it felt nice to feel so small. everyday i’m the center of my world, and it’s easy to get caught up in everything i have going on. but to feel tiny and insignificant gave me the freedom to slow down and take a breath. to walk through a forest that predates glaciers really puts my little life in perspective. and it feels so good to get lost in the wilderness (metaphorically, hopefully never literally). alaska is a place to go to lose yourself, and i think eventually find yourself.

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editor’s note: lindblad expeditions, our planet forward storyfest competition partner, made this series possible by providing winners with an experiential learning opportunity aboard one of their ships. all editorial content is created independently. we thank lindblad expeditions for their continued support of our project. read all the stories from the expedition in our astonishing alaska series.

i was grateful to feel that on the boat as well. everyone on board had gratitude for the spaces we were able to explore and learn from. alaska has a long history of extraction where people have come to take advantage of the resources, animals, and people there, and before my trip, i was nervous about contributing to that. but now after talking to the naturalists and other guests, i’ve come to accept that humans, just like other animals do need and use parts of the environment. our responsibility is to not cause damage and be as subsistent as we can. along with the attention to not take away too much, i also realized i need to give back to spaces i’m in. i took away food, water, memories, and knowledge from alaska, and in return i made sure to pick up trash, spread seeds, and not bother animals when i could. going back to dc, i’m eager to grow the connections i have to the natural elements of my urban space so that eventually with volunteering i help can grow forests where we once had a yard; a river where we once had a stream; a family where we once had a group of strangers. i’m so grateful for this experience and am eager provide you with alaska’s story around lipids, from candlefish to whales to oil reserves.

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editor’s note: lindblad expeditions, our planet forward storyfest competition partner, made this series possible by providing winners with an experiential learning opportunity aboard one of their ships. all editorial content is created independently. we thank lindblad expeditions for their continued support of our project. read all the stories from the expedition in our astonishing alaska series.

my intellectual curiosities were stoked by the seemingly endless knowledge of the many naturalists on board. the naturalists had incredible presentations about geology, glaciology, marine ecology, and even squid physiology (complete with a on-deck dissection of a squid we found on a beach)! i found myself falling deeper in love with the natural world and finding new exciting disciplines — like geology. i’ll be writing my story about the language of rocks — so stay tuned!

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editor’s note: lindblad expeditions, our planet forward storyfest competition partner, made this series possible by providing winners with an experiential learning opportunity aboard one of their ships. all editorial content is created independently. we thank lindblad expeditions for their continued support of our project. read all the stories from the expedition in our astonishing alaska series.

another highlight of the trip was the experiences lindblad scheduled for the passengers. we were able to pack crusading by the glaciers, kayaking, and hiking into one day — and that was only on day two! my favorite excursion was biking in lutak. i would never have imagined saying i biked 9 miles watching the snowy mountains and the vast oceans in alaska, but now i can!

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editor’s note: lindblad expeditions, our planet forward storyfest competition partner, made this series possible by providing winners with an experiential learning opportunity aboard one of their ships. all editorial content is created independently. we thank lindblad expeditions for their continued support of our project. read all the stories from the expedition in our astonishing alaska series.

q: many people cringe at the idea of parasitic insects. what is it about parasites that interest you so much?

a: i think what i find so interesting about parasites is the fact that they challenge my assumptions about how the natural world works. i learned about biology, i learned about all these kinds of ecological interactions; predator and prey, and how animals evolve, defenses against predation, or competition. all of that sort of fits into a framework of how i understand the world. and these parasites come along and then give examples of things that don’t really fit that framework, and all of a sudden i realized wait a minute, the level of complexity that’s possible in nature is far beyond what i thought was possible. it’s not like i thought i knew everything about nature ahead of time. but you feel confident in saying ‘yeah, i see this hawk chasing after a squirrel. that fits into what i know of how the world works.’ and then you read or hear about how these parasites are manipulating their host, and you think that makes no sense. and i found that really interesting. it’s so novel; it’s so interesting to me.

q: how do you think photography can be used as a form of environmental communication and why might this be more effective than, say, a scientific paper?

a: photography has this advantage because we are very much visually oriented creatures. so much of our biology is based around the fact that we have such good vision. i think our brains are already well-built to take in imagery; it’s automatically stimulating for us. so, you sort of have this built-in advantage. in that sense, i think it takes a lot less effort to grab somebody’s attention. now, when it comes to changing somebody’s worldview, and inspiring their curiosity, and all those things, it takes more than just the image to do that. it takes a story, it takes context, and a better understanding of what your audience’s assumptions are. a photograph by itself can’t do all that, but it’s an amazing way into somebody’s attention. i didn’t really recognize that until i was having a conversation with my editor over that story, and he really defined my objective for that story. like, you’re not going to teach everybody about every step of this process. the magazine is only going to give you one page, one photograph. and your job is to get people to stop flipping through the magazine and read the caption. and i’ve really seen that as what the role of photography is more broadly. you can’t necessarily give somebody an entire biology lesson with a single photograph. but you can get them to be at least interested to learn about it on their own, or to listen to you talk, or to read the paper or read the article. i just think it’s this window into a larger subject.

q: in your talk “beauty and the bizarre,” you talk about photographing the emerald wasp. could you talk a bit about their relationship with cockroaches and the possible relation to parkinson’s disease? what exactly does the emerald wasp do?

a: the emerald cockroach wasp, or the emerald jewel wasp (another common name it’s known by) hunts cockroaches. but these cockroaches are larger than it, like many times. so rather than try to overpower it or kill the cockroach, it has figured out a way to immobilize its prey. it does that by leading its stinger into the back of the cockroach’s head. its stinger has special sensors that can actually detect where in the brain its stinger is, and it finds the part of the brain that is responsible for the motivation for movement in the cockroach. it then injects a venom cocktail that disrupts the dopamine activity of that part of the brain. and that’s a general way of describing a process that’s actually more complex than i understand. i know that it involves something that disrupts the dopamine activity. what that means is this cockroach can still move, but it can no longer decide to move on its own. so the wasp removes its stinger, and then it grabs the cockroach by an antenna, and by pulling on the antenna, that stimulates the cockroach to move. but if it lets go of the antenna, the cockroach can’t run away. so it’s this way of getting around the fact that its prey is too large. but it also doesn’t want to kill the prey because it’s not going to eat it itself, it’s going to actually feed it to its babies. it’s going to bury it alive with a single egg that can feed on this living cockroach that stays fresh, because it’s not dead.

so i visited the scientist frederic libersat in israel who studies the action of this venom. i went to the lab, and i photographed this. i had done some research on this biology, but i didn’t realize until after when i saw that professor give a lecture at a conference where he said “you know, we’re actually working with parkinson’s researchers to try and develop a better treatment for this disease by studying the wasp.” and that’s because the dopamine-disrupting activity of this venom has a similar mechanism to how parkinson’s works in humans. and what i don’t understand is how close that gap is. so on the one hand, it’s insane that our own brains and cockroaches brains share similar neurotransmitters. it kind of points to the common building blocks of all of the animal world, and the biological world more broadly. i don’t know how far along that collaboration is, or what the near-term implications are. i don’t know that they’re necessarily going to market with a new drug based on this, but i think the idea that they can think about the activity of this disease and the system from a mental perspective. it’s almost like a model system where the activity of this neurotransmitter and the chemistry of the cockroach’s brain is far simpler in terms of its effects on the cockroach’s behavior than our own super complicated brain and super complicated disease. so it’s a way to simplify a system and think about how to approach the much more complicated problem.

q: what’s next for you?

a: for the immediate, i’m very much trying to organize my life and take a break. but i am in the beginnings of my next project on jellyfish and using that as an example for how to think about complexity in the biological world. parasites is another example of this; it’s creatures that have something to teach us about how the world works. everybody knows about jellyfish, but even i’m just scratching the surface of how intricate and beautiful and complicated they are. to look at this thing that just looks like a bag of goo and to understand how it sees the world and has survived longer than almost any other animal on the planet, through mass extinctions. this is a cool thing that we could probably learn something from. so that’ll be the next project for me.

editor’s note: emily’s piece kicks off our weeklong series, the stories of alaska: sustainability and resilience on a grand scale, from our storyfest 2018 winners, who traveled to alaska with lindblad expeditions and alaska airlines this summer. in emily’s story, you can explore alaska in storybook-like wonder, as she shows off the southern coastline that dances along the edges of its mountain ranges and ensconces temperate forests teeming with wildlife. see her full story — and her gorgeous photos — by clicking on the image below. we dare you to not fall in love with alaska’s beauty.

he applied for national geographic’s early career grant, and went to patagonia to photograph the biodiversity of these ecosystems. upon arriving back to d.c., he presented his work to national geographic, and proposed another story about parasites. he realized an immense challenge in this story, for he would have to get people to get over “their visceral aversion to parasites” and pay attention long enough to learn the fascinating science behind these interactions.

ultimately, his result was something uncannily beautiful. his inspirations were film noir, graphic novels, and japanese animation. in other words, hard lighting, dramatic backgrounds, and selective attention to detail. from japanese animation he learned that “not all details are equal”: for a human character, anime emphasizes the eyes in order to make characters more expressive, more emotionally appealing. varma had to figure out exactly what details were important in telling the beautiful, fascinating story about parasites he had in mind. in his photo of a crab infected with a parasitic barnacle, the important details were the millions of specks coming out of the crab: parasitic barnacle larvae. he didn’t care about the texture of the crab, or its color, but rather draws the viewers attention to the millions of parasitic offspring coming out of it.

similarly, when he was photographing bees for a different story, he realized that he had to find a new, fresh perspective that was interesting and engaging. he needed to find a different story about bees that had not been done before. after much experimentation, he zeroed in on the figures of bees emerging from their cells. he did a time lapse of bees developing, the first 21 days of a bees life condensed into 60 seconds, and the results were astonishing. varma has an ability to turn such essential natural processes that are normally hidden, hard to see, and hard to grasp into recognizable and beautiful processes.

the last piece that he showed us shocked me with a sense of wonder. he translated a hummingbird. the photo shoot was set up so that the hummingbird would fly through an artificial wind chamber, with a fog machine blowing visible fog so that you could see the air stream around the hummingbird. then the video footage was slowed down 100x so that the rapid pace of hummingbird life was suddenly translated into human time. the result was absolutely beautiful and breathtaking. i will remember the blinking of a hummingbird’s eye for the rest of my life.

up next: town hall: do we have the energy to lead? >