Today, Jonathan visits the National Aquarium in Baltimore to learn about the job of a Dive
Safety Officer.
Welcome to Jonathan Bird’s Blue World!
It’s November, and Cameraman Bill and I are on a road trip, driving from New England
down to Baltimore Maryland.
Cameraman Bill’s driving!
Baltimore might not be the first place you would expect an episode of Blue World, but
we’re here to meet an old friend at the National Aquarium in the heart of the waterfront
district.
We pull up bright and early and head over to the entrance.
The waterfall is an impressive first sight inside the foyer, with its pool filled with
salmon.
The glass walls of this impressive facility afford a gorgeous view of the city and harbor.
The National Aquarium has a number of large marine exhibits, like the Blacktip Reef Exhibit,
looking like a coral lagoon underneath the skeleton of a finback whale.
Shark Alley contains several species of sharks and sawfish!
And there is a fantastic touch tank area where guests can touch skates, horseshow crabs and
even jellyfish.
Public relations manager Lauren Hartman is taking me down to the diving area to find
Holly.
Holly!
So good to see you!
Welcome to the National Aquarium!
Thank you.
You are just in time for our dive briefing.
Oh awesome, let’s go.
Holly and I have been friends for more than 20 years, and she is the Dive Safety Officer
here at the National Aquarium.
So a lot of these are just trending ones.
Zeke the Zebra shark is still in Q pool, okay.
He’s off exhibit for time out.
Lady ray…
Today, Holly is giving the morning dive briefing to the volunteer divers who will be cleaning
the exhibits and feeding the fish.
…Her tail is healing actually really nicely, we got a look at it the other day, okay?
The Crooked jaw hogfish…
As the DSO (Dive Safety Officer) for the aquarium, Holly has a lot of responsibility.
So Holly, tell me about your job.
What does a DSO do at an aquarium?
Okay, so the general theme is: manage dive safety operations for all--whether it’s
on-site like aquarium exhibit diving, or off-site which we consider field diving.
So, it’s safety, equipment, and training.
It’s putting on the manager hat.
Here we interface with the husbandry team, as far as how they work with our volunteer
divers, because the volunteer divers help feed and clean the exhibit.
Probably our biggest customer is husbandry but we work with media relations folks.
We’ll work with philanthropy for VIP dives.
We have a guest immersion program that we share with an outside dive shop, which works
really well for us here.
So you’re a manager, you’re a trainer, you’re a dive buddy.
But ultimately, DSO—Dive Safety Officer—how many divers are you managing the safety of
here?
Over 200.
Over 150 volunteer divers, soon to grow next year with additional recruits.
We have probably one of the larger volunteer diver groups in the country for aquariums.
Great, awesome.
Well let’s go diving!
Let’s go!
It’s always a little bit weird, but really exciting, to be putting your gear together
in a hallway.
I’m not out on a boat, I’m in a building!
Cameraman Bill and I will be joining Holly on a dive in the Atlantic Coral Reef exhibit,
as she does her daily inspection.
This exhibit is a ring-shaped tank containing over 1,000 fish.
So where we’re going to enter today, is this platform.
The exhibit is 13 feet deep.
It always to me seems a lot deeper because when you walk it, you have several layers.
Thus spirals down to the Shark Alley Exhibit and then it spirals down to underwater viewing
for Blacktip Reef.
It’s a really cool system, it’s sort of stacked.
We suit up on the dive platform.
Next we drop into the warm 75° water.
Talk about convenient diving!
As I descend, the early morning vacuuming team is just finishing up, pulling their hoses
out of the water.
Holly will lead me and Bill around the exhibit.
The entire inner wall of the exhibit is glass.
The fish can see out just as well as the people can see in.
A Bonnethead shark catches my eye.
This little guy is like a mini-hammerhead.
A bit shy around our lights, but still curious.
On the gravel bottom, a stingray, and flying overhead, a cow-nosed ray.
These animals are fed every day by divers, so they are not shy at all.
A pair of porcupine fish are a type of puffer.
They can inflate to the size of a basketball if threatened, but they rarely need to do
that in here.
Some of the fish are so friendly that they come too close, blocking your view.
This Hogfish wants some camera time, until he is cut off by a Queen Angelfish!
As Holly makes her way around the giant ring-shaped tank, I follow behind, amazed by the size
of it.
With 335,000 gallons, this exhibit has as much water as about 25 swimming pools!
Holly is looking in every crack and hole, because she is trying to find one of the moray
eels which has been hiding for a few days.
The two morays, known as Oscar and Felix are known to vanish for days at a time.
The reef structure in the exhibit, while it’s not living coral, provides the same kind of
habitat for the fish that a living reef would.
And as well, it has interesting features for divers including a great swim-through, which
makes it feel like an underwater playground.
As we near the end of the dive, Felix is nowhere to be found, but the tarpon wants some camera
time.
Soon our inspection is over and we have to leave the best dive in Baltimore—clear and
warm with no current.
Getting to dive here great fun.
And I learned that you can start out as a volunteer, and maybe if you stick with it
long enough, work your way up to DSO.