Justin Hudson
Appearances
Short Wave
Solving A Centuries Old Maritime Mystery
So about every 40 years, someone seems to learn about Milky Seas, gets fascinated by the idea, and then builds the best database they could of all the sightings they were able to gather on Milky Seas. And what has happened to all of those previous databases is that they've all been lost in some way.
Short Wave
Solving A Centuries Old Maritime Mystery
Not at sea, I hope. The last person to make a database before us, his name was Dr. Peter Herring. And as far as he knows, his database, if it still exists, is just in some unknown archive room in the UK Navy storage somewhere.
Short Wave
Solving A Centuries Old Maritime Mystery
Yeah, there are a few accounts in the database. where the best scientific tool someone had to study this was just taking a swig of this strange glowing water out of the ocean and seeing what they could figure out from there. And there's this one account from the early 1800s where the ship's surgeon had heard about this before from sailors in the Middle East.
Short Wave
Solving A Centuries Old Maritime Mystery
And they had claimed that the water tasted fresh. And so when he encountered one, he immediately took up a bucket and tasted it himself. And he actually complains in the account that it just tastes like normal seawater.
Short Wave
Solving A Centuries Old Maritime Mystery
Yeah. So the main way it differs is kind of what Steve touched on is that it's the function behind why they're bioluminescing. So a firefly, its bioluminescence is sort of like communication of other fireflies. And the more typical bioluminescence you see out in the ocean is caused by this organism called a dinoflagellate. and it glows in response to some kind of shock.
Short Wave
Solving A Centuries Old Maritime Mystery
Something nudges it, or it gets inside a crashing wave that's on the shore, and it glows as it's called a burglar alarm response, as sort of a way to tell whatever is trying to eat it, that like, you've been spotted, so you're in danger and you should get away from me.
Short Wave
Solving A Centuries Old Maritime Mystery
Whereas with this Vibrio harvey that we think is behind it, it's glowing actually not to scare away predators, but to attract predators intentionally.
Short Wave
Solving A Centuries Old Maritime Mystery
Yeah, I have a couple different emotions about that actually. Ben Franklin actually has a letter he wrote to a friend of his in the 1750s where he was complaining how he had carried all these experiments to prove that it was actually electricity and lightning in the ocean causing bioluminescence, but actually he has come to the conclusion that it's just some unknown living being we can't see.
Short Wave
Solving A Centuries Old Maritime Mystery
Captain Newland, 20 years later, sort of in that same, I guess, scientific discourse, comes to the same conclusion about Milky Seas. And I'm just kind of impressed that they were able to sort of really narrow it down that well back then And then the fact that we still haven't been able to come that much further since then is kind of...
Short Wave
Solving A Centuries Old Maritime Mystery
It's a little depressing and shows just kind of how hard it is to actually study this.
Short Wave
Solving A Centuries Old Maritime Mystery
Yeah, I guess something that has kind of come up in our research on Milky Seas, there's others like rare forms of bioluminescence that happen out in the middle of the ocean that are both... equally as not understood, and as well as just, there really isn't any documentation on them. And trying to understand, driving into more of those. Wow.
Short Wave
Solving A Centuries Old Maritime Mystery
And a lot of them were written off as just, you know, drunks, drunk sailors at the bar trying to impress each other with more, you know, better tall tales than someone else had.