He is helping local researchers to conduct largest and most extensive marine survey here to date
Grace Chua Straits Times 25 Sep 12;
ON A recent trip to the cinema to watch the new sci-fi movie Men In Black 3, Dr Bertrand Richer de Forges, a marine biologist, saw a blob-shaped alien on screen.
"I caught that animal," he exclaimed.
It was a blobfish, a gelatinous creature with a perpetually gloomy expression that lives at ocean depths of more than 600m. Dr Richer de Forges found one during a 2003 expedition in the south-west Pacific Ocean.
The French-born biodiversity expert, known for his work in discovering new ecosystems, is normally based in Nouméa, New Caledonia.
He is in Singapore until early November on a Shell programme. He is helping Singapore researchers conduct the largest, most extensive marine survey expedition here to date, part of the three-year Comprehensive Marine Biodiversity Survey that began in 2010.
Dr Richer de Forges advised on the equipment needed and how to put it together, and where and how to trawl, said Dr Tan Koh Siang - head of the Tropical Marine Science Institute's marine biology lab - who is in charge of the expedition.
The aim of the expedition is to sample a wide range of habitats - rocky, muddy or sandy, sloping or flat - which harbour different forms of life. A few hours of successful trawling can unearth enough creatures for months, if not years, of lab work, Dr Tan added.
Dr Richer de Forges has spent most of his 40-year career studying the "aliens" that live more than 200m below the surface, much deeper than ordinary divers can go.
He was born in Limoges, the landlocked heart of France, better known for its porcelain than its access to the sea, and studied at the Pierre- and-Marie-Curie University and Museum of Natural History.
He then studied crabs in the remote Kerguelen Islands in the Indian Ocean in 1973, before doing the same in Tahiti and Mauritania.
In 1984, he moved to the French territory of New Caledonia, near Australia, to join the French Institute of Research for Development, a public research institute.
There, he embarked on expeditions around the Pacific, dropping small trawl nets overboard, then winching them up to collect and catalogue seabed life.
Last Friday, Dr Richer de Forges gave a talk on deep-sea marine biodiversity at the Botanic Gardens as part of a programme sponsored by Shell Singapore.
He explained that the ocean is 3.8km deep on average, and life below 200m is very different from life on the surface. Because of the low temperature, high pressure and scarcity of light and food, many deep-sea creatures have adapted in a special way to help them survive.
For example, many creatures give off a bioluminescent glow in order to catch food and find mates in the dark. Others, such as some corals and sponges, live for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years, their metabolic rate slowed to a crawl to survive on very little food.
Next year, scientists here plan to trawl the Singapore Deeps, a 200m-deep channel scoured by ancient currents off the Southern Islands, and Dr Richer de Forges will be back to help out.
"Humans live on only 29 per cent of the planet; 71 per cent is ocean," he said.
The marine expert, who retired in 2008, pointed out: "There's no real retirement for a marine biologist, we have so many things to do."
Related links
More about the Singapore Mega Marine Survey and how ordinary people can join
