Only 20 percent of life on Earth is on land. If you want to see the other 80 percent you are probably going to need scuba gear, or a snorkel and some helpful information.Bermudian biologist Maia Patterson McGuire has just written the first in a series of books about national marine sanctuaries in the United States, along with environmentalist and filmmaker Jean-Michel Cousteau.Mr Cousteau is the son of famed filmmaker, writer and scientist Jacques Cousteau.“‘Explore the Southeast National Marine Sanctuaries with Jean-Michel Cousteau’ is the first book in a series of four,” said Dr McGuire who works as a sea grant extension agent in Florida.“As a Florida sea grant extention agent, I am considered a faculty member at the University of Florida, but instead of beng stuck on campus and teaching college, extension agents are tasked with taking university-based research and delivering it to the general public,” she said. “I am a liaison between researchers and folks who want to use the information, but can’t necessarily use scientific journals. We are tasked with translating science jargon into words that everyday folks can understand. I give talks and write newspaper articles.”Not long ago, she was approached by Frank Gromling of Ocean Publishing, whom she had known for several years. Mr Cousteau had agreed to help him produce a series of books about America’s national marine sanctuaries, but he needed someone with a marine science background to provide the science knowledge to act as compiler and editor. He thought Dr McGuire would be perfect for the job.Mr Cousteau started scuba diving with his father when he was seven years old. Jacques Cousteau wrote more than 40 books about the ocean and produced many films. He died in 1997. Two years later, his son formed the Ocean Futures Society, a non-profit marine conservation and education organisation, designed to carry on his father’s legacy. “Frank Gromling read a book that Jean-Michel Cousteau wrote called ‘America’s Underwater Treasures’,” said Dr McGuire. “It was a companion book to a public television series that Cousteau did featuring national marine sanctuaries in the United States. It was a coffee table book, with a limited release and benefited the Ocean Futures Society.“Frank thought that was a great thing for folks to have access to, but wanted to provide more information about the sanctuaries themselves. Cousteau didn’t like the term ‘travel guide’, but that is the concept that Frank had in mind. The books have great pictures about the sanctuaries but also have information if someone wanted to visit them. In Florida, there is one national marine sanctuary, the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. The first book also looks at the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary in the Gulf of Mexico and the Gray’s Reef National Marine Sanctuary off of Georgia.”She continued: “I have been to the one in the Florida Keys, but I have not personally visited the other sanctuaries. A lot of the species are similar between those three. The habitats are slightly different in terms of depth. The Keys have the broadest range of species. They are not all that dissimilar to what is found in Bermuda waters.”Dr McGuire grew up in Bermuda and attended the Bermuda High School for Girls. She went to study marine biology in the United States and met and married an American.“I stayed in the United States due to job availability,” she said. “In Bermuda, most of the folks in positions I would have liked to hold were not much older than me. So I wasn’t confident there would be any openings on the Island at the appropriate time.”She has now been a Florida sea grant extension agent for over ten years, and loves it. She does a lot of work on invasive species, such as the lion fish that is devastating marine life in Florida, and also does some work on climate change. However, most of what she does falls under the umbrella of education.“I do teacher workshops and teach a summer camp for a youth programme called the 4-H Youth Development Program,” she said. “I also do a number of guest speaking engagements.”Dr McGuire is particularly proud of starting a fishing line recycling programme. This offers a place for fishermen to leave their monofilament lines, rather than throwing them into the water to become entangled in sea-life.“Jennifer Gray (who was at the Bermuda Zoological Society, but is now at the Bermuda National Trust) saw what I had been doing with that and asked how she could get it started in Bermuda. You can now see one of the recycling boxes, a periscope looking white container, in Flatts. If you respool and you have pulled off all the old line, stick it in there to stop it from ending up in the environment where it ends up entangling sealife. In the United States they melt it down and turn it into other recycled products.”She is currently working on the next book in the series about west coast national marine sanctuaries. The second book will be out in October. There will be four in total. One will look at northeastern marine sanctuaries and one will look at national marine sanctuaries of the Pacific islands.“The first one is already out,” she said. “I was absolutely proud when I saw it come out. It is one thing to see it in a Microsoft Word document on the computer, and it is cool to see the PDF document when everything has been formatted but seeing the hard copy is even better.”