by Edith Widder
With the bare bones of the system built and the red-light data from MBARI as proof of concept, I went to NOAA for the $15,000 I needed to put the camera/recorder into an underwater housing and design and build a frame to deploy it on the bottom. Once again, MBARI helped out by providing the underwater batteries I needed to run the system, and, most important, they provided the ship time necessary to test it in the field for the first time, in 2002. This was the mission that Dave Clark had asked to film, the first field tests of the Eye-in-the-Sea.
As an example of cutting-edge engineering for ocean exploration, it was an ungainly-looking contraption. The tripod, built out of aluminum tube stock, was over seven feet tall, with the battery on the bottom and the camera/recorder in a cylindrical underwater housing mounted just above it. The red light was mounted as far off-axis from the camera as feasible, at the top of the tripod, in order to reduce the backscatter that would degrade the image with light reflecting off particles in the water.
The day of the launch was sunny and clear, the waters so calm no one had to worry about getting their sea legs. Once we reached our deployment site, the ROV crew made short work of lifting the EITS off the deck and carrying it two thousand feet deep, where they deployed it and the bait box with such speed that we had plenty of time to go exploring afterwards. Clark wanted to film as much as possible while we were out there. Robi had come along as co–chief scientist and was happy to give us a tour of his backyard while showing off the capabilities of the ROV to capture high-resolution imagery of fragile gelatinous organisms. The whole day went perfectly.
The next day, not so much. It started when my borrowed pinger on the EITS failed to provide a signal we could home in on. It’s an awfully big ocean, and I felt my anxiety ramping up as we searched unsuccessfully. Eventually the ROV picked up a target on sonar that led us to it, and I experienced a rush of relief when I saw it standing just as we had left it. The bait box, on the other hand, was now surrounded by clusters of crabs and sea urchins and there was a writhing mass of hagfish slithering in and out of the plastic mesh holding the bait. It looked as though there must have been plenty of on-camera action to record.
It was when we got the EITS back on deck that things went seriously south. As Clark filmed my every move, I assiduously tried to ignore him and his camera as I hooked up a long cable between the EITS on deck and my laptop, back in the lab. I said a little silent prayer to Saint Murphy—Please have mercy on me!—and typed in the command to retrieve whatever imagery the camera had collected. Nothing. Nada. The system refused to talk to me, no matter how nicely I asked. After several failed attempts, I went back to the deck to check the camera connection and that was when I saw it: water sloshing inside the camera dome.
Only once before had I seen that sickening sight. It was early in my career, shortly after I had started at Harbor Branch. I had been in need of a supersensitive light meter that I could use on the JSL. Nothing of the kind existed, and I had to convince two funding agencies (ONR and NSF) to share the cost of its development. On an early test dive, it failed, and one of the sub crew, Jim Sullivan, a.k.a. Sulli, spotted the water in the optical dome and delivered the devastating news.
At that time, I had felt like my career was hanging by a thread as I stared dumbfounded at the water sloshing back and forth. Sulli, who was a font of both philosophy and humor and whom I thought of as my personal Yoda, stood quietly next to me for a couple of minutes and then drawled, “You know, success in life depends on how well you handle plan B. Anyone can handle plan A.” It took a while for that to sink in, but once it did, it turned out to be exactly what I needed to hear. I wrote those words down and posted them on my office wall, which is why I knew just what to say when Dave Clark shoved his camera in my face to get my reaction to the EITS’s flooding.
Robi, too, knew just what to say. Once we were back on the dock, he made an eloquent on-camera speech about how we have to expect to fail every now and then and how David Packard said, “If you’re not failing occasionally, I’ll think you’re not reaching far enough. I want you to reach as far as your imagination will allow you.”
Generally speaking, when people start making speeches about your courage to fail—on national television, no less—it’s not a good sign. The fact that this was exactly the worst of the worst-case scenarios I had envisioned did not help at all. I felt like I had been gut-punched, and I couldn’t even claim it was a sucker punch, because I’d volunteered knowing this could happen! It wasn’t just the mortification of an extremely public failure; there was also the far more concerning worry that this could endanger any hope of future funding for the EITS. I knew I needed to make it right, and fast.
I had just three months to turn things around before my next mission. First, I asked Clark if he would film this (hopefully) comeback expedition. He said he was running out of time and money, but if I managed to get some good footage from the EITS he would try to include it.
This was going to take some serious scrambling and scrounging. Fortunately, I had an ally. Lee Frey was a young ocean engineer who had started at HBOI in 1997 as an eager intern and worked his way up to senior engineer in less than five years. Besides having an obvious passion for deep-sea exploration, Lee had an incredibly valuable talent for adapting the engineering to the budget at hand, which in this case was rapidly approaching zero. Somehow, whenever a problem arose, he kept finding workarounds that didn’t break my pathetic bank. But still, it all felt pretty dicey, so when the launch of the next mission rolled around, I wasn’t terribly confident about the outcome.
Clark didn’t come along on the ship this time. I was initially relieved he wasn’t going to be there, because if it all failed again, I certainly didn’t want to share that moment. However, as fortune—and Murphy—would have it, this time everything worked.*9 The whole operation played out exactly as it had before, only this time, when I plugged in the camera cable and typed in the command to retrieve images, after a brief but seemingly interminable pause, video sequences started appearing on my laptop. It’s hard to imagine a better feeling in the world than that moment of pure victory when you manage to pry open a door that has remained stubbornly shut for so long. I was seeing the deep sea in an entirely new way—without scaring the animals I wanted to observe!
The recordings were mesmerizing. I felt like a kid again, watching the action around home base while remaining hidden. There was no bioluminescence, but there was plenty of action, with fish and sharks swarming around the bait. Even better was seeing that imagery on national television when Clark’s documentary Science of the Deep: Mid-Water Mysteries aired in early 2004 on the Science Channel. The show won Clark and his coproducer, Sue Norton, the National Academies Communication Award,*10 “for showing the importance of engineering in scientific exploration.” They did show the initial failure of the Eye-in-the-Sea, but they also showed its ultimate success.
Being willing to fail is one of the job requirements if you want to explore any kind of frontier. There are many quotes on the subject. My favorite is Winston Churchill’s: “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” Your passion needs deep roots if it’s going to survive the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” For some, their obsession stems from wanting to be the first to reach a place, like the moon or the bottom of the Mariana Trench. It’s a powerful drive that has resulted in valuable technology development.
But for others, their fervor involves unmasking the hidden secrets of the natural world, an aspiration that doesn’t necessarily require traveling to the farthest reaches of the globe. The invention of the microscope revealed a previously hidden world, including the first microorganisms ever seen. How utterly amazing to discover another world within our world.
What world within our world might be revealed to us in the vast reaches of the dark ocean if we can simply learn to explore it without scaring life away?
Skip Notes
>
*1 I’m just guessing based on personal experience. It depends on where your house is. Resolution on Google Earth ranges between six inches and fifty feet.
*2 The Empire State Building is 102 stories.
*3 Currently rated to 14,760 feet.
*4 Here’s a useful tip if you are ever suffering from insomnia: Call up a scientist and ask about their grant funding. You will be treated to a sleep-inducing, interminable tale of woe worthy of a Greek tragedy.
*5 This is real. Over the years I have heard several credible accounts of people reaching stage 5 and having to be physically restrained to keep them from jumping overboard to end their misery.
*6 One of the most famous was Alan Alda, of M*A*S*H fame, who came out on the Point Lobos soon after he began filming his wonderful PBS series Scientific American Frontiers. He turned visibly green on camera and never filmed another episode of that program at sea.
*7 A closed-loop feedback system in which changes to the input signal, in this case the illumination level, have minimal impact on the output, i.e., the image brightness.
*8 This is a scientist’s version of setting up a lemonade stand.
*9 This is actually one of the innumerable corollaries to Murphy’s law: When things go right, nobody notices (or in this case is there to see).
*10 A project of the National Academy of Science, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine, funded by the W. M. Keck Foundation, to help the public understand topics in science, engineering, and medicine.
Chapter 11
THE LANGUAGE OF LIGHT
Bumbling around a frontier in the dark, both literally and figuratively, one learns to expect calamity as the natural order of things. Yet a combination of insatiable curiosity and optimism sustains forward momentum in the face of what seem like endless setbacks. Maintaining optimism takes work, often requiring a concentrated focus on small successes. As a result, when a major success materializes, it can be kind of overwhelming, even if it was the very thing you were working toward. In my wildest imaginings I never envisioned anything as amazing as what occurred the first time I took the Eye-in-the-Sea on a major expedition.
* * *
—
My thrill of victory after that first successful deployment of the EITS in the Monterey Canyon was short-lived. During my initial experiments, I hadn’t been terribly surprised that the sablefish we observed from the ROV seemed to be able to see the red light emitted through the red plastic filters snapped over the ROV’s white lights; I had measured the transmission through those filters and knew that some of the shorter wavelengths—blue light—were sneaking through. But for the EITS I had switched to red LEDs, which are often functionally described as emitting monochromatic light. Most deep-sea fish are also described as monochromats, meaning they see only one color. Since that one color is usually blue (between 470 and 495 nm*1), I was hopeful they wouldn’t be able to see the light emitted by the red (660 nm) LEDs. But with careful analysis, it became clear that they could.
Although some of the fish didn’t seem to respond when the red lights came on, others would gradually adjust their swimming patterns, veering away from the lights. In a few cases, it wasn’t even all that subtle: When the lights came on, they bolted. For my next try, I pushed the illumination even further, using far-red LEDs (680 nm). The penalty for this was that the longer the wavelength, the more poorly it transmitted through seawater. The resulting video recordings were much dimmer and harder to analyze, but the outcome was the same: The fish were still seeing the light.
Calling LEDs monochromatic and fish monochromats is misleading. Even though most deep-sea fish have only one visual pigment, that pigment can absorb a whole range of colors—the fish just can’t distinguish one from another. Their vision is like a black-and-white camera through which varying colors are simply seen as different shades of gray. For the sablefish, maximum sensitivity is to blue light (491 nm), so the color blue would be perceived as white, green of equal intensity would be seen as light gray, yellow would be medium gray, orange would be dark gray, and red would be seen as close to black.
Plotted on a graph, this visual sensitivity looks like a very broad bell-shaped curve, with its peak sensitivity in the blue but with the base of the bell, where sensitivity gradually drops toward zero, extending to the left into the short wavelengths down past 400 nm to the ultraviolet, and surprisingly far to the right into the long wavelengths all the way past 600 nm to the oranges and approaching the reds. The emission of the red LEDs, on the other hand, looks like a very narrow bell-shaped curve with its peak at 680 nm. If you plot these two curves on the same graph, they don’t appear to overlap, but if you greatly expand the vertical axis*2 and zoom in on that stretch between the two peaks, you can see that in fact they do.
It seemed like I was between a rock and a hard place. The width of the visual pigment absorption spectrum, on the one hand, and, on the other, the extreme attenuation by seawater at wavelengths outside that range, at the red end, were making it extraordinarily difficult to see without being seen.
* * *
—
Immediately after the successful trials of the Eye-in-the-Sea in 2003, I wrote a proposal to NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration and Research for an expedition to explore the ocean in a whole new way—one that took into account the visual capabilities of its inhabitants. What might we find that had never been discovered before, if we could see without being seen?
My goal was to have the EITS play a major role in this expedition, which was scheduled to take place in the Gulf of Mexico in 2004. The trouble was that, as the date of the expedition approached, I was still struggling with making the illumination unobtrusive.
My inspiration for a solution came from the extraordinary stoplight fish, whose bioluminescence I had measured using the Optical Multichannel Analyzer back when I first started investigating the colors produced by various light producers. Like many deep-sea fish, it had a flashlight next to its eye that could emit blue light. But it also had a much bigger flashlight under its eye that shone red. The remarkable thing about the stoplight fish is not just that it can emit red light, but that it can see it! This means that the fish has sniper-scope vision that potentially allows it to see without being seen.
What an incredible advantage: to be able to home in on prey that can’t see you and communicate with potential mates without revealing your presence to your predators! One of the striking features of this red-light organ is that it has a very sharp cutoff filter*3 over it. This filter shifts the color of the raw light produced by the light organ from a bright reddish orange to a much dimmer infrared. It is an impressive color shift, and at the time I made those measurements, I had been struck by how much light energy the fish sacrificed to blot out those shorter wavelengths. The selection pressure to be sneaky is clearly enormous.
Taking my cue from Mother Nature, I decided to emulate the stoplight fish by using cutoff filters in combination with the red LEDs, which would hopefully make the illumination less visible to the fish. I was excited to learn that some new, higher-power 680-nanometer LEDs had just come on the market, which would allow me to more than compensate for the energy I was sacrificing by using filters. I had hoped to test this new illumination system on another MBARI deployment. Unfortunately, the cutoff filters were a special-order item with a long lead time, leaving me no window for further testing before the NOAA expedition.
Besides planning to use the new filter system, I also had a new trick up my sleeve. I was hoping to take another stab at talking to the animals. Two decades before this, while diving Wasp and Deep Rover, I had tried to elicit some kind of bioluminescent communication by flashing a simple blue light that I had attached to a pole. I was now convinced that the reason this light wand had failed to elicit any reactions was that I wasn’t being stealthy enough
. If the new illumination system worked as I hoped, I would finally have a way to test this theory. Also, I had been on dozens of missions and learned a lot about the specificity of bioluminescent displays since those early days. So this time, my attempt to talk to the animals wasn’t going to just feature a single blue light but rather would imitate particular displays; in other words, I’d be using a language they might recognize.
The most spectacular display programmed into the device mimicked that of the deep-sea jellyfish Atolla wyvillei. Both in the light and the dark, this is a magnificent creature. With the lights on, it looks like a scarlet sunflower with long crimson tentacles protruding out from between its translucent red petals, called lappets. With the lights extinguished, its bioluminescence can take an intriguing range of responses, depending on the strength and location of the stimulus applied. Touching a lappet may induce it to squirt out a thin streamer of light that hangs in the blackness to distract a predator—“Hey, look over here!”—as the Atolla covertly escapes into the darkness. A gentle bump on the bell causes a brief, dim pulse of light local to the contact, which I interpreted as a visual “Ahem, this space is occupied.” A much more prolonged stimulus, as might occur if the jellyfish was being munched on by a predator, causes it to pull out all the stops and produce a pinwheel display that swirls round and round its surface in waves of brilliant sapphire blue.
The fact that the pinwheel is such an eye-catching, prolonged spectacle makes it an ideal candidate for a burglar alarm—a scream for help, using light instead of sound, to draw attention to an attacker. The superbly sensitive eyes of deep-sea dwellers are tuned to detect any telltale flash that could lead predator to prey. The prey, in this case, is not the jellyfish but its attacker. The jellyfish “scream” is a plea for rescue—“Help! Come eat this guy before he eats me.” I thought a display like that could potentially attract predators from hundreds of feet away. If it did, it would have the double benefit of helping substantiate its function as a burglar alarm while drawing large predators into the field of view of the EITS.
