Sleeping with the Fishes

For residents and visitors, the Gulfshore's clean sandy beaches and coastal waters rich with wildlife are alluring. Those attractions certainly played a major role in my decision to move to Naples recently. But my appreciation for the sea goes deeper than most, for twice now I've been given the rare opportunity to live underwater, working, eating and sleeping among the fishes.

For the past two decades I've been immersed in marine science, and the undersea world has become a home away from home, often literally. It was a summer job-the best ever-that began my adventures of not just diving beneath the waves, but living there. After a college semester spent in St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands studying marine science at an extraordinary teaching and research laboratory, I became, for a few short, glorious months, a support diver for the Hydrolab undersea habitat program.

At Hydrolab, teams of four scientists lived for a week in an underwater laboratory studying the surrounding coral reef. In truth, my title of support diver was a euphemism for undersea slave. I was the underwater grunt, shuttling equipment, tanks and food, and essentially doing as directed by the senior staff and scientists. It was exhausting and exhilarating to work side by side with expert divers and renowned marine scientists. It was also an incredible learning experience that further sparked my desire to pursue marine science as a career.

At one point while working for Hydrolab, I questioned whether I had what it takes to become a scientist. The answer became clear during one memorable mission. The lead scientist was studying the role of parrotfish in the recycling of nutrients on the reef. If you've been snorkeling or diving in the Florida Keys, you're sure to have seen the princess parrotfish-a medium-size turquoise fish with hints of yellow, green and purple. Its most distinctive feature is its large, protruding buckteeth, used to scrape algae off the reef's coral and rocky surfaces. To assess the species' role in nutrient recycling, the scientists surveyed the parrotfish's numbers and followed them around with plastic bags to collect their waste products for analysis. OK, if science meant watching and chasing parrotfish for their poop while scuba diving, I could be a scientist.

As I progressed through graduate school, my time underwater came in handy for my own research and for a few other exciting adventures. To help pay for my master's degree, I hired out as a diver. The work ranged from supervising diving in the cold, dark, current-swept waters off the New Jersey shore-one of my least pleasant undersea experiences-to collecting fish for a large aquarium with ex-NFL football players turned stuntmen who had wrangled sharks for some of the James Bond films. They kept trying to convince me of the best techniques for grabbing and subduing a shark by hand. But I opted out of the first-hand experience on that one. I also went on fascinating research expeditions to Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Galapagos and the Bahamas, and I dove in a submersible into the deep waters off Florida's southeast coast.

After obtaining my doctoral degree and several adventurous positions (stories for another time), and a stint at the U.S. Geological Survey in St. Petersburg, I got another opportunity to work with an undersea habitat-this time not as the grunt underwater worker, but as an experienced scientist. In 1998, I was asked to join a 10-day mission in the Aquarius undersea laboratory nine miles offshore in Key Largo. The mission plan was to conduct surveys of corals and fishes as part of a long-term strategy to investigate changes in the reef's condition. The team members (or aquanauts, as they are called) were also chosen as guinea pigs to test recently installed equipment. I was honored and thrilled to get the call, and quickly agreed to once again spend some quality time with the fishes.

The mission began with a week of intense training, including equipment drills, an orientation to the site and habitat, and what to do in the event of an emergency, such as a fire or power outage. Aquarius is the successor to Hydrolab. As such it was larger and outfitted with more modern equipment, and it provided a more comfortable living and working situation. It is 43 feet long and 12 feet in diameter, looking much like a large, yellow, cylindrical mobile home sitting 60 feet below the surface. Aquarius is constructed of two-inch-thick steel, weighs 80 tons in air and sits bolted to a 100-ton, four-legged platform on the seafloor. Its round windows, called viewports, are made of two-inch-thick acrylic plastic. Attached at its base are large air and water tanks. Power, communications and additional air come through cables that are connected to a large life-support buoy anchored to a float overhead.

Aquarius, like the undersea habitats before, provides scientists the advantage of time. When living in Aquarius, you have six to nine hours of dive time each day from the habitat down to 115 feet. Scientists can conduct extensive surveys, run 24-hour experiments and observe their underwater surroundings in a way that is logistically difficult or simply impossible from the surface.

Of course, there are drawbacks. You cannot go shallower than 45 feet, nor can you go directly to the surface. After having been underwater for 24 hours or more, you must go through 17 hours of decompression before returning to the surface or suffer the potentially deadly consequences of decompression sickness, commonly called the bends. Staying for extended periods of time underwater where pressure is higher than at the surface causes the body to become saturated with gas. Returning directly to the surface would be like opening a can of soda-except the bubbles would be in your blood and they could lodge in your joints, lungs, spine or even brain-causing serious injury or death. It is critical that aquanauts spend 17 hours slowly returning to the surface.

What's it like to live underwater and be a part of a place so foreign from our own land-dwelling, air-breathing existence? Maybe a few experiences will provide a glimpse of the wonders beneath the waves.

One of my favorite times on the coral reef is called the changeover, when dawn turns to day or dusk turns to dawn. Early mornings, while others slept and all was quiet in Aquarius, I would carefully climb down from my narrow bunk and sit by one of the large, round viewports. As dawn broke, the water transformed from black to a deep navy color. Then the color changed to a misty royal blue, and shafts of yellow sunlight pierced the water, flickering across the seafloor. On the reef, animals sensed the dawn changeover. Large schools of silvery jacks would return from a night of hunting, arriving at the very same spot each morning. Other fish became more active, leaving the protection of the reef's nooks and crannies and beginning a day of foraging. Several schoolmasters, silver fish with yellow fins and tails, large eyes, snouts, and big, glum-looking, down-turned lips, would swim by the viewport, stop and look in. Just who was watching whom?

During my time in Aquarius, I've seen a barracuda launch a swift nighttime attack on a squid. I've swum with a gentle giant-the goliath grouper, which with one gulp of his huge, wide mouth could have sucked me in. And I've watched as a silvery school of hundreds of small fish hovered over the reef, parting in graceful synchrony to make way for a diver.

Aquarius's technology is impressive. At underwater way stations some 500 feet away from the habitat, divers can hook their tanks up to a hose and refill their air returning to work without ever having taken the scuba tanks off their backs. An underwater hydrophone allows the staff inside the habitat to communicate with divers working outside. (At Hydrolab during my first official descent as a support diver, late at night in the pitch dark, the staff surprised me with a little accompanying music over a hydrophone-the ominous music from the movie Jaws.) Around Aquarius a highway system of cables suspended over the seafloor allows the divers to navigate where there are no signs or roadways. If the water becomes murky, the divers can use the cables to return to the safety of the habitat. Telephones and an Internet connection allow some communication with those on shore.

While living underwater, the chores of daily life can take on a hilarious aspect. Much of the gas in a person's body when saturated is nitrogen. As with nitrous oxide it can lead to a bit of laughing, an effect called nitrogen narcosis, more fondly known as the martini effect. Because aquanauts get a bit silly and spacey at times, dive planning is done during the week of training, and a team on shore monitors the diver's safety and life support constantly.

During my 1998 mission, I arranged to do a live interview on the Today Show. Beforehand I asked a producer what questions might be asked. I was told that questions are never given out before a live interview. I asked him if he had ever heard of nitrogen narcosis. After I explained the martini effect, I was quickly given a list of potential questions. Matt Lauer and I had a lovely conversation several days into the mission-and I only laughed once.