is an ecologist at Cornell
University, New York, and
a specialist in diseases
of marine life. As head of
a World Bank task force, she
became increasingly worried
by widespread ignorance
about diseases that could
destabilise temperate and
tropical marine ecosystems.
Harvell’s clear and clever
prose takes us from the
Indonesian coral reefs to
Californian kelp beds, from

Caribbean sandy beaches to
Washington state’s inlets, as
she shows us an unfolding
series of ecological disasters.
There is the mystery disease
that laid waste to most of
California’s starfish, making
their arms fall off and their
guts spill out. Then there is
the infection that made the
abalone’s muscular foot
wither, so that the rock-
clutching mollusc couldn’t
feed. Or the agent that ate
holes in sea fans, creating
purple halos as it went.
Piece by piece, Harvell
brings the science to life,
through dedicated lab and
fieldwork. We see dead ends,
disasters, eureka moments
and slow, encouraging
recoveries, as she makes plain
what might have happened –
and might still – if diseases
had taken even deeper hold.
Ocean Outbreak does a
first-rate job of inspiring
readers, and of providing the
right kind of proselytising to
turn marine epidemiology
into a go-to career for a new
and concerned generation. ❚

Adrian Barnett is a rainforest
ecologist at Brazil’s National
Institute of Amazonian Research
in Manaus

Killers in the sea


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their own sake do not interest
him. “I never use dynamic data
in my work,” he says.
He did try, once. In 2014, he won
a residency at the Large Hadron
Collider at CERN, Switzerland. But
he found the data overwhelming.
“They have supercomputers and
one experiment takes two years
to analyse and compute,” he says,
“and still it’s not really enough.
They proposed I use this dynamic
data, but how could one single
artist handle this? We talk of ‘big
data’ but no one imagines really
how big it is.”
So Ikeda’s data-verse 1 project,
which will take a year and two
more productions to reach
fruition, is founded on that most
old-fashioned of ideas, a record
of objective truth. It is neither
easy nor cheap to realise, and is
being supported by watch-makers
Audemars Piguet, an increasingly
powerful patron of artists who
operate on the boundaries
between art and science.
Last year, the firm helped
Brighton-based art duo
Semiconductor realise their
CERN-inspired kinetic sculpture
HALO. Before that, it invited lidar
artist Quayola to map the Swiss
valley where it has its factory.
While Audemars Piguet has
an interest in art that pushes
technological boundaries, Ikeda
fights shy of talk of technology,
or even physics. He is interested
in the truth bound up in numbers
themselves. In an interview with
Japanese art critic Akira Asada
in 2009, he remarked: “I cannot
help but wonder if there are
any artists today that give real
consideration to beauty. To me,
it is mathematicians, not artists,
who epitomise that kind of
individual. There is such a
freeness to their thinking that it
is almost embarrassing to me.” ❚


Wrecked starfish and sea fans with purple holes
should worry all of us, finds Adrian Barnett
Free download pdf