The ultimate fishbowl

KEY LARGO, Fla. – A nine-day mission that ends Tuesday in the world’s only permanent working undersea laboratory is like living in a fishbowl in more ways than one: Anyone with an Internet connection can watch the researchers wind up their project 60 feet below the surface.

Six “aquanauts” studying changes along a coral reef will work, sleep and eat at Aquarius Reef Base, on the Atlantic Ocean floor about nine miles southeast of the Key Largo in Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. It’s the first time students and others will have had an extensive real-time view of the underwater life surrounding the 21-year-old lab.

Aquarius chief scientist Ellen J. Prager said the aquanauts will conclude the mission with a decompression ascent to the surface.

Live camera feeds won’t continue beyond Tuesday but nearly every other mission lesson or recorded session will continue and be online, said Prager, who is associated with the University of North Carolina’s Institute of Marine Science.

The team, hoping to raise interest in science and the oceans, is delivering their research to students with undersea classroom sessions and to the public through Internet video. During the past week, video feeds from inside and outside Aquarius, and from divers wearing helmets mounted with cameras and audio equipment, were delivered to anyone with an Internet connection.

“It would be ideal if all the students we are going to reach on this mission could actually be here, but the truth is most of them will never get that opportunity,” said Prager.

“So the best we can do is have them connect and be virtually there.”

Researchers will study sponge biology and coral reefs – fertile marine habitats that are threatened around the world by disease, rising ocean temperatures and human factors such as pollution and overfishing.

Aquarius is a yellow, 43-foot-long, 9-foot-diameter tube, roughly the size of a school bus. It lets researchers dive for nine hours a day and return to the habitat without standard scuba diving requirements of surfacing and decompressing.

This was the first time that live classes were conducted from Aquarius Reef Base.

Classes interested in studying what the team accomplished and researched can view archived video and other material at www.oceanslive.org.

Using a system of cables that stretch out from Aquarius, divers also visited sites of past studies to determine if any long-term change has taken place.

On most reefs around the world, the abundance of hard coral has declined and the cover of soft algae has increased, said Steve Gittings, science coordinator with NOAA’s National Marine Sanctuary Program. Algae is a natural part of the ocean ecosystem, but it can respond to human influences such as pollution to create large or unnatural concentrations that can displace corals.

Researchers also want to learn more about two other reef dwellers, sponges and soft corals, because it’s not clear whether their abundance has significantly changed, Gittings said.

Also of interest are the suspected causes of change in reef ecosystems, which may include a mass die-off of a long-spined sea urchin that ate algae, Gittings said.

“We’re seeing dramatic changes literally on reefs around the world with regard to the relationship between all those different components that live on the bottom,” Gittings said.

One of those components is sponges, which pump water through their bodies to filter food particles and produce dissolved nitrogen, a fertilizer.

The Aquarius team is researching any links between changes of reef compositions and organic matter processed by sponges, seeking to discover whether sponges are fertilizing grasses that compete with corals, said researcher Chris Martens of UNC-Chapel Hill.

“Corals have gone through huge changes in terms of being totally dominant in oceans to being lesser,” said Martens. “We’re asking the question, `Do sponges help or hurt in that process?’ “

Aquarius, owned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, operated by the University of North Carolina-Wilmington and used by the Navy and NASA, was built in 1986. It began operating in the U.S. Virgin Islands before being redeployed off Key Largo in 1993.