Tracey Sutton
DANIA BEACH, Fla. – Professor Tracey Sutton’s obsession with the ocean runs deep.
“I’m doing now what I thought I would be doing when I was 6 years old,” said Sutton, a top oceanographic scientist at Nova Southeastern University (NSU). “I was fascinated by fish the first time I saw the ocean from the Navarre Beach Fishing Pier. Watching schools of fishes move along the beach was a game-changer for me.”
Navarre Beach, a famous Florida Panhandle angling destination, is about 40 minutes from where Sutton was born, in the small town of Milton.
Over the years, Sutton’s marine life fascination has steered him to extraordinary depths. In ocean research, Sutton’s specialty is called “deep pelagic,” characterized by vast, dark, cold waters with high pressure, the lack of sunlight, and unique creatures. Deep pelagic animals depend on bioluminescence (the biochemical emission of light) for navigation and communication.
“Most deep-pelagic animals will never see the bottom nor the surface of the ocean,” he said. “For them, it must truly be like living in outer space.”
A sea-going oceanographer, Sutton participates in one to three research cruises each year, sometimes using submersibles for access. His deepest dive has been 3,300 feet, equivalent to the length of more than nine football fields. During his journeys, Sutton has discovered and described a few bizarre-looking fish species – such as the scaleless black dragonfish in the north Atlantic Ocean, deep-sea anglerfish in the Gulf of Mexico, and Robert’s dragonfish in the Indo-Pacific.
“Diving in a submersible is jaw-dropping fantastic,” he said. “It changes your perspective of life on Earth. Seeing luminescent fishes, pelagic shrimp, squid, and gigantic jellyfish in their natural environment is nothing one can ever see on land.”
Many of his specimens look like something out of a science fiction movie. While some are transparent and glow like fireflies, others have vampire-like teeth and come in brilliant colors.
“These animals create living light,” Sutton said. “They use this light to hunt, to hide, to find each other, and to startle predators. Living light is the language of the deep ocean interior.”
Regardless of their shape, size, color, or other characteristics, these creatures perform a vital function for the survival of the planet, Sutton says. The up-and-down migration of deep-pelagic animals during feeding reduces carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
“This ecosystem service has been valued in the trillions of dollars,” Sutton said.
At NSU, Sutton points his passions at exploring the far reaches in the Gulf of Mexico, learning about its many creatures that almost no one encounters, and devising strategies to ensure that those same creatures thrive.
While teaching five classes at NSU and guiding six to 10 graduate students in his lab, most of Sutton’s work is heavy on research, something he refined during his post-doctorate work at the well-renowned Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution – a private, nonprofit research and higher education facility dedicated to the study of marine science and engineering.
“Woods Hole feels like my birthplace, research-wise,” he said. “It has a singular job description – be the best in the world at what you do. Woods Hole has a belief that if you give people the freedom and administrative support to go where others have not, great things will happen.”
Introduction to NSU’s Oceanographic Campus
Sutton first came to NSU to do a site review of Professor Tamara Frank’s laboratory in 2012. Frank’s research focuses on the visual physiology of deep-sea animals and zooplankton ecology. Sutton, who was a faculty member at William & Mary’s School of Marine Science in Virginia at the time, says he felt a wonderful vibe during his visit.
“I knew that people at NSU’s Oceanographic Campus were top scientists, but on my visit, I learned that they were also amazing people,” he said. “People were happy here.”
While in South Florida, Sutton was told that NSU had an opening, so he applied and accepted a position in the summer of 2013.
“I love it here,” he said. “The freedom to ‘do me’ and the support along the way were a perfect combination, culminating in the creation of the DEEPEND (Deep-Pelagic Nekton Dynamics) Research Consortium, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary.”
Sutton is director and principal investigator of the consortium, an initiative with more than 140 participants from 22 institutions to date. DEEPEND is dedicated to research and stewardship of the organisms and communities of the open ocean, including the effects of human activities on those communities. DEEPEND’s broader goals are to increase public awareness of life in the deep sea and to train the next generation of ocean scientists and resource managers.
In the past 10 years, DEEPEND scientists have recorded one out of every nine fish species now known to live in the Gulf of Mexico.
“We have recorded about 190 new fish records,” Sutton said.
The seeds of DEEPEND were planted when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) asked Sutton to help with a natural resource damage assessment after the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010. Deepwater was a massive offshore oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that was caused by an explosion and fire on a drilling rig. The spill resulted in the release of more than 4.9 million barrels (210 million gallons) of oil in the ocean over five months, making it the largest marine oil spill in history. The spill has been the subject of a major motion picture and numerous documentaries.
NOAA called on Sutton’s expertise because of his work on a Census of Marine Life project in the North Atlantic a few years before the spill. Sutton connected with NSU’s Frank and began building his consortium team. They worked for months on research vessels taking an inventory of deep-sea life in the Gulf.
“It took us several years to fully analyze all of the samples, during which time I visited Tammy at NSU, and later joined the faculty and brought the program here.”
In 2014, a large program called the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative announced a competition for consortium funding. Sutton combined his original team with new researchers at Texas A&M, University of South Florida, Florida International University, the Smithsonian, and the Naval Research Laboratory at the Stennis Space Center. With the new researchers on board, he wrote the DEEPEND proposal, and his was among six proposals funded, receiving about $10 million.
Among the major findings of the consortium are:
- The amount of pelagic life in the Gulf of Mexico decreased dramatically after the Deepwater Horizon spill and has yet to recover.
- The deep Gulf is amazingly biodiverse, in fact, one of the four “hyperdiverse” deep-pelagic ecosystems on Earth.
- The living Gulf is highly connected from the surface to great depths by ecological processes and behavior and needs to be considered one large, whole entity, rather than a collection of parts.
“In 2019, an award from the NOAA RESTORE Science Program allowed us to continue the DEEPEND program until at least 2029,” Sutton said. “This continuation has been critical in building the first deep-pelagic time series program in oceanographic history.”
Protecting sea animals is a never-ending job paved with hurdles, Sutton says. Threats include pollution from deepwater oil and gas extraction, deep-sea mining, marine microplastics, noise pollution, and in some places, fisheries for deep-pelagic resources.
“The deep ocean is naturally quiet, but we are making it quite loud,” Sutton said. “Some of the world’s most iconic predators, such as tunas, oceanic dolphins and whales, billfishes, seabirds, and sharks, depend on deep-pelagic fishes, shrimps, and squids as their primary prey,” he said. “Unfortunately, we are seeing declines in these animals, which can only be detected with time series data.”
