(bright music) - [Announcer] Tonight on "Rhode Island PBS Weekly."

- [Narrator] In 1985, former Naval Intelligence Officer and underwater explorer, Bob Ballard, was sent on a top secret mission to find two lost submarines, and.

- Guess what's in the middle?

The Titanic.

The only reason I found it was because of that fact, that there was flanked by two nuclear submarines.

- I do broiled with some onions and tomatoes, and I also do fish tacos with it, which is fantastic.

And when I have company over, they never really ask what the fish is until after.

They love it and then I'll say, "Believe it or not it was scup."

"You gotta be kidding me."

- I'm Julia Child.

We're doing mushrooms today.

All kinds of ways to use them.

You know, you can hardly think of French cooking without mushrooms.

(bright music) - Good evening.

Welcome to "Rhode Island PBS Weekly."

I'm Pamela Watts.

- And I'm Michelle San Miguel.

More than a month ago, much of the world was transfixed on the fate of five people aboard a deep sea submersible heading to the wreckage of the Titanic.

Tragically, all those aboard the vessel perished in an implosion.

- Tonight, we revisit our April profile of a local man who has a special connection to the Titanic, and has visited many underwater worlds.

His adventures are legend, and while his name may not be well-known to you, his discoveries are.

- I'm the king of the world!

- [Narrator] Bob Ballard's most remarkable discovery inspired this classic Academy Award-winning movie.

- I'm really an Earth scientist, but it turns out that most of the planet is under the ocean.

So I am studying my planet, but in the meantime bump into things.

- [Narrator] Things such as the Titanic.

In 1985, Ballard became world-famous from finding its remains and the film that followed.

- I'm flying, Jack.

- [Narrator] Ballard says he's only seen the film a couple of times.

The first with its creator, Jim Cameron.

- I knew that what I say the old lady in her grave, I knew what the old lady looked like.

Jim so accurately replicated it.

I got to see the beautiful ship that she was.

- [Narrator] It was the largest ocean liner of its time.

Titanic hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic on its maiden voyage in 1912 and sank off Newfoundland.

More than 1,500 died in the disaster.

Just recently, the haunting original video of the watery grave was re-released, but beyond Titanic, Ballard is like the Lewis and Clark of the sea on a mapping expedition of what he believes is the next frontier.

His voyage of discovery began when the compass pointed him in the direction of the University of Rhode Island's Graduate School of Oceanography more than a half century ago.

- Dr. Ballard, you are oceanographer, explorer, adventurer.

You are a naval intelligence officer and commander, archeologist, author, professor.

Of all of these titles, which one describes you best?

- Oh, I love an explorer.

I boldly go where no one has gone before on planet Earth.

You can't have a better job than that.

- [Narrator] That job of a lifetime began to take shape when he was introduced as a child to Jules Verne's classic tale.

- I didn't read the book "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea."

I went and saw the movie when I was 12 years old.

- [Narrator] He says he watched the movie because he couldn't read well.

Ballard has what's known as a learning difficulty, but he views it differently.

- I'm dyslexic and I'm very proud of it.

I see things people don't see.

See, I live in a world of complete darkness, and so I have to imagine it.

And dyslexics have a powerful ability to form visual imaging in our right side of our brain.

- I gotta stop you there because you have been extraordinarily successful in life.

How did you navigate dyslexia to make the discoveries you've made?

- Well, I did good in school, but I had to memorize everything.

And I would go in to take the exam, close my eyes and see the answer.

- [Pamela] So you see dyslexia as an advantage.

- It's a gift if you go down the right road.

There's this new research that says dyslexics make great explorers.

We're not afraid of the unknown.

My daughter, who's dyslexic, gave me a little thing for my deck that says, "Not all who wander are lost."

- [Narrator] And Ballard credit's dyslexia with helping him envision where the Titanic was located.

- I had to dream up a way of finding it, which was to imagine it sinking, dumping out its remains, falling down, but then they would be carried by the current.

So I said, "Let's not look for the Titanic.

Let's look for its footprint.

Let's look for the debris that came off of it."

- [Narrator] And searching for the Titanic was not Ballard's original intent.

It was a cover story for a recently declassified top secret military mission.

At the time the Navy was concerned two U.S. nuclear subs that had been lost during the Cold War would be found by the Russians.

So they asked Ballard, who was then an intelligence officer to find them.

If he did, the Navy said he could use the rest of his resources to search for Titanic.

He found the subs and.

- Guess what's in the middle?

The Titanic.

And the only reason I found it was because of that fact that there was flanked by two nuclear submarines.

- [Narrator] Using his newly developed technology, an unmanned submersible vehicle, sent back live pictures in the dead of night, finally detecting evidence of the long-lost ship of dreams.

- We were in the debris field.

We knew immediately to turn north, and then the boiler of the Titanic came in and we had a photograph of that boiler.

It was like scoring the winning goal.

We yelled and jumped up and down and then someone made this innocent comment.

She sinks in 20 minutes.

It was two in the morning, she sank at 2:20.

Then it really hit me hard.

I never expected to be emotionally touched.

And it hit me particularly when we were processing some of the film and we saw pairs of shoes.

So imagine seeing, this was powerful, a mother's shoes next to her daughter's shoes where they landed together.

That's a very sacred place.

- [Narrator] The crew held a memorial service on deck.

The following year, Ballard went down in a three person submersible to see the Titanic with his own eyes.

- The amazing moment was going inside.

Now, obviously, our submarine couldn't fit inside.

I had developed this little vehicle called Jason Jr. And it was like a robot on a fishing line.

So imagine landing on the deck of the Titanic, clunk.

And we landed right where the grand staircase used to be, but the glass shattered.

And so we launched our little robot out and it went down in the grand staircase and it goes into this dark void and a light comes on in front of us.

- And what did you see?

- We had a heart attack.

I mean, my head went back hit the bulkhead of the submarine.

A light.

We were shining our lights on a crystal chandelier and it was our lights coming back at us.

It's like those movie scenes where the cowboy draws on himself in a mirror.

- [Narrator] As amazing as that underwater voyage was, it's not the only shipwreck Ballard has uncovered.

He's also located John F. Kennedy's PT-109 boat, German battleship the Bismarck, and the World War II aircraft carrier, Yorktown, as well as almost 100 other vessels, some in the Black Sea.

- [Bob] We found perfectly preserved shipwreck sitting upright.

Even human remains from 200 BC still there.

Can't beat that.

- [Narrator] There is one enduring mystery that still challenges Ballard.

In 2019, he searched unsuccessfully in the South Pacific for the remains of the plane flown by famed aviator, Amelia Earhart.

While many believe she may have crashed and been taken hostage as a spy, Ballard is convinced she went down in her aircraft in the sea off Howland Island.

- [Bob] Stay tuned.

- [Pamela] Do you think you're going back?

- I know I'm going back.

- [Pamela] Soon?

- Stay tuned.

- Do you think you can find her?

- Absolutely.

It took two times to find the Bismarck.

- [Narrator] However, Ballard says he's equally excited about findings being made today at the School of Oceanography's Inner Space Center.

He calls it mission control, where six ships are using live telepresence technology foraging unexplored terrain in the deep.

- Each of these ships have a very large gyro-stabilized satellite that's able to beam what they're doing live back to the Inner Space Center.

- [Pamela] You can see it crystal clear.

- [Bob] Yeah.

- [Pamela] And we've even seen, like, well, here we go.

What's happening here?

- [Bob] It's gonna pick up a sample, I suspect.

That's a manipulator.

And they're going into probably collect a biological specimen.

- [Narrator] And it is this specimen, which Ballard says is indicative of a whole new ecosystem under the sea.

- Giant tube worm that sticks out its plume and ingests hydrogen sulfide kill you and feeds it to its gut where another creature is living symbiotically in the gut of these, and it can oxidize that hydrogen sulfide and fix carbon and set up a whole food chain.

- [Narrator] Ballard says the finding of the giant tube worm has NASA now searching for the same creature in the oceans on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter.

- And they should have life.

Now I don't think it'll be New York City down there.

- [Narrator] While Ballard can joke about finding a thriving world on another planet, the explorer in him says, "Time is of the essence."

- There's no plan B for the human race.

We're not gonna leave our solar system.

The laws of physics make it impossible for humans to leave our own solar system.

So let's prove that there's life within our own solar system.

Unless we get back in tune with Mother Earth, we're not gonna survive.

- [Narrator] And so the work continues for Ballard in every direction.

Now in his 80s, he's currently planning a center to showcase all his wonders.

- We're building a new 360 degree dome where you'll be there.

Imagine you're in a room and it's all around you.

We just shot footage last week.

When you go where no one has ever been, you can't miss making discoveries.

- Up next, we take another look at the rapidly changing ecosystem in our own Narragansett Bay, and what it means for how and what we eat.

Last November, our team partnered with ecoRI News to investigate the state of the Bay.

We also talked to those finding new ways to cope with those changes.

ecoRI News contributor, Mike Stanton, brought us this report, part of our continuing Green Seeker series.

- [Mike] One summer morning on Narragansett Bay the trawler, John H. Chafee, sets out from Fort Wetherill in Jamestown.

We're headed for a spot off Scarborough Beach.

The crew sets their nets for 100 feet down, but these are not your typical fishermen.

- I've been doing it for a while now and honestly you never know what it's gonna be.

- [Mike] Chris Parkins is chief biologist for the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, or DEM for short.

They have been surveying the area's fish since 1979.

- The longer you do the same thing, you'll notice trends and changes over time.

So that's what we are doing.

We're looking for those changes of species diversity, the size of the species, when they arrive, when they leave, things like that.

Okay, so scup, this is your typical scup.

This is a butterfish.

These and all these little silver dollar looking things.

This is our longfin squid.

Any of the small stuff like silver hake we'll just pick a bucket, put 'em in that bucket.

Same thing with squid.

So just separate everything by species.

- [Mike] And that separation has provided a window on something that looms large, climate change.

An early warning sign that the Bay was changing came in the 1990s when the popular winter flounder went into sharp decline.

Today this fish has become a poster child of sorts for how warming waters affect cold water fish.

- Winter flounder are kind of interesting, right?

Because their life history is they come into the Bay in the wintertime, hence the name, when most of all the other fish leave.

So they have the Bay to themselves.

With the excess fishing and climate change, they've struggled to recover.

- And climate change produces winners and losers.

The winners, warmer water species like scup and black sea bass, which are swimming up from the south in greater numbers.

So when you see the changes, you know, with warming waters and the climate, what worries you?

- It's the rate at which it's happening.

The ocean is notorious for being able to adapt to change, through some pretty significant events in the history of Earth.

We see species that have survived asteroids and things like that.

Whereas, climate change is happening at such a rapid rate, it's pushing a lot of species out quickly.

And then the species that are taking their place are changing the structure of the ecosystem.

- The northeast U.S. it is one of the fastest warming areas in the globe.

And I think there is cause for concern.

- [Mike] Conor McManus, chief of DEM's Division of Marine Fisheries, calls Narragansett Bay an essential nursery for sea life, but according to a study published last winter in the journal "Climate" the Bay also lies in one of the fastest warming areas on the planet.

- How do we as a society and ecosystem effectively adapt to these changes?

And really has us asking questions of for the species that are maybe climate change losers, how do we build management plans to either help rebuild, or maintain these populations that have declined over time?

- [Mike] And that's certainly been the case in Narragansett Bay where temperatures have risen almost three degrees Fahrenheit in the last 60 years.

- That can be the difference of whether a species is now able to thrive in an environment that it used to not be able to, or conversely species not being able to spawn, or reproduce, or survive in an area that they once were able to.

- [Mike] The day we went out, the DEM's fishermen scooped up a lot of different things, crabs, butterfish, skates, and the Rhode Island State appetizer, longfin squid, aka, calamari, but the biggest catch is a fish that some have never heard of.

- [Chris] So the scup total weight is 11.4723.

- [Crew] 22.

- [Chris] 21.

- [Mike] Also known as sea bream or porgy, scup is a fish that has been around for centuries.

Roger Williams referred to it by its Narragansett name, mishcuppauog.

Today, while more plentiful, thanks to warming waters, many Rhode Islanders have never given it a try.

- I've made poke bowls with it at home, which is really good, but it also makes a really great fish taco.

- Kate Masury is the executive director of a Rhode Island nonprofit called Eating with the Ecosystem.

And you say that you connect the dots between food systems and the fisheries ecology.

Can you tell us what you mean by that?

- Those food systems and then fishery science kinda happens in two different almost like silos.

There's the fishery science that looks at, you know, the populations of fish and shellfish and how well they're reproducing and all these other factors.

And then there's the food system side that it's, you know, looking at how to feed people and creating food plans for the different states.

And a lot of times those aren't necessarily linked up.

- [Mike] Rhode Island fishermen caught more than four million pounds of scup last year, making it the state's top catch among fish, but most is exported to big cities like New York, Philadelphia and Chicago with large immigrant communities that favor it.

Here in Rhode Island the demand is low.

John Delgado, the seafood buyer for Dave's Supermarkets is trying to change that.

- It should be a staple, especially in the New England northeast area, and it's not, it's definitely underutilized.

- One reason for that Delgado says is that many people are intimidated by having to cook a whole fish, bones and all.

- We have to take that element out of it to make sure we have a filet, and then the feedback is usually wonderful.

Once people try it, Mike, it comes back as a positive.

Wow, I thought it was gonna be a lot stronger, or a lot gamier.

It was mild, my children liked it.

We used it in this dish or that dish, and it becomes family-friendly, children-friendly.

I do a broiled with some onions and tomatoes, and I also do fish tacos with it, which is fantastic.

And when I have company over, they never really ask what the fish is until after.

They love it and then I'll say, believe it or not, it was scup.

"You gotta be kidding me."

- [Mike] In the dozen or so years that Dave's has carried scup, sales at its 10 stores have climbed from 25 pounds to several hundred pounds a week.

Scup is also on the menu at some of Rhode Island's finest restaurants.

It's a nice thick piece right there.

- [Ben] That's beautiful, right?

- [Mike] Ben Sukle is the chef owner of Oberlin in Providence.

His downtown restaurant has won national acclaim for his locally sourced seafood.

And a critic from "Bon Appétit" wrote that scup was his new favorite fish.

- Tonight's preparation will be raw for our crudo, so it'll just be salt, lemon, and in this case we're using this olive oil called Arbequina olive oil.

It's a really nice buttery Spanish organic olive oil that we always pair with almost all of our fish.

- [Mike] Sukle has been serving scup for 15 years.

To make it sound more appetizing he used to call it silver bass.

- When you get, like, the old salty ones that come through and, like, say, like, they used to catch this fish and used it for bait, or they would just, like, kill it right away, and, like, or throw it back right away.

I just know the more we keep doing it, the more it seems like that is becoming what people want.

- Is it a sustainable model to keep eating seafood that's caught far away when we have this abundance of underutilized fish in our own back Bay?

- I mean, I personally don't think so.

I think that, like, for when you're eating local, you're not only, like, I guess supporting kind of your local fishing community, not just the fishing community, but the full kind of supply chain of, like, people that are involved in that, but your food is traveling less far before it reaches your plate, which is helping in terms of carbon emissions.

- [Mike] Since the pandemic, Masury's group and the Rhode Island Seafood Coalition have worked to connect local fishermen to poorer communities.

They created a program that has handed out more than 210,000 pounds of seafood.

- In 2021 Rhode Island harvested 99 different species alone.

That was from commercial fishermen.

And so we've got this huge selection of different local seafood species, but a lot of it there's not as much of a market for it here 'cause consumers kind of aren't demanding it.

- [Mike] But some immigrant groups are, and Masury says we can learn a lot from people from far away about how to eat local.

- I think that there's a lot we can learn from them about adapting our diet to what's actually being produced in our local waters and caught by our local fisheries.

And then beyond that, I think that we can really look to them for how to utilize some of these species and how to prepare them in delicious ways.

- [Mike] And that's been true for Liberian immigrants, Michael Neor and his wife Esther, who work with and are beneficiaries of the program.

To them, scup offers a taste of Africa.

Is this a fish that you would eat back home in Liberia?

- Oh yeah, we have this one in Liberia, we call it black snapper.

Liberia is like an island.

So, like, we're surrounded by water, the real island.

So, like, we have a place called Providence Island.

It's in Monrovia, so they got the fishermen and the fish.

We go there buy the fish.

- Then it was time to taste the scup, which is smothered in a sauce of onions, fresh tomatoes and garlic.

I hold the tail to get, I wanna get a little of this sauce here.

Look how nice and white and flaky it is.

- [Esther] Make sure don't eat the bones.

- This scup was swimming in the Narragansett Bay a few days ago.

- [Esther] Yeah, get the bone out of it.

Make sure you taste it.

Spicy, huh?

Yeah, spicy.

- It's really good, really good.

- [Esther] And spicy.

- I could eat this whole fish.

- Finally, last May as part of our continuing My Take series, we went to Coventry, Rhode Island, and met a man who's passionate about fungus.

Well, at least a certain kind.

- Mushrooms are for everybody that enjoys to consume them.

My name is Sam Morgan.

I'm the owner and operator of High Tide Mushroom Farm and this is my take on mushrooms.

Mushrooms are the plant-like structure of fungi.

They have a stem, they have a cap, some have veils, but all are pretty great.

(upbeat music) We have a plethora of different mushrooms that we grow, dependent on the season.

If it's cold weather, we focus more on cold tolerant species of mushrooms, whether it's golden enoki, king oysters, blue oysters, chestnut mushrooms.

And then when the weather starts warming up, we kind of try to switch our rooms over to warmer weather tolerant mushrooms, whether it's pink oyster mushrooms, yellow oyster mushrooms, pioppino mushrooms, phoenix oyster or the Italian oyster mushroom, king blue oysters, and so on.

I got into mushrooms for a few reasons.

I was a firefighter and paramedic 10 years prior to getting into the agricultural realm of mushroom cultivation.

Mushrooms are like the coral of the land, they're great remediators and filtration devices, for not only our land, but they're great filter devices for our water as well.

- Welcome to "The French Chef."

I'm Julia Child.

We're doing mushrooms today.

All kinds of ways to use them.

You know, you can hardly think of French cooking without mushrooms.

The French call them champignon.

- So when people hear the term gourmet mushrooms, they usually think of blue oyster, or anything within the oyster family of mushroom, which are great mushrooms.

They are protein dense, full of umami flavor.

They add a nice texture to whatever you're cooking.

They can take center stage of a meal, or they can be an accessory to a meal to add some flavor.

There are other gourmet mushrooms.

We have lion's mane, we have pioppino mushrooms, we have golden enoki mushrooms, and all these mushrooms have different kind of flavors, different kind of textures, and they add something special to every meal.

There's two, I would say, two different schools of thought when people first look at lion's mane, like, oh, what's that?

Or, ooh, what's that?

(lion roaring) It's a pretty cool mushroom, it's neuroadaptive, so anything to do with the brain, it helps stimulate NGF growth in the brain, so anything with, you know, motor function, sensory perception, ADD, ADHD, OCD, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and dementia, lion's mane's being studied for because of the compounds within it.

(buzzer blaring) Not all mushrooms are edible.

If you're gonna go out foraging, go through the woods and start looking for mushrooms 'cause you're excited to get into the realm of mushrooms and mycology, I would say, you know, start with getting to know your environment, start to get to know your trees, what locations you're looking to start searching and what kind of mushrooms you're looking for.

It's not necessarily too hard if you start to zone in and focus on one or two mushrooms you wanna find in your area, and you can do so in a couple different ways.

I would say pick up an encyclopedia that, you know, deals with mushrooms, or also, there's apps nowadays that you could take a photo of a mushroom and it will give a statistical probability of what that mushroom is.

So if you're doing a little bit of cross-referencing and you're getting out into the woods and you're seeing some mushrooms you like, or you, you know, wanna take home, maybe take some spore prints, I would say you need to be 100% confident on your choice before putting it in your mouth.

Mushrooms are a hot topic right now, and to me that's no surprise.

Mushrooms are not only delicious, but the mycelium of mushrooms, which is the root-like structure of mushrooms that connects the mushroom to the ground, or its fruiting substrate has several applications.

Packing peanuts are gonna be replaced with mycelium.

Alternative leather for shoes and clothing is gonna be mycelium-based.

NASA is also studying to use mycelium as their structural basis to any kind of housing structure, whether it be on Mars or our interplanetary travels.

Mushrooms or the spores of mushrooms can live in the vacuum of time and space.

My name is Sam Morgan, and this has been my take on mushrooms.

- That's our broadcast this evening.

Thank you for joining us.

I'm Michelle San Miguel.

- And I'm Pamela Watts.

We'll be back next week with another edition of "Rhode Island PBS Weekly."

Until then, please follow us on Twitter and Facebook and visit us online to see all of our stories and past episodes at ripbs.org/weekly or listen to our podcast on your favorite streaming platform.

Thank you and goodnight.

(upbeat music)