by Edith Widder
Scientific achievements have always been linked to technological advancements. But for innovations to occur, there must be a sustained source of funding, first to develop the technology and then to support its continued progress and applications. The recent remarkable technological achievement of being able to image a star nine billion light-years away was made possible by a very significant investment in the Hubble Space Telescope at a total long-term time investment of more than a third of a century and a total cost of well over $10 billion.
By way of contrast, a comparable investment for ocean exploration would be the deep submergence vehicle (DSV) Alvin. This little three-person deep-diving submersible, which was originally built for less than half a million dollars, is a great example of a technological advancement leading to incredible scientific discoveries. But in the absence of the kind of PR generated by the space program, those discoveries go largely unhonored and unsung. To most people, it’s just a clunky-looking little sub with a funny name.
The idea of developing a submersible for science was not widely embraced when it was first proposed, since no one was sure what it might discover. It was Woods Hole scientist Allyn Vine, speaking at a national symposium in Washington, D.C., in 1956, who best articulated the need for a human presence in the ocean: “I believe firmly that a good instrument can measure almost anything better than a person can if you know what you want to measure…But people are so versatile, they can sense things to be done and can investigate problems. I find it difficult to imagine what kind of instrument should have been put on the Beagle instead of Charles Darwin” (emphasis mine). It was a speech with enough punch to sway opinion, so when the sub was finally built and launched, in 1964, it was christened Alvin, a contraction of Allyn Vine.
Alvin, which was paid for by the Office of Naval Research, was originally designed to dive to 8,010 feet*3 carrying a pilot and two passengers. Since then it has undergone several rebuilds and upgrades, the most recent in 2013, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). In all its various incarnations, the sub has had a long, illustrious career spanning more than half a century. Its long list of impressive achievements includes discovering the hydrothermal vents, recovering a lost hydrogen bomb off the southern coast of Spain, diving on the Titanic, photographing deepwater corals smothered in brown goo following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and a lengthy string of major scientific findings and breakthroughs, including several that have helped to radically transform our understanding of how our world works.
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My belief in the importance of submersibles grows out of direct experience. For the majority of my career, no camera system existed that came close to the capabilities of the dark-adapted human eye for seeing bioluminescence. As a result, I spent many hours in the deep sea sitting in submersibles with the lights extinguished, seeing the largest ecosystem on the planet as few others have. It gave me plenty of time to think about what life must be like for the animals in this realm, and I have often wondered how great our impact must be when we enter their world with our screaming thrusters and blinding floodlights.
Those thoughts would resurrect childhood memories of summer nights when the neighborhood kids would come together to play hide-and-seek. We’d gather by the lamppost at the corner and then disperse into the surrounding darkness of our suburban neighborhood to hide from whoever was “it.” One of the best hiding places was just outside the illumination halo of the streetlight in a neighbor’s yard, lying flat on the ground where you could see the action around home base but you wouldn’t be seen. In the sub with the lights on, I could imagine a spherical halo of animals around me, lurking just outside the reach of my lights, playing their own games of hide-and-seek. How could we ever hope to draw them in?
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Despite my passion for submersibles, I knew Allyn Vine was right: If you know what you want to measure, then you can probably develop a remote system to do it. In my case, I wanted to determine what animals and behaviors I might see if I wasn’t physically there, scaring them away. A remote system was the logical solution.
What I needed was a battery-powered deep-sea camera that could be left untended for extended periods. These existed, but they depended on white light. I wanted bioluminescence to be visible, which meant turning out the lights. But at the same time, I wanted to be able to see the animals. If I was going to be truly unobtrusive, I needed an illumination system for the camera that the animals couldn’t see. I knew that red light had been tried by a number of investigators working from submersibles, but always with disappointing results. The light was absorbed over such short distances in water that it was essentially useless. My idea was to try to compensate for the extremely poor illumination that red light provides in water by using one of the super-intensified cameras I had been employing for recording bioluminescence stimulated by the SPLAT screen. If I got the illumination levels just right, I should be able to see both the animals and their bioluminescence. I had done the math and was convinced it should work. I even had what I thought was a cool name for it: the Eye-in-the-Sea. What I didn’t have was the money to make it a reality.*4
I will spare you the grant-writing blow-by-blow. The bottom line was that before any of the funding agencies would consider ponying up financial support, they wanted to know what, exactly, I would discover. I had no idea—that was the point! But I was convinced that there must be oodles of critters out there we didn’t even know existed because we were scaring them away. Based on the proposal reviews I received, it was clear I was going to have to supply proof of concept, which meant field data demonstrating that it was possible to illuminate the animals in such a way that I could see them but they couldn’t see me.
Deep-sea field studies are expensive. I was doing well managing to fund two or three major expeditions a year. But inevitably, the expense was such that the number of at-sea days that got funded was less than the time needed to do the research proposed—especially when you factored in days lost to bad weather and equipment failures. There was zero time remaining in my existing expeditions for screwing around with red lights.
It was 1994 when I wrote my first proposal for the Eye-in-the-Sea (EITS). Six years passed before I finally found a way to establish proof of concept, thanks to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. MBARI (pronounced em-BAR-ee) is a world-class research institution that traces its origins to our 1985 Deep Rover expedition in the Monterey Canyon and, more specifically, to a series of conversations that grew out of that mission between Bruce Robison (the chief scientist on our Wasp and Deep Rover expeditions) and David Packard (of Hewlett-Packard fame and fortune).
Packard had financed the hugely successful Monterey Bay Aquarium, which opened in 1984 on the site of the last sardine cannery along Cannery Row. He was a strong proponent of science and had been envisioning a research program associated with the aquarium, but with Robi acting as his personal pied piper into the deep sea, aided by the glorious high-resolution videos we were bringing back from our Deep Rover dives, he started entertaining a greatly expanded vision. Why not an entire research institution? One that would take advantage of the unusual underwater topography of Monterey Bay, which put the head of a massive, biologically rich subsea canyon a mere stone’s throw from shore?
Not surprisingly, Robi was hired on by the newly formed institution and had been working there since 1987, using MBARI’s state-of-the-art remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to study deep-sea life in the Monterey Canyon. He suggested that I apply for an adjunct appointment at MBARI, which had the amazingly generous policy of providing its adjuncts with free ship and ROV time to conduct research. I applied and was thrilled to be accepted. Finally, I had an opportunity to experiment with red lights. I didn’t, as yet, have a battery-powered camera that I could leave on the bottom. So for my first attempt, in 2000, which was to be a two-day trial run, I planned to use their ROV Ventana to carr
y a bait box down to the bottom to attract animals that I would observe with my intensified camera, wired into the ROV, spotlit by alternating red and white light for illumination. I hoped to be able to prove to potential funding agencies that red illumination would work with this arrangement and, if possible, provide evidence of more animals seen under red compared to white light.
Several friends had warned me that MBARI’s research vessel, the Point Lobos, had a reputation as a “vomit comet,” but I figured that would be no problem for me. I had been going to sea for sixteen years and had been on countless similar vessels without effect. So when I first started feeling a bit off just a couple of hours into the mission, I chalked it up to jet lag, since I had just gotten off a plane from Florida.
It is said that there are five stages of seasickness. Stage 1 is denial. Stage 2 is nausea, which, by the time we reached the dive site, I was rapidly approaching. Stage 3 is feeding the fish. After that comes stage 4, when you’re afraid you’re going to die, followed by stage 5, when you’re afraid you’re not.*5 There were a couple of reasons why being seasick was out of the question. First, this was the beginning of a series of missions with this vessel and this team, so throwing chow was not the first impression I wanted to make. And second, Robi had come along to help train me on ROV ops, so I needed to focus.
When we reached the dive site, I went out on deck, where I breathed in great gulps of fresh air and tried to focus on all the activity associated with launching the ROV. The Ventana stood tall on the aft deck, with the dimensions and utility of a toolshed: eight feet high, six feet wide, eight feet long, and bristling with gear, including cameras, lights, manipulators, and all manner of samplers for collecting animals. The top third was constructed of molded syntactic foam painted tangerine orange, with the MBARI logo—a sinuous deep-sea gulper eel poised in the cleft of a jagged V, symbolizing the Monterey Canyon—emblazoned in blue. The bottom two-thirds was a dense snarl of instrumentation and cables.
Launched off the starboard side of the ship, the 7,500-pound ROV was plucked off the deck by a stern-mounted crane that did a stiff-arm lift, popping it into the ocean in a matter of seconds. As soon as it was in the water, the crane operator released its grip and the ROV pilot standing on deck took control by using a belly pack fitted with a remote control unit to fly the ROV away from the ship and start its dive as the deck crew paid out the tether. Only when it was safely underwater did the pilot on deck pass off the operation to the pilots in the control room.
It was an impressive process, designed to minimize the window of greatest vulnerability for any package passing through the frequently bumpy interface between air and sea. Because of this, they were able to launch and recover in much worse sea states than we could risk with the Johnson-Sea-Link. Also, they weren’t limited by battery charge the way we were in the subs, since all the power they needed was transmitted down the tether. It promised the opportunity for extended periods of animal observation. But there was one little hitch: Those observations would have to be made from the ROV control room, which was situated in the bow of the ship—pretty much a guaranteed roller coaster on a 110-foot vessel. There was no choice. I took one last gulp of fresh air and proceeded belowdecks.
The control room was a high-tech, dark space lined with large video monitors in front of four deck-mounted padded chairs like those you’d find in an airplane cockpit. Two of these chairs were for the ROV pilots and two were for the scientists who were supposed to direct the pilots and keep up a running commentary of observations and animal identifications on the audio track of the high-resolution video that was recorded during each dive.
I was in the chair nearest the bow, staring at the monitor directly in front of my face, which was displaying an underwater scene being recorded by one of the cameras on the ROV. Since the motion of the ship was being transmitted down the ROV’s tether, the scene was bouncing up and down, but it was completely out of sync with the up-and-down motion I was feeling. It was a formula for intestinal disaster that had claimed many victims over the years*6 and saddled the ship with its unflattering nickname, the Point Puke.
As my nausea grew, it was becoming increasingly difficult to focus on the instructions that Robi was giving me. Eventually, when it became clear that mind was going to lose to matter and gastric cataclysm was imminent, I mumbled something about getting a cup of coffee in the mess and bolted for the head. I was fooling no one; Robi and the ROV pilots had seen it all too many times before. After relieving myself of the vile bilge sloshing around in my stomach, I attempted to return to the control room and take up my station as though nothing had happened.
By this time the ROV had reached the bottom, so we started looking around for a good place to set down the bait box. The Ventana was facing one of the canyon walls, and our lights revealed a couple of convenient ledges that appeared ideal. I pointed to what looked like a good spot and the pilot started to maneuver the ROV into place. The next hour was an education in the operational limitations of ROVs.
It seemed like every time the vehicle got close to the ledge, the tether would drag it back. From my experiences diving in Wasp, I knew how restrictive a tether could be, but after many years diving in the JSLs I had forgotten. With so much fumbling about, the ROV kept stirring up the fine silt that had built up on the ledge, creating mini dust storms, and we had to wait for them to clear to see what we were doing. It seemed to take forever, and during that time I had to make a couple more dashes to the head.
Eventually, after many tries, the ROV was lined up properly and the pilot used the manipulator to set the bait box on the bottom, but as soon as the box was released, I watched in stunned amazement as it slid toward the edge of the cliff as if possessed, like one of the kitchen chairs in Poltergeist. Another disadvantage of ROVs is that they have no depth perception. It sure didn’t look like it, but that ledge had a sloping bottom—a pretty steep one, judging by the speed with which the bait box was exiting the scene.
Fortunately, the pilot managed to snag it with the manipulator before it went sailing off into the abyss, but now we had to find another ledge and begin the whole process again. And after all that, one last fly in the ointment came to light when we finally got the bait box situated: I learned that there was no way to go neutral and shut off the thrusters—something I did all the time in submersibles like the JSLs and Deep Rover. For safety reasons, ROVs are trimmed to be positively buoyant so that if they ever lose power, they will float to the surface. That means that to stay down, their thrusters must be running all the time. So much for being unobtrusive! In the end we got no data.
For my next attempt, my first goal was to beat the seasickness. Unlike the last time, I made sure I was well rested and I took some medication described as the “Coast Guard cocktail,” which former Point Puke victims swore by and promised wouldn’t make me sleepy. As we cruised to our dive site, I stood out on deck staring fixedly at the horizon. I also chose a different location to deploy, a deep site that was farther out to sea, giving me a little more time to get my sea legs. All told, it worked. I felt fine.
This new site also had a smoother bottom, so we didn’t have to waste time looking for a flat spot. We just dropped the bait box and backed off a few feet to observe, beginning by comparing what we could see under red light to what was visible under white light. The combination of the red light with the intensified camera worked brilliantly. In fact, because the camera was black-and-white and had automatic gain control,*7 I had to make sure I took careful notes so I knew which lights, red or white, were on in each recording I made.
With the red lights on, we soon saw hagfish and large sablefish nosing around the bait box. When we turned on the white lights, the sablefish would disperse immediately, while the hagfish remained—not surprising, given that hagfish don’t have image-forming eyes and are driven primarily by smell. Given enough time, the sablefish would return when the white lights were on but would rema
in near the box for much shorter periods. On average, I saw thirty-nine sablefish in each ten-minute viewing period under red light, and only seven under white light. Those were convincing numbers, but it was nonetheless obvious from their behavior that the sablefish could see the red light, because when it first came on after a period with the lights off, the fish would swim away. However, it was also obvious that red light was far less aversive than white light and that using an intensified camera was the key to making it work as an illumination source.
Since it was apparent that there was no way to make an ROV unobtrusive, the next step was to build the battery-powered camera I had envisioned in the first place. Still, funding remained elusive. I ended up kludging the system together with multiple funding sources. The first and most unusual involved something called the Engineering Clinic, an innovative hands-on undergraduate teaching program pioneered by Harvey Mudd College, in Claremont, California. The idea was to give students experience working in teams to solve real-world engineering problems for “clients.” To become a client, you needed to submit a proposal, pay a fee of $35,000, and provide all the requested materials. I didn’t have nearly that much money in my internal budget, so I had to convince Harbor Branch to pitch in the fee, and I used the sale of some of my images of deep-sea animals to cover the equipment purchases.*8
As far as I’m concerned, hands-on problem solving is the ideal way to learn, and this project was a splendid example of how motivating it can be. The Harvey Mudd students were receiving a practical, multidisciplinary education by meeting a real-world engineering challenge while at the same time hearing about deep-sea biology. Being involved in something so exploratory was exciting for them and helped sustain their enthusiasm through long hours. There was a lot to do, with many challenges to overcome, but they got it done, creating a computer-controlled camera/recorder/illumination system that worked on the bench top.
