Edith Widder Quotes

If I go out in the open ocean environment, virtually anywhere in the world, and I drag a net from 3,000 feet to the surface, most of the animals - in fact, in many places, 80 to 90 percent of the animals that I bring up in that net - make light. This makes for some pretty spectacular light shows.

In the ocean, [bioluminescence] is the rule rather than the exception.

It's a little-appreciated fact that most of the animals in our ocean make light.

I am fond of them, of the inferior beings of the abyss, of those who are full of longing.

There's a lot of animals in the open ocean - most of them that make light. And we have a pretty good idea, for most of them, why. They use it for finding food, for attracting mates, for defending against predators. But when you get down to the bottom of the ocean, that's where things get really strange.

Even in our deep ocean, there are ecosystems at work with no light whatsoever down in the deepest portions of the oceanic abyss.

I would love to see a giant squid. Very few people have seen them. And only about half a dozen people have seen one alive.

I deep sea fish a lot.

One time on a dive, I wound up drifting up in darkness surrounded by billions of photoluminescent creatures. It was a religious experience, one only a poet could do justice to.

The corals do not look much worn, but still appear to have been dead. There are some delicate shells of molluscs from depths beyond 500 fathoms, where they were certainly living.

I think there's so much we don't know and the unknown in the ocean; every 10 years or so, we find some fossil that's been there before mankind.

I do an awful lot of scuba diving. I love to be on the ocean, under the ocean. I live next to the ocean.

If you're going to make a lot of films about a particular group of animals, you might as well pick one that's fairly common. And octopus are: they live in all the oceans. They also live deep. And I can't say octopus are responsible for my really strong interest in getting in subs and going deep, but whatever the case, I like that.

I really feel that there are things in the ocean that we have no idea about.

Zero of Animal Life probably about 300 fathoms.

I've never been hurt by a sea creature, except for jellyfish and sea urchins.

People generally thought that sharks are dumb eating machines. After some study, I began to realize that these 'gangsters' of the deep had gotten a bad rap.

The deep sea is a scary world.

It's a little-appreciated fact that most of the animals in our ocean make light. I've spent most of my career studying this phenomenon called bioluminescence. I study it because I think understanding it is critical to understanding life in the ocean where most bioluminescence occurs.

The one thing I've learned exploring the deep is that you just can't even begin to imagine some of the bizarre creatures that are down there.

One of the things that's frustrated me as a deep-sea explorer is how many animals there probably are in the ocean that we know nothing about because of the way we explore the ocean.

It is clear that if we are going to understand ocean ecosystems, we need to understand the part that bioluminescence plays in those ecosystems.

Since my first dive in a deep-diving submersible, when I went down and turned out the lights and saw the fireworks displays, I've been a bioluminescence junky. But I would come back from those dives and try to share the experience with words, and they were totally inadequate to the task. I needed some way to share the experience directly.

With 'Black Sea,' I long had an idea that I wanted to do a film about people stuck on the bottom of the ocean. I thought that was a terrifying scenario.

In the deepest places, where physical norms collapse under the crushing water, bodies still fall softly through the dark, days after their vessels have capsized. They decay on their long journey down. Nothing will hit the black sand at the bottom of the world but algae-covered bones.