Sea change

“I’m hopeful that the small things we do will make a bigger impact,” says Joleah Lamb.

Hope is the most obvious takeaway from any discussion with Lamb, director of UC Irvine’s Healthy Oceans & People Lab. Her work is about finding connections among disease, people and the environment, specifically oceans.

Trained as a coral reef biologist, Lamb was part of a project in Indonesia looking at disease in corals. Everyone involved got very sick – dysentery and even typhoid fever. The finding: Places with lots of coral disease also have lots of human illness.

And here’s where her hopeful outlook came in. “Thinking about the connectivity was more inspirational,” says Lamb, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. “How can nature protect people and nature?”

Seagrass wasn’t top of mind for her. “I didn’t think seagrass was that interesting,” Lamb says. “It’s just grass.”

But as she watched videos of clams filtering ocean water until it was clean, she wondered if submarine plants might perform a similar function. Four years of work later, in 2017, Lamb was lead author of a study finding that seagrasses help clear the ocean of human and marine pathogens, decreasing the amount by 50 percent. The groundbreaking report made the cover of Science magazine and prompted similar research worldwide.

“We’re trying to make seagrass cool,” Lamb says with a laugh. “When it got on the cover of Science, that made it cool.”

Cool and enduring. Recently, Lamb and her students published a paper in Nature Sustainability about their research showing that seagrass reduces human pathogens in seafood by 65 percent.

“A lot of seafood is produced in urban coastal areas, like California,” she says. “So if you can conserve or restore seagrasses in those places, you can make a substantial improvement to the quality and safety of the food.”

Having an impact

As an undergraduate, Lamb was interested in disease. She also loved scuba diving. With her scientist’s mind, Lamb merged them. Filling in the gaps in knowledge is what drives her. “Trying to make a difference has been the impetus for a lot of what we do here,” she says of the Healthy Oceans & People Lab.

Lamb understands that showing an economic impact can help prompt change. That might mean comparing costs at seaweed farms that use seagrass with costs at those that don’t, figuring out which ecosystems are most threatened by plastic, highlighting reductions in plastic that occur when there are mandated fees for plastic bags or cups, or advocating for funding for countries that don’t have the resources to change.

“Plastic moves everywhere,” Lamb says. “It affects the food and the climate. It’s important for us as a community that we help the areas that need it most.”

She emphasizes steps that everyone can take, no matter how small they might seem.

“Students can get involved with the Sustainability Resource Center on campus,” Lamb says. “They can collectively write letters to their local government. I’ve seen students write hundreds of letters, and that’s very influential, especially in California.”

She’s impressed by students’ awareness of plastic waste and says she rarely sees single-use water bottles at UC Irvine. “Even at the Starbucks on campus,” Lamb says, “they don’t offer straws. You have to ask.”

A native of Portland, Oregon, she recalls people without reusable shopping bags being humiliated at the local grocery store. “I would ride home in the rain on my bike just to get my bag!” Lamb says. “They would really shame you.”

Not that she’s advocating that. Rather, she thinks having consumers pause to make a choice is effective. “It seems minuscule to charge for cups or bags, but those fees make people think about whether they need it,” Lamb says.

Big shifts can come in small forms. Just look at the seagrass.

If you want to learn more about supporting this or other activities at UC Irvine, please visit the Brilliant Future website. By engaging 75,000 alumni and garnering $2 billion in philanthropic investment, UC Irvine seeks to reach new heights of excellence in student success, health and wellness, research and more. The Charlie Dunlop School of Biological Sciences plays a vital role in the success of the campaign. Learn more by visiting https://brilliantfuture.uci.edu/school-of-biological-sciences.