Charley and the Aquanauts

Sixty feet doesn't seem very far, does it? It's the distance from the pitcher's mound to home plate. Two city buses parked end to end. You can stroll it in fifteen seconds.

But today you're going to dive sixty feet to the ocean floor, to the Aquarius undersea laboratory just off the Florida Keys. You're going to live down here for ten days without coming up. Fifteen seconds? Try seventeen hours. That's how long it will take you to decompress and get back to the surface. You've put up with a week of training already. It's August 9, 2004. Tonight, you sleep with the fishes. Oh, we forgot to tell you one thing: it's hurricane season.

With you on the aquanaut team are two marine science professors, a graduate student in marine sciences, an undergraduate student in marine sciences and biology, two technicians for Aquarius, and an Aquarius support team up on the surface.

Chris Martens, a professor of marine sciences and coleader of the team, fills you in on why he’s studying the sponges here. “I was shocked by how different the reefs were in just twenty years, ” he says. “All the branching corals were gone — there were brain corals left, but sponges had sort of taken over. Big barrel sponges as tall as four feet. Lots of rope sponges.” Sponges, you learn, are hardy and grow relatively quickly. Coral, on the other hand, grows more slowly, and it can't tolerate big temperature shifts and big spikes in nutrients such as nitrogen.

You've come to Aquarius with the rest of the aquanauts to try and get a handle on what these sponges are up to. What role do they play in the nitrogen cycle on the reef? Are they taking nitrogen from their food and from ocean water and converting it into forms of nitrogen that are putting corals out of business? Or are the sponges helping the reef?

Take a look at Marten’s mission journal to see what it’s like to live under the sea.

Mission Journal: Chris Martens

Got up early after a good night's sleep — we always sleep well after a diving day. Had my Kix with milk, then it was off to do our first full experiment with living sponges.

Meredith and I suit up and head out.

Before the day is done, we've conducted four sponge surveys. We head in at 7:30 p.m. On the way back we have some extra time for a little fun in the darkening water column. I flash around our new halogen high-intensity beam lights. The fish go bonkers.

At Aquarius we peer under the main lock at beautiful, bright-orange corals which have begun their nighttime feeding. Their tentacles flow with the water movement — a continuous dance that brings them into contact with tiny food particles that they capture with a graceful withdrawal of each tentacle. Time to go in and get a shower and some chow.

Storms are brewing in the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. When Hurricane Charley looms closer to the Florida Keys, the topside support team decides they want you out of there. Will the aquanauts stay below and try to survive the approaching twenty-foot waves or be forced to abort the mission?

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