People of land? No. People of sea? Yes!

The Bajau people, also known as the “sea gypsies,” are a tribe of nomadic water, or sea, dwelling people that reside purely in a marinedependent locale around Southeast Asian, Malaysian and Indonesian seas. With over 1,000 years in their history residing in houseboats, the Bajau people, have developed the ability to hold their breath for a much longer time than most. All the while diving down roughly 20 meters (65.5 feet), on a daily basis without any breathing assistance, they can hold their breath for about 13 minutes, easily. Can you just feel the pressure in your chest and lungs as I described diving down that far? And that is just on a daily basis. There has been record of them free diving to depths that are far past just 20 meters - up to about 70 meters (roughly 230 feet). Again without any air tanks or breathing apparatuses to assist, only possibly some heavy stones and a pair of wooden goggles. With spending over 60% of their daily lives in the seas, their work consists of keeping the coral reefs protected, as well as gathering fish and other water creatures to keep their families fed and sustained.

How can the Bajau stay in the water holding their breath for that long, you ask? Well, everyone was thinking it. According to a comparative genomic study through Cell, “Physiological and Genetic Adaptations to Diving in Sea Nomads,” scientists have discovered that while they looked to cultures of extreme altitudes, hypoxia would occur and also was found in the Bajau people but for drastically different reasons. Hypoxia is defined as low levels of oxygen in cells and blood tissues which cause dizziness, confusion, restlessness, rapid heart rate and difficulty breathing. However, with Bajau, natural selection through their “waterlife” has adapted their genetics and structure of their bodies and they don’t have the same effects of hypoxia as the rest of us. Their spleens are disproportionately larger, by almost 50%, than their land-dwelling counterparts.

Why is it that in the Bajau, hypoxia seems to mean something different? Let me see if I can explain without getting too technical, biologically speaking. Humans have a diving response that can be induced by apnea and cold-water facial immersion. The physiological effects of this response lowers oxygen consumption (bradycardia) and peripheral vasoconstriction which is the body selectively redistributing the blood flow to the organs that are the most sensitive to hypoxia. With all of that, the contraction of the spleen injects a supply of red blood cells into the circulatory system which then helps regulate the body. There has been a study of a group of diving seal species that have a similar and positive correlation between spleen mass and maximum dive time, which gives good confirmation that spleen size matters in the discussion of dive time and breath. So, through passage of time and thousands of years of living in this way, the body has adapted to life with much more time within the water. Their spleens have adapted to endure lengths of breath-holds without extra support externally. This shows that throughout our lives, we are adapting to our environments slowly and gradually. What surrounds us in a way, has very real effects on how the structure of our body evolves through time.

Learning about the Bajau population of the world, makes me pause to let my mind once again open to more possibilities than what is physically in front of me. This computer, this desk, technology… will our culture show any type of evolution over time within our body? Will our eyes and minds adapt to the rapid pace of the technology world to process information faster? I wonder what the results will be in the future. Hopefully my time in nature will create a very unique skew on my results. ‘Til then.

“There is so much more to life than meets the eye if you choose to seek it. The seeker becomes the finder, the finder of so much more than we thought was possible.” ― Wim Hof

SEEKING

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ONDER

BY

SAMANTHA Y OCIUS CREATIVE MEDIA