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- NARRATOR: This is an artificial reef on the
floor of the Gulf of Mexico.
Here, the ocean will turn this rusty metal
into a booming ecosystem.
An empty sea bottom transformed into a dense
underwater jungle of life.
[upbeat music, splashing water]
A few miles off the Texas Gulf Coast, a research expedition
is about to begin.
- You have more shots of me putting my booties on
than anything else, I think.
[Brooke laughs]
- NARRATOR: Brooke Shipley- Lozano is Chief Scientist
of the Artificial Reef program for the Texas Parks
and Wildlife Department.
Chris Ledford is the diving safety officer.
They're part of a team spending the next four days on board
the M/V Fling...
Pursuing their life's mission
and chasing their life's passion.
[dramatic music]
[splash]
- MAN: Alright, have fun.
[splash]
[breathing underwater]
[music, bubbles]
- NARRATOR: The Gulf of Mexico has very few naturally
occurring reefs.
[music, bubbles]
So, artificial ones like oil platforms, reef balls,
and decommissioned ships...
give barnacles, coral, and other invertebrate sea-life
the hard surfaces they need to survive.
[music, bubbles]
Energy then flows up the food chain,
providing habitat and sustenance for snapper, grouper,
and countless other species.
Every so often, the underwater inhabitants here get visitors
from up top.
Marine biologists like Brooke and Chris, who have come to
count fish, collect data, and evaluate the overall health
of their man-made ecosystem.
- BROOKE: The monitoring program is essential to the
entire artificial reef program because if we don't
monitor the restructures, then how will we know whether
the fish are there.
Whether it's a good structure.
- NARRATOR: Both Brooke and Chris help manage an artificial
reef program that covers 4,000 acres across nearly 70 sites.
- CHRIS: I was introduced to scuba by my dad, who was
a diver in the military.
It's very much a part of who I am.
I love just playing around down there, which is kind of hard
to do when I'm on a work dive, but we always make some time
for that.
- BROOKE: One ten.
One ten for forty.
Yea, that was a good dive.
Other than Kevin!
[laughter]
- CHRIS: Do you want to see the jellyfish shots?
- BROOKE: Yea, I do.
Cause it was a really cool jellyfish.
Ooh, that's a great shot.
It's got the four half-circles in the top.
I think that's the Aurelia.
- MAN: Did you get a picture of that shark?
- CHRIS: Ah, maybe.
[dramatic music]
- Living out at sea is difficult sometimes.
It is a lot of fun.
You know, my job is scuba diving.
I get to come out.
I get to see great fish.
I get to go home and take these pictures to my parents
and my family and go, "Look what I did this week."
[chopping]
- MAN: Barney, what's for dinner?
- I'm going to have hog jowls, creamed corn.
- MAN: Possum grits.
- BARNEY: Possum grits.
[music]
- BROOKE: I have been on work ships where I have been gone
for three to four weeks at a time.
It's a wonderful thing, but it's also hard.
You wake up at five in the morning.
You don't go to bed until 10 or 11 at night.
But it is also so amazing...
because every day you wake up
and you're standing in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.
All you hear is the water sloshing around against
the side of the boat.
I mean, I sleep better on a boat than I sleep at home.
It's crazy.
What I'm working on is the database that contains all of
the data that we have collected from 1993 through 2011.
One of the things that I'm hoping to do eventually is be
able to take all of that and run a spatial implication model
using fuzzy logic, which is what my Ph.D. was,
to then determine if we're putting reefs too closely
together.
When you're a kid and people ask you what you want to do with
your life, I wanted to be a ballerina or a veterinarian
or a scuba diver.
And, as it turns out, in the weird way that life works...
[splash]
I actually have a career where scuba diving is a
large portion of it.
So, it's uncanny to me that at five or six or whatever
age I was then, I actually knew what I was going to be now.
[film projector begins]
- CHRIS: I was probably primarily influenced with diving
through two sources.
My dad as a scuba diver.
[film clip, music]
But also a big deal was the old Jacques Cousteau reruns.
I always knew from the get-go that that was what
I wanted to do.
I used to actually get dressed up in my favorite scuba diving
outfit, which was probably my pajamas and a pair of socks that
were loosely pulled up around my feet so they flapped around
like flippers.
And I'd slide around on my belly, pretending I was diving
and being Jacques Cousteau's dive buddy.
So it pretty much started from that point and went downhill
from there pretty much.
[music from film]
- BROOKE: When I'm at sea, and once I'm in the water,
it is just, it is the most serene and perfect place
that you can be.
[soothing music]
You're there, and you're weightless in this amazing
blue world where things swim within inches of your face,
and, it's just- it's just perfection.
I probably feel closer to, you know, the-the God
and all the spiritual aspects when I'm at sea in the water
than I do even in a church.
It's just you and God's creations and perfection.
[dramatic music]