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.

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

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 primary way that we know about what lives in the ocean is we go out and drag nets behind ships. And I defy you to name any other branch of science that still depends on hundreds-of-year-old technology. The other primary way is we go down with submersibles and remote- operated vehicles. I've made hundreds of dives in submersibles.

Marine biology was something I was into during high school and the beginning of college.

There is another domain that we consider relevant and having good prospects - marine biology. For many years this region [Russian Far East] has been home for one of the leading institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Marine Biology.

If you compare NASA's annual budget to explore the heavens, that one year budget would fund NOAA's budget to explore the oceans for 1,600 years.

I am really dedicated to understanding the planet/creature on which we live and know that means I must go beneath the sea to see 72 percent of what is going on.

I have in hands, now, specimens of bottom from t he Gulf Stream, obtained by Lieutenant Craven, and I can say that they are among the most interesting that I have ever seen.

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 am an underwater explorer, not a treasure hunter.

The naturalists of our own time hold equal faith in the wonders of the sea, but seek therein rather for the links of nature's chain than for apparent exceptions.

I love storytelling, I love being a visual person, and it just made perfect sense to be an underwater photographer and explore the ocean and work with scientists.

As a young boy, I was very interested - as I still am - in all sorts of adventure and exploration. I thought about being an astronaut, a dinosaur scientist, or marine biologist, but I clearly was drawn to the ocean and to the water.

I love the ocean. Boats, not so much.

I had gone to school to study marine biology.

The amazing thing about the sea is that it is perhaps the last truly unexplored frontier; most oceanographers estimate that only about ninety-five per cent of the sea has been studied. Meanwhile, the oceans are believed to contain more animals than exist on land, a majority of which have never been discovered.

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.

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.

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

Everybody's got some fascination with undersea life, don't you think?

When I was younger, I wanted to be a marine biologist, among other things.

We went out and tagged 17 sharks and watched where they went. The data was amazing.

There is an enormous amount to be learned about the sea; like most wildernesses, it has great potential.

I suppose the marine biology was a post-teen thing. I was kind of on my way but I was one of those teenage boys who got to 13, 14 and had no idea what I was going to do. I liked natural history. I liked the outdoors. And I found the sea quite interesting.