Doing underwater research is not always what the Hollywood films make out, but the office can be incredible!

Marine biology is the study of underwater animal and plant life from the microscopic plankton to the blue whale. To understand the behaviours that these underwater creatures exhibit, scientists need to spend some time in their environment. Setting up experiments and running them underwater isn’t as simple as setting one up in a lab or out in the woods. Being underwater for any considerable period of time is not what humans are built for. So how do these scientists get their experiments done?

Bring in the scientific divers. Scientific divers, or aquanauts (as some like to refer to them), are divers that do science underwater. It sounds simple enough, but there are a lot of rules and regulations that define this role. The American Academy of Underwater Sciences defines scientific diving specifically as:

“…diving performed solely as a necessary part of a scientific activity by employees whose sole purpose for diving is to perform scientific research tasks.”

Nick Tolimieri {credit}Image credit: NOAA{/credit}

So, if you’re taking equipment down, inspecting any equipment or doing any diving that doesn’t have any science in it, this isn’t considered scientific diving. Scientific diving, according to Nick Tolimieri, a research fishery biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, WA, is “data collection under water.”

There are a group of standard skills, according to Tolimieri, that every scientific diver will need to have. Continue reading →