Welcome to Karen Hunter is awesome. I am Karen Hunter and while yes, I am awesome, this podcast is about

people and the things that they have to offer to you. I believe in speaking things into existence.

So it is with that, I offer you these amazing

people, these awesome topics. Sit back and enjoy. She is a marine biologist. You better watch that.

PhD and all of this stuff. We're going to talk about this from Harvard. She's a Brooklyn native.

We're going to talk about what's going on with our climate, with the oceans,

and all of the things that matter in the water with Dr. Ayanna Johnson. Welcome to the Karen Hunter Show. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming through and coming in. I saw you on Twitter and

there was a conversation that I was like, I don't know any black marine biologists. There are not enough of us.

How many other? Do you know all of them?

It's a very tiny club.

Yes. Okay. So you're born and raised?

In America. There's a huge crew in Africa, but like not here.

Not here. We have oceans. We have oceans. Right. Raised in Brooklyn.

How do you get interested, Ayanna, in this space?

I think like most marine biologists, there's this formative childhood experience.

And mine was we went on the one family vacation my whole life, and it was to Key West Florida.

And I learned to swim, and I went on a glass bottom boat,

and I saw a coral reef for the first time, and I got to hold a starfish in my hand. And I was just like, this is my job now. What is that called? So at the age of five, I was like, I am going to become a marine biologist. But then you came back to Brooklyn. And I came back to Brooklyn and I was like, clearly you can't do that here. But now that I just moved back after doing work all over the Caribbean for a decade and going to college and grad school and all this stuff, I realized that New York is a coastal city. We've got 578 miles of coastline. It's an archipelago. And so it's a perfectly good place to be a marine

biologist. I mean, the water is not very clear and it's not very warm, but we have sea horses living

in the Hudson River under piers, and we have whales coming through. In New York's Hudson River?

In New York City. There are whales in New York Harbor. And so it's really exciting to me to rediscover New York City. There are whales in New York Harbor. And so it's really exciting to me to

rediscover New York from this ocean perspective as a grown-up. I like that we imagine a world that

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