by Nancy F. Huddleston, National Research Council

June 1, 2010--Working in the San Blas islands along the Caribbean coast of Panama, research diver Ken Clifton saw tropical green seaweed do something he’ll never forget.

"I saw the seaweed explode in what looked like a cloud of green smoke as millions of gametes were released into the water," Clifton said.  He could hardly wait to get into the library to see what he had witnessed, but he found that no such event had ever been documented.  It turned out that Clifton had discovered that tropical green seaweed have "synchronous spawning events" much like corals.

Ken Clifton

Was the discovery luck?  Not really.  As with all things, luck favors the prepared.  Clifton’s work includes years of daily 5 a.m. dives where he has observed his subjects of study up close through the use of scuba and snorkel gear.  Was Clifton the first person ever to witness the seaweed spawning event?  Probably not.  But he was the first researcher to see it and understand its significance.

Clifton is one of 50 U.S. scholars and international collaborators who presented research findings at a 2-day Symposium at the National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C. on May 24 and 25.  Co-hosted by the Smithsonian Institution, the National Science Foundation, and the National Research Council's Ocean Studies Board, the symposium celebrates scientific accomplishments made by “placing the trained scientific eye into the underwater environment on self-contained compressed gas."

Larry Madin, another presenter who is Executive Vice President, Director of Research, and a Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), was among the first biologists to use scuba for the in-situ study of oceanic plankton.

Larry Madin

Madin points out that for decades, researchers thought that oceanic plankton were too small for diver research. But in the early 1970s, Bill Hamner at UCLA introduced the idea of open-ocean or “blue-water” scuba diving for plankton research. The first blue divers found many large and important zooplankton, including gelatinous forms such as jellyfish, that had been largely missed by conventional sampling even though they make up a significant portion of the life forms in the upper water column. Since then, blue-water scuba has become an accepted and productive method for plankton research, helping researchers to understand such things as predator-prey relationships and how the organisms eat.

Madin characterizes the simple method of direct observation by scuba divers as "productive out of all proportion to its cost and complexity" and “about 100 times less frustrating” than trying to make the same observation in underwater vehicles.  Madin says he also loves diving because he can now appreciate what most of the planet really looks like, considering that it is 71 percent ocean. "Humanity’s viewpoint," said Madin, "is really just from the sidelines."

Paul Dayton

In an opening address to Symposium attendees, Paul Dayton, a research diver since the mid-1950s and celebrated marine ecologist now at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, presented his concern about "a strong trend to bring nature into the laboratory and model it rather than actually experience and respect nature herself." Dayton’s lifelong studies of marine systems along the eastern rim of the Pacific Ocean, from the Arctic to the tip of South America, and among coral reefs and in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica focused on how ecosystems vary in space and time in relation to both ecological and physical factors.

Dayton said that you can ask good questions and even develop models and predictions in the laboratory, but without going into nature, you can’t really know if you’re right or wrong.  Furthermore, most theories focus on a single aspect of the system, for example energy or population dynamics.  Dayton points out that, in truth, the complexity of nature includes all these and many other aspects.  A “sense of place” and true understanding of the system can only be gained by direct experience.

“I worry that nobody’s getting into nature anymore,” Dayton said. “Other things, like computing, are capturing young people’s attention; nature seems old-fashioned by comparison.  But trying to understand marine life in a lab is like trying to understand birds in a rainforest from an airplane.”

Ken Clifton shares Dayton’s concern about this growing indifference towards direct underwater research efforts, which they say comprise the record of the natural history of marine life, an often necessary component of scientific exploration and discovery.  Although some academic researchers have seen a trend away from field work, Michael Lang, Director of the Smithsonian Marine Science Network since 1998 and one of the organizers of the conference, sees positive signs in the growing interest in scuba diving. "Scuba is increasing as a recreational activity, which I think presents an opportunity to get more young people interested in science, especially marine biology," said Lang.  In fact, many of the researchers at the symposium mentioned how their first diving experiences inspired them to pursue a career in marine science, having been drawn in by the beauty and wonder of the undersea world.