Sönke Johnsen admits that, "unlike most marine biologists, I don't even live on the coast" but, rather, some two hours away via interstate highway. However, his obsession with the open water has been lifelong, initially fueled by annual childhood family trips from Pittsburgh to Kill Devil Hills on North Carolina's Outer Banks. In Into the Great Wide Ocean: Life in the Least Known Habitat on Earth, Johnsen deftly, humorously, lovingly combines his childhood awe and his many discoveries--both marine and human--delving into the deep blue seas.

Johnsen's "love for the ocean eventually propelled [him] to graduate school in marine biology"; he's now the Ida Stephens Owens Distinguished Professor of Biology at Duke University. That trajectory, however, was as roundabout as it was random--arriving from "a nomadic life of teaching kindergartners, programming computers, and renovating houses." When he and a friend decided they needed more education, they chose what to study by going through the alphabet, Johnsen settled quickly on "b" for biology (his friend went with "e" for education): "Thirty-five years later, we're still living out the decisions we made in that half-hour drive."

Johnsen selected the University of North Carolina, "mostly because I thought Chapel Hill was closer to Kill Devil Hills than it turned out to be." His ah-ha moment took another six years: "The animals out there look nothing like the animals on land or near shore," his grad school mentor told him. "In that moment everything in my life changed, as I became aware of an immense world that had always been right there, waiting for me to notice." And so--applications, rejections, detours aside--to the great, wide ocean Johnsen went. His first research cruise was a "trial by fire"--the realities of seasickness, privations, indignities--but he was there, "on the ocean, out of sight of land, exploring it with nets, instruments, and a manned submersible. It was then I learned that I never knew the ocean at all."

So far from shore in the seemingly endless expanse, the animals proved magical. "What on earth is that?" was a common refrain. Marine animals that live in the open waters must navigate habitats without a bottom floor or a reef (or anything stationary) while maintaining a sustainable depth to avoid being crushed by changing water pressure. They must also find food without becoming food themselves--"They seem alien because the ocean is an alien world to us." And yet most of the earth is water, which means "to know the ocean is to know our planet."

In (mostly) one-word-titled chapters, Johnsen explores--and deciphers as plainly as possible--the often mind-boggling adaptations necessary to thrive in the pelagic portion of the ocean. Pelagic, he explains, "is everything that is not the bottom, which includes the surface and the watery world between it and sea floor." Within these pages, interspersed with wondrously intricate black-and-white line drawings by Marlin Peterson, Johnsen highlights the pelagic animals that exist "particularly in the top 1000 feet"--their buoyancy, their sight (or lack thereof), their movements and migrations, feeding, camouflaging, reproducing, and establishing relationships within and between species.

Interwoven with pelagic encounters are frustrating, funny, inspiring stories of the people who study the boundless waters, along with the technology to make all that happen. What may sound like improv comedy--"At sea, plan A never works, and plan B is usually a pipe dream, so you're left with plan C or--more often--plan D, which you built out of old ladders, spackle tubs, and duct tape on the back deck at 3 AM"--is very much reality. Nonetheless, the rewards are immeasurable: intense, intimate camaraderie with colleagues and crew and the infinite satisfaction (delight, elation, glee) of discovering life that has rarely, if ever, been seen. Always looming is the realization of the vastness of not knowing. "We don't know much about pelagic communities," Johnsen acknowledges, although he astutely counters with plenty of "why we don't know it."

Johnsen is an amusing, friendly writer, regularly using "I," "you," and "we" to create what reads like a warm chat. He never shies away from exacting science but effortlessly translates complicated details into easily understandable descriptions: fish with swim bladders deflate via burping or flatulence to dive back down. Compelling tidbits appear on almost every page: male octopuses hand their mates a "nuptial gift" during insemination; parasitic shrimp lay eggs in a hollowed-out salp corpse that the newly hatched babies will then eat; the 13,000-mile round-trip journey of elephant seals to birth their pups every December on Año Nuevo State Park beach near Santa Cruz, Calif. As for his human communities, Johnsen convincingly concludes, "It turns out that 23 people more or less randomly put on a small boat in the middle of the sea can get along, pull together as a team, and accomplish great things." --Terry Hong

Sonke Johnsen (photo: Jamie Baldwin)

Sönke Johnsen claims he "never wanted to be a biologist" and yet he's spent the last quarter century at Duke University's biology department, where he's currently the Ida Stephens Owens Distinguished Professor in Biology. His field work takes him on open ocean research cruises, using scuba and deep-sea submersibles for closer encounters with marine life. His particular interest is in vision and camouflage in the open ocean. In Into the Great Wide Ocean: Life in the Least Known Habitat on Earth (Princeton University Press, October 15, 2024), Johnsen reveals fascinating details of the pelagic world along with intimate, often humorous glimpses of its human audiences.

You confess in your preface that you hadn't written a word long after your manuscript deadline. Despite the pressure of not being able to "bail" because you'd bought a much beloved tractor with the advance, how long did it take you to finally finish? And did you manage to have fun in the process? 

I wrote a chapter and then Covid hit. Then I waited for the world to get better and it did not. So I set up a writing retreat in fall 2021, made it to my cabin in the hills and immediately got Covid. I waited until 2022, and then finished it on a sabbatical at the Duke University Marine Lab. I write fast, when I'm actually typing, but spend a lot of time musing beforehand. I can't say writing is "fun," but I do like it.

Did you work from copious notes? Or does the writing just sort of happen? 

I've never used notes for anything in my life. Things stay in my head or they don't. It can feel full, and writing it down can be a relief from all those words in there.

You mention that your favorite animal is always "the one I'm working on now." In the book, you were most recently exploring the navigation prowess of elephant seals. Do you have a new favorite animal today?

Right now, it might be skates. It turns out that they can both detect electricity and make it, which is very rare for a marine animal. So--in the best of all worlds--we are trying to decode their electrical language. It will be hard, I think. I also really like sea birds, since we are doing a project about how they find their food.

Since you get so intimate with these animals, do you ever feel guilty about having to collect them as specimens? As in, you have to kill them?

Yes--I have a soft heart for animals and we try very hard to work in a way that doesn't harm them. We mostly do behavioral work or other kinds that don't hurt them. This is hardest when we catch deep sea animals because they don't live long after that. We catch far less, though, than the bycatch of even the smallest trawler.

Besides the glass octopus, what else haven't you seen that you'd love to meet? 

Good question. Hard to answer, since I've seen so many that I wanted to. For me it's also more about the whole community than it is about a special animal. That said, I'd love to see a giant oarfish.

The film My Octopus Teacher seemed to have tipped the public's interest in relationships with marine life; numerous books as well, perhaps most successfully, the novel Remarkably Bright Creatures. Any thoughts on this anthropomorphizing of sea creatures? 

I have mixed feelings. I like anything that makes people pay more attention to the natural world around them, but animals are not us. They do share a history with us, but the mental and sensory worlds are so different. We should love animals but also accept that they are not us.

Your book is as much about people as it is about pelagic companions. Are there lessons from the human community that helped better understand them? And, maybe more importantly, vice versa?

More vice versa. The community of life at sea, both human and animal, have helped me understand what it is I want for our own communities on land. At sea, a community will form almost anywhere it can, almost because it has to. On land, this doesn't happen as easily, which makes me sad.

What is your absolute favorite research trip thus far? 

They've nearly all been wonderful, but I do have very fond memories of my first blue-water diving cruise in 1998 in the Gulf of Mexico. It was magical to be in all that blue water, and the weather behaved for once.

Do you have a bucket list of future research destinations? 

The open ocean is funny in that it doesn't have destinations. You can be warm or cold, but otherwise things don't change much. I'd like to see the Antarctic, though. I didn't before because those cruises are long and we had a child.

Do you scuba dive just for fun?

I do dive for fun, even when working. The Great Barrier Reef is hard to beat, but just about anywhere away from the coast is nice. I loved Looe Key in the Florida Keys, and the reef off Belize.

You write that this is not a book about conservation, but since you mention the above locations--how do you react when you see the reef destruction? Any brilliant ideas--maybe the fish have whispered great secrets to you?

I realize in retrospect that the book, since it's essentially my own love poem to the ocean, is 100% about conservation, just in an indirect way. It breaks my heart to see what we have done to nearly all the habitats on earth, and places like reefs are especially vulnerable. I wish I knew how to fix it. It seems like the main solution has to involve backing off a little. If you leave nature alone, it has a remarkable ability to recover. North Carolina had almost no beavers or trees. We stopped hunting and harvesting them, and now this is a beaver-filled forest. I want to see the world given a chance to return to a more natural state.

You are very open about what you don't know--with the caveat of "It can be hard to get a scientist to say 'I don't know,' and even harder to get them to say 'I was wrong.' " What's the one thing that you wish you knew for sure?

Oh, wow. I do this to my students all the time and they hate it. If I'm limiting myself to biology, I would love to see how all the animals are actually related. It's the ultimate family story.

Any last words for your readers-to-be?

I mostly want people to appreciate the things that they don't get to see all the time. I know that's hard because we fall in love with what we see, not with what someone tells us. But I hope this book can worm its way into people's minds and--even for a moment--take them hundreds of miles from shore, where their only companions are transparent swimming snails. --Terry Hong