| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Roy Caldwell Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Page 4 of 8
Before we move into another feature of this animal, I want to talk about where you go to study the animal. As we're speaking in late June of 2001, you're about to go to the Aquarius. Tell us what that is and how it empowers you to continue your studies of the stomatopod.
The Aquarius is an underwater habitat. She is anchored at sixty feet underneath the ocean on Conch Reef off of Key Largo, Florida. Right now, she's the only operational underwater habitat in the world where scientists can go and do research.
She can house six people, two technicians and four scientists, and is about fifty feet long and about nine feet in diameter. We live in there for about two weeks. There is a hole in the bottom, and any time you feel you want to go outside, you basically can swim out on scuba and do your work. The advantage of this habitat is that because it is pressurized, you are living at the same pressure that the water is at sixty feet. That means that we are totally saturated with nitrogen at that depth and we can basically stay out indefinitely. If you're diving on scuba from the surface, to go to a depth of sixty feet, you can only stay down for about fifty minutes before you would have to decompress on the way back to the surface.
Because if you rise too suddenly after you've accumulated all this nitrogen, you have what is called the bends.
That's right. So literally, when you're in the Aquarius, if you had to come to the surface without decompression you would probably be dead in a matter of minutes. It's very much like a space capsule. As long as you stay down there, everything is fine. You just don't go up. But what it allows us to do is to have much more bottom time to work with the animals to conduct our experiments at what's called storage depth, at the depth of the habitat. I can literally stay out all day and all night if I want to. If I want to go to 120 feet, I can go down for a couple of hours, whereas if I was on scuba I could only go down for a few minutes. So it gives us a lot of time to plan and conduct experiments that we just absolutely couldn't do if we were working from the surface.
You were explaining earlier that, for example, when you're just doing scuba, it's not as if you go out and interview your creature. He's in a burrow, and you were explaining that it can be very time consuming, finding him and so on.
Yes. One of the things we were working on -- I've done two previous missions on Aquarius -- and last time, there's this species there that it turns out is monogamous, the male and female live together in the burrow. Well, I never could really prove that, because I never could get them out of the burrow. I was able to lie on the bottom for probably six hours, literally digging with fingers a hole about two meters in diameter until I finally got the whole burrow exposed, and could prove that they were both in there. At the surface I never could have done it.
So you're empowered to truly embrace the ecology of this creature that you're studying.
Yes. You're living there in its world. We do a lot of work on vision and light, and it puts us into that environment so we can measure the light. We actually see what these animals are seeing. It's a very different experience than catching them and bringing them into the lab and then trying to recreate or simulate that environment.
How long do you go down for in Aquarius?
A typical mission is ten days.
Is it claustrophobic? Or are you so focused on your work that the time just passes?
It passes quickly, but I don't think anyone can stay that focused for ten days nonstop. But the big advantage is, every once in a while, if you just want to go outside, you can go outside. Go for a swim, look at some animals and sort of get away from these five other folks.
What has been the most difficult part of being on an Aquarius mission for you?
Occasionally, personal dynamics can be difficult, but I think it's actually just the general wear and tear on the body and the brain. You always have an agenda which is ten times longer than you could possibly accomplish. You're pushing. From day one you are aware that you've got nine days left. Eight days. Seven days. One. You're done. So, there is a lot of pressure. And the physical environment is demanding as well. That nitrogen that's stored in your body takes a toll. You're cold. You get tired. And you've got those other people around, so tempers get a little short. It's a physical and mental demand.
And it's a slow process of returning to the surface, right?
Yes. It takes 23 hours. Basically what they do is -- the Aquarius stays put, she's attached at the bottom -- they just adjust the air pressure inside and gradually decrease the pressure until eventually it gets back to the surface [pressure]. Then we go into an airlock, it repressurizes, we go out of the airlock and swim like the devil for the surface. And we come back to one atmosphere [of pressure].
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