Andrew Thaler - or Southern Fried Scientist, as he's known on the web - is a freelance marine biologist and an advocate for the democratization of ocean science. He's founder of the Southern Fried Science blog, and co-founder of openCTD, a project that aims to make one of the most commonly used tools in oceanography accessible to everyone.
What is your first memory of the ocean?
I grew up near the Chesapeake Bay and spent a lot of time on the water, so I don't really have a "first" memory. My first experience doing ocean science was in high school. I was volunteering as an aquarist assistant at the National Aquarium in Baltimore in the seahorse breeding program and had the opportunity to join Jorge Gomezjurado on a collecting expedition to the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. We went out on a small skiff and ran a seine net over seagrass beds to collect Hippocampus erectus, common lined seahorses, for the exhibit.
What does it mean to be a freelance marine biologist?
It sounds better than unemployed.
How did your blog, Southern Fried Science, get started? And where did the name come from?
I started Southern Fried Science as a writing workshop--a chance to practice communicating scientific issues to a diverse audience. As my audience grew, I added additional writers and expanded the scope of topics we cover. At it's heart, SFS is still about trying new things and developing our skills as writers.
The name reflects the tone of the blog. We're primarily southern (or located in the south) and we talk about science, but we're not here to lecture or participate in heavy-handed discourse. The title Southern Fried Science lets the reader know that we don't take ourselves too seriously.
What is a CTD?
A CTD is an oceanographic tool that measures conductivity, temperature, and depth through a water column. The ocean is not uniform, it its filled with swirling eddies, temperature boundaries, layers of high and low salinity, changing densities, and many other physical characteristics. These three measurements are necessary for characterizing a water column and identifying patterns in the ocean. Using a CTD we can understand how regional and global processes -- both natural and manmade -- affect the ocean. The CTD is used on nearly every oceanographic research program and is often considered the workhorse of oceanography.
Why do we need an openCTD?
There are billions of people whose livelihoods depend on the ocean, but only a select few have access to the tools necessary to study it. The CTD is the single most important oceanographic instrument, but a commercial CTD can cost upwards of $25,000. We believe that this creates an unacceptable barrier to access for the majority of the world's ocean stakeholders. A low-cost, open-source CTD will allow researchers, educators, and anyone interested to investigate ocean processes and contribute to our collective knowledge.
I genuinely believe that the ocean belongs to everyone, and everyone should have access to the tools needed to study it. The OpenCTD is obviously not a perfect solution, but it's the first step towards truly open-source oceanography.
If everyone with a boat did just one openCTD cast, where would you ask them to do it? And what would you do with the data?
The OpenCTD can only function to 200 meters, which provides access to almost all of the world's continental shelf. If all the boats in the world could be coordinated to each generate one data point, I'd want to produce a single, high resolution map of the entire water column above the global continental shelf. This single map, though only a snapshot in time, could reveal oceanographic anomalies that are invisible to conventional oceanographic studies, which take CTD measurements over a kilometer scale. This could then be used to identified key points of interest for future study.
If we were able to send the world ocean fleet out for additional samples, I'd love to do a long-term time series, documenting daily, weekly, or seasonal scale variability throughout the coastal oceans.