Brian Skerry Quotes

Coral reefs represent some of the world's most spectacular beauty spots, but they are also the foundation of marine life: without them many of the sea's most exquisite species will not survive.

I am delighted to see that the issue of coral reefs is receiving the attention it deserves.

Ten percent of the big fish still remain. There are still some blue whales. There are still some krill in Antarctica. There are a few oysters in Chesapeake Bay. Half the coral reefs are still in pretty good shape, a jeweled belt around the middle of the planet. There's still time, but not a lot, to turn things around.

The corals do not look much worn, but still appear to have been dead. There are some delicate shells of molluscs from depths beyond 500 fathoms, where they were certainly living.

I like underwater life.

I've had the joy of spending thousands of hours under the sea. I wish I could take people along to see what I see, and to know what I know.

If salt ocean is the Great Mother from whom all life has sprung, fresh water is the Nurse entrusted to nourish life within her wanderings and around her wave-lapped margins.

The biggest predator of fish like cod is other fish - and seals keep fish like that in check.

The sea is a place where every day, half the population eats the other half.

Everybody's got some fascination with undersea life, don't you think?

Overfishing, global warming and pollution are destroying the ocean.

We need to do a better job of keeping oceans healthy.

The ocean is a mighty harmonist.

The very survival of the human species depends upon the maintenance of an ocean clean and alive.... The ocean is our planet's life belt.

It’s all in there. We have harpooned every whale in the ocean.

I have been passionate about the oceans since I dipped my toes in the water at the first age of three.

If we are to be good stewards of the ocean, we need to understand what lives there and how the animals interact with each other and with their environment, which means we need to be constantly seeking new and improved methods for exploration and observation.

We need a NASA-like organization for ocean exploration, because we need to be exploring and protecting our life support systems here on Earth.

The amazing thing about the sea is that it is perhaps the last truly unexplored frontier; most oceanographers estimate that only about ninety-five per cent of the sea has been studied. Meanwhile, the oceans are believed to contain more animals than exist on land, a majority of which have never been discovered.

One of the things that's frustrated me as a deep-sea explorer is how many animals there probably are in the ocean that we know nothing about because of the way we explore the ocean.

I love the Gulf of Mexico.

We've only explored about five percent of our ocean. There are great discoveries yet to be made down there, fantastic creatures representing millions of years of evolution and possibly bioactive compounds that could benefit us in ways that we can't even yet imagine.

There's too much we don't know about the ocean to make me feel comfortable around it.

I fell in love with the ocean when I was just a little kid, four or five years old, I was a junior ranger, I was going out and doing intertidal stuff, walking around and sticking my finger in my first sea anemone and picking up starfish and all that. It gripped me when I was young.

It goes back to the starfish. That's when the light bulb really popped over my head. We'd found one on the beach, and I was struck by what astonishing creatures they are, talking with Dad about how they regenerate.