Ep 52 The Big Blue Ocean | Professor Jessica Meeuwig

Professor Jessica Meeuwig AM is one of Australia’s most important voices in ocean conservation. Recently appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for her significant service to marine conservation and research, Jessica is the inaugural Wen Family Chair in Conservation at The University of Western Australia and Director of the Marine Futures Lab. Her work has helped pioneer the global use of midwater BRUVS, baited remote underwater video systems used to study life in the “big blue”. This is the vast open ocean that covers most of our planet, but remains hidden from view. Through this work, Jessica and her team have transformed how scientists count, measure and understand open-ocean wildlife, from sharks and tuna to the smaller pelagic species often missed by traditional fisheries data. In this episode of Paramount Importance, Kurt Krispyn sits down with Jessica to explore why the open ocean matters to all of us, how scientists study wildlife in one of the hardest places on Earth to monitor, and what that research can tell us about sharks, tuna, fisheries, shifting baselines and marine parks. This is a powerful conversation about the hidden life of the open ocean, the difference between real protection and “paper parks”, and why the ocean still has an extraordinary ability to heal if we give it the space to do so.