Innerspace: at undersea lab, researchers sleep with the fish

Maria Lameiras
Alumni Association

A team of four marine biology scientists and students from Georgia Tech spent 10 days in November living like fish to begin a two-year study that could help save dying coral reefs.

Tech’s “aquanauts” — including Professor Mark Hay, postdoctoral associate Todd Barsby, Ph.D. student Deron Burkepile and research specialist and technician Alex Chequer — were aboard the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-owned Aquarius ocean laboratory in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. Tech graduate students Zach Hallinan, Brock Woodson and Anne Prusak provided support for the mission from the surface, diving to the site on a daily basis.

	Roughly the size of a school bus, Aquarius is located at Conch Reef, three and a half miles offshore and approximately nine miles south of Key Largo, in the Florida Keys.

Aquarius, a 47-foot cylindrical lab, is deployed three and a half miles offshore, at a depth of 60 feet, next to spectacular coral reefs. Mission scientists at Aquarius use saturation diving to study and explore the coastal ocean.

Hay, who led the Aquarius mission, is an experimental ecologist and holds the chair in Environmental Biology in the College of Sciences.

“Over the last 20 years, reef cover has gone from 60 percent in some areas of the Caribbean to 3 percent,” he said. “Reefs I started to study in 1977 are now essentially gone.”

The team spent nine hours per day diving, the physiological limit at that depth while saturated. “Saturation diving” is a technique that permits divers to remain exposed to the increased pressure of the ocean for weeks or months.

“We would go out at about 6 a.m., stay until noon, and then we were required to spend four hours in the Aquarius. Then we’d go out at 4 p.m. and stay until about 7 p.m.,” Hay said.

Working at the dive site before dawn and as day turned to dusk provided interesting opportunities to observe different marine life.

“The coolest thing to me was to see the changes in fish at dawn and dusk. We’d start before the sun came up and we’d see the reef wake up as the nocturnal fish went away and the daytime fish started to move around,” Burkepile says. “It was equally neat to go from light through dusk to darkness and to see all of the predatory fish come out.

“You’d see huge schools of fish — 50 to 60 barracuda all together — swimming around right at dusk.”

The underwater lab, with its lights and generators, also attracted fish.

“When we swam to Aquarius the first time it was dark, it was surrounded by clouds of fish,” Chequer said.

The long days of diving were physically draining, and the bedroom accommodations were less than spacious — about 7-by-8 feet with two sets of bunks stacked three high with a little less than 2 feet of space between bunks — but everyone slept well, given the daily schedule.

“We slept very soundly at the end of the day because we spent twice as much time in the water as we could have diving from the surface,” Burkepile says.

Although the water was 82 degrees, prolonged exposure meant a lot of energy expended keeping warm. “That means we were twice as cold and twice as tired,” Hay said.

Chequer said by the end of the mission, he was wearing “two wet suits, a vest, an under vest and a hood. That was the worst part of it.”

Living in cramped quarters was easier to adapt to than the team thought it would be.

“It was definitely a different experience. It was very compact living. We couldn’t all eat at the same time because there was only room for four of us to sit down, but we learned to move around each other within a day or so,” Burkepile says.

Chequer said the experience was “surprisingly normal.”

“When we were in Aquarius, I would sit and look out the window and I had to remind myself that I was underwater looking at fish. They’d come by and look in at us too.”

More information about Professor Hay and his Aquarius mission is available in the Winter 2004 edition of the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine, which can be accessed at www.gtalumni.org.