Stored in the controlled chaos of Gretta Pecl’s office on the banks of the River Derwent are jars containing samples of the giant squid that now and then wash up on Tasmanian shores. Professor Pecl, a self-confessed sucker for squid, keeps these specimens – mostly muscle tissue and reproductive organs – for regular talks to students who she wows with fun facts about the life of the cephalopod. Among the squid's many curious attributes are three hearts, blue blood, and advanced problem-solving abilities.
As director of the Centre for Marine Socioecology - a University of Tasmania and CSIRO collaboration that began in 2014 – Pecl’s focus has broadened from her favourite marine creature to encompass entire ecosystems and the humans that interact with them.
The Centre’s work on the impact of climate change on oceans lies at the intersection of marine, earth and social sciences; technology and psychology; and economics, government and media.
The United Nations has declared 2021–2030 the Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, and Pecl, as head of the Centre for Marine Socioecology's collaborative Future Seas Project, is leading an international drive to boost ocean health by providing the science necessary for sustainable marine development – to underpin “the ocean we need for the future we want.”
Her attention has shifted from the lab and field work of an early career researcher to a wide-angled and very public engagement with the great issue of our age.
Not content to merely study the world, she’s an actor in it. As part of the citizen-science project Redmap Australia, Pecl invites anglers and divers to photograph marine species that seem to have strayed south with warming ocean currents. She is as much a sleuth as a scientist; or, as she puts it, an “eco detective.”
“Biology and ecology are largely about figuring out how a species or ecosystem works,” she says. “How it responds to temperature or some other factor, where it goes, what it eats, how it interacts with other species, how it’s affected by our human activity. Each aspect of a plant or animal is complicated on its own. Each is its own puzzle piece, but there are so many puzzle pieces, and each piece affects the other – nature is so complicated, but also incredibly fascinating.”
Her job is a constant source of wonder. Her “favourite cephalopod video in the world” captures the moment an octopus drops its masterful camouflage as an algae-encrusted rock and scoots away across the ocean floor.
“I’ve been a biologist for 25 years and still, almost every day in fact, I see something that makes me think, ‘What is that? Is it real?’ And sure enough, it's actually a creature that exists.”
Asked to recall the most astonishing revelation of life beneath the waves, she gives a crisp reply: “the way giant squids have sex.”
Gretta Pecl was born into a blue-collar Tasmanian household. “These days my father is my biggest fan, but he had strong ideas about girls and careers due to his own upbringing, and education wasn’t a priority when I was a kid.”
And yet it was clear, from a young age, that her curiosity was irrepressible. “Outside school hours I was a biology nerd reading about plants and animals, catching bugs, puzzling over creatures washed up on the shore when we went on our annual family pilgrimage to the beach. I was awed by the vastness of the ocean and fascinated by the things in it. Mum would shriek in horror if we went into the water past our knees, but this only made me wonder what the hell was so frightening in there.”
Pecl completed her doctorate on the northern reef squid at James Cook University and returned to Tasmania as a research assistant.
In 2009 she launched Redmap (or Range Extension Database and Mapping) from the University’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) after a large group of commercial anglers reported worrying changes to the marine environment. Most of these anglers, invited by Pecl to a workshop, were climate sceptics. She encouraged them to forget about the climate debate and instead talk about the environmental changes they’d witnessed. These, it turned out, were all consistent with climate change.
Did you know? 4,000+ citizen science contributions to Redmap since 2009
A professor of marine ecology at IMAS and an ARC Future Fellow, she has been the recipient of an ARC post-doctoral fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship.
She recently varied her theme of outreach with two educational card games, Go Fish and Marine Match, that she developed with colleagues. Each illustrated card includes details about endemic or endangered species, or species new to Tasmania. Among the latter group is the wonderfully named Gloomy Octopus, which has recently migrated south to Tasmanian waters.
She recently varied her theme of outreach with two educational card games, Go Fish and Marine Match, that she developed with colleagues. Each illustrated card includes details about endemic or endangered species, or species new to Tasmania. Among the latter group is the wonderfully named Gloomy Octopus, which has recently migrated south to Tasmanian waters.
The 2020 Netflix documentary My Octopus Teacher, about a South African filmmaker who records his relationship with a characterful common octopus, took cephalopods off the menu for many people. Pecl liked the film because it “helped the public see how fascinating these guys can be. They definitely have personalities. We’ve had octopus in tanks that have been naughty, cranky, inquisitive, or friendly.”
The documentary also prompted her to reflect on the assumptions guiding her own relationship with nature, and how these had changed over the years.
“I used to think of nature in a more ‘humans are connected to but separate from nature’ kind of way,” she says. “But now I think of humans as a deeply integrated part of nature. In this I’ve been profoundly affected and influenced by my work collaborating with First Peoples here in Tasmania and overseas.”
Among Pecl’s gifts is the art of gentle persuasion. By dropping academic airs, striving for human connection and, as she puts it, “meeting people where they are”, she’s opened eyes that had been closed to nature’s human-inflicted wounds. She’s well aware that while science can solve puzzles, only societies can reclaim the future, and it’s to both science and the broader society that her energies are directed.
Gretta Pecl is Professor of Marine Ecology at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies and Director of the Centre for Marine Socioecology
Main image: Seahorse, marine and Antarctic science research
This story features in the 2023 edition of It's in our nature - a collection of stories that celebrate and highlight the unique work being undertaken by our institution, and the people within it, to deliver a more fair, equitable and sustainable society.
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