[Mauritius Bell] So our dive objective, we’re doing collections. Luiz is doing
photos, I’ll do video. Max depth for us: we’re doing a max of 500 today.
We’ll be in the water at 10 so we can do a five hour dive.
Priority is collections.
Let’s do it.
[Luiz Rocha] Cousteau is credited with this great quote. He says that people
protect what they love and you can’t love what you don't know.
The area that we visit, the official name for that particular depth range is mesphotic.
So that’s about 100 to 500 feet. It’s beyond the reach of normal scuba diving.
Deep reefs or mesophotic coral reefs, they’re not viewed as something that needs to be
protected because people don’t know what they are. With Hope for Reefs we want
to raise awareness and we want to show them why they need to be protected.
A lot of the times, because people think that those deeper reefs are safer, they’re
out of reach from human activities, they usually don’t include them in protected
areas, so if they create a marine protected area to protect coral reefs, they usually
stop at the 100 feet depth line.
So the result for that is that there’s a lot more fishing in some places in the
deeper reefs than there is in the shallow reefs.
My name is Luiz Rocha, I’m the curator of ichthyology at the
California Academy of Sciences.
I grew up in a coastal city in Brazil, always snorkelling, always going
to the ocean. Today, one of the main things that are driving me is the desire
that I have to save coral reefs.
So Hope for Reefs is a large initiative, being led by the California Academy of
Sciences. One of the main objectives is to collect and identify like new or undescribed
residents of the reef, in my case fishes. So we find a fish that we haven’t seen
before, we try to take a good picture or collect it and then bring it back to the
lab to basically identify and formally describe it.
So mesophotic diving is to me very exciting because it's the next
level of underwater exploration.
The technical rebreather mixed gas diving is very dangerous, it’s very complex, it
requires a lot more gear than the standard scuba diving gear.
We usually descend through the normal coral reef and we can kind of see that
change into this deeper, more mysterious, colder, darker mesophotic reef.
The excitement of being at 400, 500 feet and seeing a fish that nobody has seen
before, it’s just, beyond words to me, I love it.
[Indistinct voices] Oh wow wow wow!
[Bart Shepphard] Actually, this was the first fish I saw when we dropped down to
the bottom. We saw a lot of these down there, and it's the first time they’ve been
recorded from here, so it’s very cool.
[Luiz Rocha] So collecting these species very often contributes to a
policy change in meaningful ways.
So when we go to a place, more often than not, we find species that we knew it was
there, but it doesn’t have a name yet, and those are the known unknowns. And then
the most exciting one is the one that we’ve never seen before, or we see for
the first time, it’s the unknown unknown. Those, whenever we find them
it’s like pure joy and excitement.
[Off screen voice] What did you get?
[Tyler Phelps] Some sort of pipefish.
[Luiz Rocha] Very cold, but very good. Great dive.
We found one, we found one on this trip. We found an unknown unknown, so we took
really nice photos, we collected one specimen.
So the next steps here, we’ll take those back to the lab, we’ll study their
morphology, we’ll describe them.
Some of the things that our data can be used for, for example would be to try to
find better spots to create marine protected areas. Not all marine protected
areas are equal. Some are created in places that don't really need protection.
So one of the things that our data can really be well used for is to try to look
at the places that better need protection right now.
It’s one of the saddest things about all this is that when I get to a place
where nobody has dove before and I see a species that nobody has seen before and
it’s super super exciting but invariably 100 percent of the time I’ll see human
trash, I’ll see tumble down corals, I’ll see beached corals, so
we always see traces of human impacts.
We’ve been to places where the reefs were dying right in front of our eyes.
One of the challenges we face is we try to do this fast enough
before reefs actually die.