Why do WHOI scientists need to dive, when they have sophisticated vehicles and subs for oceanographic research?
People really need to make firsthand observations. It’s really hard to chase, say, a fish around with an ROV [remotely operated vehicle]. In the past, you’d take nets and dredge them through the ocean and come up with whatever comes up on deck, but if you’re dealing with gelatinous zooplankton, you come up with goo. Whereas, when you actually are down there with these animals, you can see that they have some pretty complex behaviors. You can actually see them completely spread out, doing natural things. Nowadays, most of our divers are engineers. They develop gadgets and test them right here at the dock to make sure it works before they take them out at sea. And divers rapidly and fairly inexpensively maintain instruments that are put in the water. I don’t know how you’d be able to do some of these jobs without diving. What is the safety record of the WHOI dive program? Well, we’ve had people get decompression sickness, but when you look at what actually happened, they have all been wh
