We speak with a group of expert blackwater divers about diving in the open ocean at night, and coming face to face with deep sea critters.
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To find out more about the world of Blackwater diving, I've got a whole group here with me so I will just let you introduce yourselves to begin with.
Andrea: My name is Andrea Whitaker, I am a jack of all trades in the dive industry, I suppose. So, primarily, I am a scuba instructor, and underwater photographer, I teach underwater photography and then I’m one of the main crew members on the blackwater dives over the past eight years we've been running these.
Rich: I'm Rich Collins and I'm a retired businessman and a blackwater diver. An amateur diver and a photographer. Over the years I've morphed into a collector and photographer for the Florida Museum of Natural History and also for the Smithsonian, as all of us have. We've sort of turned into a research arm a little bit for all sorts of different institutions that are looking to get information on invertebrates and larval fishes and so forth that inhabit the black water realm.
Linda: My name is Linda Ianello I'm a retired IBM and I've been doing the blackwater dives for as long as they've been running them locally, so that's about eight years and about 500 dives. I started out learning about these subjects, how to identify them, what they are and then learned more about them. I eventually co-authored a book about blackwater creatures so that we could educate other people, and then I eventually got into the collecting with Rich. Contributing to the science behind it all. It's been great being able to hand them off to Rich and then he catalogues and gets them to the appropriate scientists. So it's been a group effort and it's just been great.
what is blackwater diving? What sets it apart from other types of scuba diving that we might be more familiar with?
Andrea: Blackwater diving is super special! So in Palm Beach in particular: at night after the sun goes down we go out. It's about four to six miles offshore. So we're looking for depths typically between 700 to 800 ft (210 - 250 m), however some nights we stay a little closer to shore, so we’ll be perhaps 400 to 500 feet deep. Then we have a long line that's got lights all over it. It has a float on top so it stays afloat and a weight at the bottom so it stays taut. We throw that in the water. Generally, we're in the Gulf Stream or we're in some portion of the Gulf Stream. Then we throw the rig in with the lights on and then everyone jumps in the water. So we're freely drifting in the Gulf Stream here in Palm Beach and your quote-unquote “dive guide” is going to be this line with the lights all over it. So we keep within a vicinity of that light and we're freely drifting (maximum depth - generally speaking - for the majority of the dive is about 50 ft (15 m) and then we're looking for these larval or even pelagic creatures that you don't necessarily see on the reef, or just generally on other recreational dives. So the idea of being out to those deeper depths is to hopefully get to see some deep water species or more pelagic species than what you would closer to shore.
That's a great summary because night dives have been a thing for a while but this is quite specific. This is open water, this is over deep water and it's its own thing. And you led on to it there with why is a dive to 50 feet on the deep sea podcast? It's because the deep sea comes to you!
Rich: That's right, it comes up every night. We're seeing all sorts of fish that live in much much deeper water than the water that we're in. All these diel organisms are coming up to the surface in this great migration every night after sunset, where there's just this huge number of creatures rising from the depths. And you can actually see them and you're swimming around, you can see fish just shooting by you like a rocket heading towards the surface.
And why is it that blackwater diving only seems to have appeared quite recently? It seems to be this eight-year mark. We've been scuba diving for so long but it feels like blackwater diving is kind of new, or maybe it's galvanised and formed quite recently and it was just something people used to do as a bit of a night dive kind of thing?
Andrea: So you two may remember more about the origin of it in Palm Beach but I recall one of our friends that also does the blackwater dives with us, came up to me and was talking about it. Perhaps he had heard about it because I think the year before we started, they were doing them in Hawaii. He proposed it and we brought it to the captain and the owner of the facility, one of the main ones that we run these through. And we sorted out how to create the rigging for the dive itself.
Rich: The earliest person I know about is Ryo (Ryo Minemizu) in Japan. But there were guys like Richard Harbison from Woods Hole. Back in the 70s, he started doing bluewater dives in the open ocean to collect and find ctenophores because they're so hard to preserve, it’s so hard to keep them. So they were going out and hand-collecting, so I think that's where the roots of it came from, in terms of these daytime dives. And then, doing it at night is a kind of twist on that. I think better camera gear, better scuba equipment and virally hearing about it from other places. But it's great! It's a lot of fun! We're close to the Gulf Stream, so there's a lot of water moving. I mean, some nights we'll only drift a mile or two. Sometimes we'll go five, six, seven, eight nautical miles in a 90-minute to 2-hour dive.
Larval Tripod Fish (Bathypterois bigelowi) at 0-20m depth - (Image courtesy of Linda Ianniello)
Adult Tripod Fish (Bathypterois bigelowi) at 650-880m depth - (Image courtesy of Ocean Exploration Trust)
This feels highly technical with the light guide that is helping you along. Because you have no frame of reference, you are in a void…
Rich: That's your frame of reference - you've got that (light guide)! Everything's drifting to the north with the Gulf Stream, but depending on which way the wind's blowing, the ball might be going in a different direction. So you might end up swimming east, west or south even because the wind is blowing out of the North. What can happen is: you stop and start taking pictures of some little larval creature and you collect it and you're fussing around with your equipment and stuff. And you look around, and you can't see the ball anymore. And meanwhile, you've got completely turned around in terms of what direction you're facing. But then, you'll see other divers lights all around you. So which way is which? Who's near the ball and who's not? You don't know.
That's what really grabs me because you're in this infinite void with very few reference markers. But these subjects… this is macro-photography in the most part. You are zoomed right in, in this tiny little world. And I could totally see… looking up after getting the fantastic shot… getting lost in the moment and realising: ‘If it wasn't for the bubbles, I wouldn't know what up was’.
Rich: Right, yeah. There are always other lights around, so it's not as disorienting as you'd think it is. But yeah, it's dark. And you don't have a frame of reference, and there's certainly no bottom. We always joke: if you go to the bottom, you're only going to see it once!
“...it’s dark and you don’t have a frame of reference. And there’s certainly no bottom!
We always joke: if you go to the bottom, you’re only going to see it once!”
So you're getting these classically deep sea critters coming up, I've seen images from you guys, you're swimming with a fish I associate with 5,000 m. They’re probably a big ugly brown or silver brute of a thing, whereas their kids are beautiful. A juvenile cusk eel is spectacular! A juvenile bathysaurus (lizard fish), the adult is a monster but the juveniles are absolutely stunning! On the back of this incredible experience, how did that then lead to citizen science? How did you then get involved in the project and the people who were hungry for these specimens?
Rich: We all belong to a club. For me, I went to a meeting a long time ago when I first started doing underwater photography and there was a guest speaker who was talking about the fact that: if you get in scuba diving and you don't have a focus, you won't do it for very long. And so, photography was my focus. But I wanted to do more than just photography, I wanted to actually do something with the images, something that lasted longer than just getting a magazine picture or something like that. I wanted to have some sort of impact with the work. So, just by chance, I sent an email one night to a guy named Peter Schuchert, who was the curator of invertebrates at the Geneva Museum of Natural History. But he also happened to be an editor of WoRMS (World Register of Marine Species) which is the go-to place for marine species taxonomy. So Peter is the editor, and I said ‘I noticed there's no images in here. We're trying to figure stuff out but we can't find images of the inverts’. And he referred me to Professor Gustav Paulay, who's the curator of invertebrates at the Florida Museum. And they both said the same thing, which is: the pictures are great and they're really interesting and sometimes you can identify species from an image, but most of the time you can't. Most of the time, you need a specimen to go with it. You need DNA, you need a specimen that's been preserved. So I met with Gustav, and we decided to start collecting these things. He gave me a whole bunch of gear and we started with the most common things first, and gradually as we learned to recognize the animals that were around us all the time, we started to recognize the ones that were rare and unusual. Andrea and Linda are two of the best at finding the rare and unusual, I must say. In the paper we just published, most of the glory shots were from Andrea and Linda.
Rich: So, we had 49 species of hydrozoans, two new species and a bunch of new species that had never been seen before in the Atlantic. They're not really new to science but they were species that were heretofore Indo-Pacific. And we continue to find stuff. I mean, that's the amazing thing with this. If you were doing bird photography and you went out to the Everglades, I could take pictures of the great blue heron and it would go along with about 100 million other pictures out there of great blue heron. But the stuff we're photographing often hasn't been seen in a hundred years. Very often, we're finding hydrozoans and other animals that haven't been seen since they were described, and that could be a hundred years ago!
Octophialucium irregularis. A new species of hydrozoan collected and photographed by Richard and the team.
(Image courtesy of Richard Collins)
Octophialucium irregularis. A new species of hydrozoan collected and photographed by Richard and the team.
(Image courtesy of Richard Collins)
Andrea: I think Linda has a good description for getting that connection with the scientists as well on the larger scale, because you guys started the Facebook page. Basically, we were posting the images and then all of a sudden scientists were hopping on and they were like… ‘Wait a minute?!’
Linda: Yeah, I think that's a good point too. We had no idea what so many of these subjects were. After maybe a year into it, one of the guys in Anilao (in the Philippines) started the Facebook page ‘Blackwater Photo Group’ and we started posting our findings. And the scientists started paying attention to that group and started giving us ID help. Because like you touched on, most of the things that they had seen were collected in a driftnet. They're mangled, they haven't seen them with all their appendages flared and what they look like in situ. So it became a win-win. The scientists were looking at the images and saying ‘oh my God that's what it really looks like’, and this is what it is. And that led to, like I mentioned, we wrote a book to try to educate people and I've worked really hard to maintain my website with galleries from the Blackwater findings as IDs as best as we know. And it constantly gets updated so that people in our group and all over the world can use that website to ID their findings. The scientists have been so helpful, we never would have had a clue what so much of this stuff was if they hadn't started paying attention!
It's wonderful how this developed organically. Just in sharing stuff and sharing an interest, someone else with the right expertise will see a totally different side to it. Because they’re works of art in their own right, but there’s that extra layer of ‘this is the thing that lives at 5,000 meters and we didn't know it looked like this as a juvenile. We knew they laid eggs, we knew they floated up, that's it’. That's where the story ended.
Andrea: And we knew how many fin rays it had. That's how they did a lot of the identification, by counting the fin rays. But to see it just all flared and in its environment… And that's the other advantage with all of the things that we're collecting, we're providing images. So it's not just the subject in the chemicals with no colour. There's an image that goes with it, there are probably at least 10 images that go with it. So I think that's been a tremendous help to the scientists too with this collecting.
Yeah, and it's THAT individual. You have Museum standard logging of this. Like THIS is the picture of THIS specimen.
Rich: Yeah, the collection is in the Florida Museum of Natural History’s database so anybody can look them up. And the data goes in the Gen bank and other people are using the data for their research as well. Just with the hydrozoans alone, we've been able to identify I think eight new species now. And that's just stuff that we've collected!
Has your photography changed as you've learned more about the science side of things and you’ve become citizen scientists?
Andrea: I think if you look at when we first started years ago, it was very much so more ID photographs. I think Linda can attest to this too, is that it's definitely become more behavioural now. So we certainly have nights where it's not completely ramped up out there with all these amazing rare deep water species. We have slower nights! So we started to turn our attention towards interesting behaviors like seeing some of the things that the critters are eating. Seeing some predation etc. Because that is what so many are out there doing anyway, so you get some interesting opportunities. You can see the movement of how they swim, you can see different fin rays, you can see what's in their gut because they're so translucent. Things like that I think, have become a bit more interesting for me anyways than just ID shots.
Rich: Linda and Andrea have given me a stack of images recently of pelagic nudibranchs feeding! There is very little literature about what do they really eat, and we're able to confirm some of the things that were believed. And we found some new things that they dine on as well, so we're working on a paper right there.
Pelagic Nudibranch (Phylliroe lichtensteinii) - Image courtesy of Linda Ianniello
There'll be some keen photographers and techy folks listening I'm sure. What are your setups like? I've only seen looking out of the lens, I don't know what you guys look like when you're down there. I'm guessing it's a handheld rig, lots of dedicated lighting? Do you use different setups? Do you all have your own favourites?
Rich: Yeah! By and large, in West Palm Beach, people use Nauticam brand housings and generally have a Nikon D800 or D500 camera inside. It's usually a 60mm macro lens, a couple of flashes and usually focus lights of some sort. There's a bunch of great brands on the market. I also use some lights in the blue wavelength. I do that to stimulate fluorescence. Some of these creatures fluoresce so strongly that you can see it with the naked eye, you actually don't even need a yellow filter to stimulate a little bit some of this fluorescence, but if you put a yellow filter on the camera and you use some of this blue light, you can find things that are fluorescing down there.
Linda: For one thing, the rigs are big! I mean, you've got this full-blown DSLR in housing, two strobes, two focus lights… I actually use three strobes; I'm one of the few that uses three. So this is very task-intensive trying to get pictures of the subject. And then you have to get it into a bag using lights that are on your camera… I swear most of them know what you're trying to do and take off!
They're all about predator avoidance and that's what you guys are!
Linda: …and so my particular rig is a D500 with 60 mm and everything else. And I believe Andrea uses a D500 also, right?
Andrea: I do. My only difference that I have is I am a glutton for more torture and I use diopters from time to time. So I like to make it even more challenging and get more magnified and get as close to the subject as possible. Which sometimes I have to give up but it's it can be really rewarding other times.
Linda: What Andrea is not saying is the problem with diopters is you have an extremely shallow depth of field. And again, with these moving subjects, it's hard to track them with a dioptre on the lens, and so that adds an extra degree of difficulty for sure!
We talked about exploring it a little bit here because of course, around New Zealand we've got some great deep water and some currents that it would be fun to interact with. But the the immediate worry was ‘you look like a very distracted prey animal’ because you're focusing in on something else. Do you ever worry about who else is out there watching you?
Andrea: We've had a couple times where the occasional decent-sized sucker fish comes by and you definitely look around like… what is it attached to?! But at least in our area, we get occasional sharks that come through. I think dolphins have scared a few photographers that were so focused. But for the most part, the sharks that we get are more or less just passing through. In the cooler months, we'll get some juvenile silky sharks that will come in and they'll get really curious and they'll kind of bump you and check you out which is a bit unnerving, but then I think most of us just get frustrated because now we can't focus on taking photographs.
Rich: Actually, the only injuries anybody's gotten have been from billfish. Somebody got slapped a few years ago by a swordfish and we had a little spearfish incident. Someone got speared by a spearfish not too long ago…
Andrea: …only a few months ago...
Rich: But when you consider how many years we've been doing it and how many thousands of hours of man time we've got in the water, it's not much of a risk.
“Somebody got slapped a few years ago by a swordfish and we had a little spearfish incident... but when you consider how many years we’ve been doing it and how many thousands of hours of man-time we’ve got in the water, it’s not much of a risk.”
I'd love to have from each of you an anecdote of one of your favourite dives? Or one of your favourite moments?
Linda: I've been diving for over 30 years and my most recent work before this was a lot of muck diving and a lot of looking for uh little subjects. Hunting more so than anything else. And it was always nudibranchs before that. And so, I was photographing locally every nudibranch and trying again to ID it and learn about it. So on one of my second or third blackwater dives, I found a pelagic nudibranch, and I didn't know there was such a thing! And I was thinking, oh I'm so happy there are pelagic nudibranchs! And like Andrea said, now I'm looking for the behaviour! Can I get them mating, can I get them feeding? Can I get them spawning? So you kind of grow with the subject.
Rich: Yeah I'd have to go my first dive. I was one of those people that went on their first dive and it was a spectacular night for blackwater diving. Because, you know a lot of times we go out and we don't see very much at all. Because you know life in the sea is kind of patchy, and and we see that all the time. Some nights we are really in the thick of it. My first night was spectacular and I haven't seen one since, but I had a larval Marlin, and it was probably about 2 cm long, something like that. It was spectacular, a beautiful colour and I got a really prized shot, like the first night I was out there. I haven't seen one of those since, so that was a that was a great start. I was hooked!
Andrea: Oh I don't know, it's so hard to choose because there have been so many amazing nights! One in particular that comes straight into my mind… it was one of those nights where you get in the water and it's like perfect visibility. You can see so far. But then every square inch of the ocean has something amazing. I felt like I was hopscotching from one subject to the another, so I start out and there's this really interesting cusk eel and it's got these beautiful pink speckles on its face, so I'm all giddy about that taking pictures and hanging out. And there wasn't a lot of wind, so I don't have to chase the ball, you can just stay put. Which, these are some of the trials and tribulations of blackwater dives, dealing with the different environmental conditions. Is it low visibility? Is there a lot of particulate? Is the wind blowing? Are we going to chase the ball? And this was just that night where it was perfect and we didn't have to chase the ball. Visibility was great, subjects were everywhere… so there's this first cusk eel and then I get to show it to some other divers, and then I move along to the next section and right next to me there's a larval pancake batfish, so that's exciting! And I get to hang out with that, and then I move from there and there's another different species of cusk eel. I think that was a really big highlight for me, like hop-scotching from one subject to the next.
Larval Cusk Eel (Lamprogrammus brunswigi)
Image courtesy of Linda Ianniello
Adult Cusk Eel (Lamprogrammus brunswigi)
Image courtesy of University of Hawai‘i Undersea Research Laboratory (HURL)
You all seem to have your specialist groups. Are there any particular animals that you've developed a real fondness for? Either as an interest in that animal group or just, they're always fun to interact with?
Rich: I love almost everything I see, I find them all interesting but I do have an affinity for jellies and hydrozoans, in particular.
Andrea: Well, I have a huge soft spot for cephalopods. I think any cephalopod that I see. I feel like in all of the blackwater dives that we've done, I feel like we have barely scratched the surface for cephalopods. I'm still waiting for the next really cool cephalopod to pop up.
Linda: For me, molluscs, the sea angels and sea butterflies. Nudies definitely, nudies yes. But I also got really into identifying the sea angels and sea butterflies. And again, back to the behaviour: since they're pelagic, you do catch some mating occasionally. Although the darn things don't like the lights…
They don't like an audience!
Linda: Yes! But you can occasionally get them spawning. But that's been fascinating trying to ID those guys, because there hasn't been so much literature on it and luckily one of the scientists has been a big help with that.
I feel like we've touched on lots of really useful resources that I think the listeners will be keen to follow up on, we've got a good mix of science-interested people and scientists themselves, so we may also inadvertently open a bit of a scientist floodgate which hopefully will be useful. You might find some experts appear on your radar and it's our fault and I'm sorry.
Linda: I think it's great! I'm eager to give images to any scientists for any projects you know of if the images will help illustrate these subjects or educate about these subjects. I'm really happy to share. I think we need to educate people about this environment and its value before it starts getting destroyed before we even understand it.
This is one of those hidden worlds again, one of those that could disappear and we hadn't even got to grasp with it. ‘Oh it's just the open ocean’... No! There's a whole world out there!
Rich: For us it's just right off the beach, I mean it's only five or six miles off the beach it's not that far away. Sometimes I think about here in South Florida, millions of people live here and there's just a handful of us going out and looking at these things every night. It’s a great privilege to be doing it, and at the same time I'm always surprised that nobody else is doing it!
And the things it's linking up with. We pollute the surface waters or we change what's going on, or change some of these current regimes and you are knocking out the babies of animals that live at 5,000m. This idea that the deep sea is this ‘self-contained little box and it's kind of fun but you don't have to worry about it’. But no! Their kids are up here with us where we can pollute them and litter them and have quite a direct impact on them.
Rich: The whole chain is dependent on it. I mean, think about all the food that comes just from the larvaceans that we see, all their little houses collapse and sink to the bottom. It's a major part of the carbon cycle, of dropping organic matter to the sea floor, and those guys are living near the surface.
Linda: Rich just mentioned the carbon cycling, I mean that's another whole piece of this that people just have no knowledge of at all and don't understand the value.
This is the biggest migration on Earth and it happens twice a day and it's gigatons of carbon that's moving up and down! It's right there under our noses! We've not lifted this rock sufficiently. In eight years this has exploded and the amount we've learned in this time.
Rich: Yeah, the gear and the cameras have gotten so much better. If you think about the fact that we've identified eight new hydrozoans over the years here. We’ve managed to find that many new species just among the hydrozoans in such a well-studied area of the ocean. And that's just a handful of us going out swimming around looking for weird-looking jellyfish. It just boggles your mind as to what is not known among all these other types of animals, that haven't been as thoroughly studied. And in all these places in the world where no one's been doing this kind of work at all. So it's a big world and we've only scratched the surface of it.
“... it’s a big world and we’ve only scratched the surface of it.”
Thank you for what you're doing to progress the scientific understanding but also what you're doing for science communication and displaying these animals in such an attractive way. It actually does a huge, huge amount.
Thank you so much for your time gang, I really enjoyed chatting with you!
Rich: We appreciate you having us!