Bob Edwards introduced our guest speaker for the evening, John Turnbull, Marine Explorer, researcher at UNSW, President of their Underwater Research Group.
John spoke to us about the weird and wonderful marine life in the waters around Sydney. A keen diver and marine ecologist, John explained that 70% of the earth is covered by oceans which provide us with all our water and 50% of our oxygen. It is a hidden world and expensive to research and hence only a small percentage is known about it. The ocean comprises an underwater forest made of kelp and crayweed and unfortunately in the 1970s much of this crayweed died due to pollution. Despite the vast improvement in the cleanliness of the oceans since then, this crayweed has not naturally regenerated and is having to be replanted by divers wherever possible.
John’s website, www.marineexplorer.com, shows what unique life there is under the ocean around Sydney. Some of this sea life include types of cuttlefish, weedy sea dragons – a foot long creature that lives in kelp and looks and behaves like kelp, and the blue groper which is neither blue nor a groper! The Sydney pigmy pipehorse and Bare Island angler fish are both unique to Sydney waters amongst other creatures.
John also spoke about marine pollution and explained that the biggest pollution threat are microplastics, the main culprits, surprisingly, being the minute plastic grains in facial scrubs and the fibres of polar fleeces and other synthetic fibres. Each time they are washed the minute fibres eventually end up in the oceans attracting harmful chemicals which end up back in our food chain. This certainly gave us all food for thought!
Ian Burnet thanked John Turnbull for his talk and said we all need to take responsibility and learn how to protect our environment.