Coming up, the Blue World team goes night diving in the open ocean…and gets more than
they bargained for!
Welcome to Jonathan Bird’s Blue World!
The Big Island of Hawaii.
It’s an ocean lovers paradise, with clear, warm water, lush tropical vegetation, and
plenty of seashore activities.
And of course, the underwater environment is even better!
But not all the great diving is on the reef, or during the day!
After the sun goes down, divers go looking for creatures of the abyss!
The waters around Hawaii are thousands of feet deep.
During the day, plankton sink down to avoid predators.
But at night they rise to the surface to feed.
Divers go way offshore and jump into the inky darkness to find these aliens of the abyss.
It’s called Blackwater diving.
We have sent Cameraman Zach and Annalise to Hawaii to check out this exciting activity.
We’re here in wonderful Kona, Hawaii.
Normally Jonathan would be here with us but he said something about being chained to his
desk but we are out here without him and we’re going diving!
And today we are going to go meet up with a friends who is going to show us some blackwater
critters.
Chained to a desk?
Yeah that’s just what we told them!
We’re down in Florida doing our own blackwater dive!
Here we go!
So, while Zach and Annalise are exploring the waters off Kona in the middle of the Pacific,
we will be almost 5,000 miles away in the Atlantic just off the coast of West Palm Beach
in Florida.
We’re diving with Bill Walker’s Dive Adventures on his boat The Wetter The Better.
But we have a while until the sun goes down.
Meanwhile, back in Hawaii Zach and I are diving with Kona Honu Divers on the Honu Lele!
But first we have to wait for the sun to go down.
As night falls, the boat makes its way into the harbor and is ready for passengers.
We load all of our gear on the boat and begin setting up gear before leaving the dock and
heading out into the darkness.
In Florida it started to rain, but like the boat says, the wetter the better!
Soon we are ready to depart and divemaster Autumn Sherman unties the boat.
Then Zach-of-all-trades and I get a dive briefing from John Philipes.
He explains that we are going to be floating along with the current in the open ocean.
The crew lowers a bright array of lights that hangs from a buoy.
They don’t hang it from the boat because the wind blows the boat.
The buoy goes with the current at the same speed as the divers.
But that’s not how they do it in Hawaii.
Dive guide Jeff , who actually wrote the book on black water diving, gives us our dive briefing.
We’re doing our blackwater dive a little differently.
We’ll all be individually tethered to the boat and stick together as a group, so that
way nobody gets lost or floats away.
Jeff still places a safety light in the water so that we’ll all still be able to orient
ourselves around it.
Now its time to gear up.
And, separated by almost 5,000 miles, we all hit the water in search of the coolest critter!
We all descend down our lines and get accustomed to the darkness at depth of about 65 feet.
The current is pretty strong down here and I’m trying not to think about the almost
7,000 feet of water below me.
I’m kind of glad that I’m tethered in to the boat.
Floating in the open ocean, our only reference is the bright lights hanging down from the
buoy.
Up above, the boat captain follows the buoy.
When we float away from the buoy it gets really dark.
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We start to see some really cool stuff!
A Pteropod swims by!
You can see it’s little fins working hard to propel it through the water.
These are called Sea Butterflies because as they swim their fins emulate the flapping
wings of a butterfly.
Looks like this guy has caught himself a nice dinner out in the ocean.
We find an animal called a comb jelly, that is actually not a jellyfish but something
called a ctenophore.
Ctenophores are similar to jellyfish except that they don’t sting.
A ribbon-shaped ctenophore called a Venus Girdle floats by in the current.
Comb jellies are everywhere!
There’s even a comb jelly who caught himself a salp.
Apparently everyone is out looking for dinner tonight.
Speaking of salps, they also seem to be abundant!
This one has a little amphipod hitching a ride.
Zach and I are also seeing a lot of salps.
Salps are planktonic tunicates, which are a kind of simple animal with two siphons.
They pump water through their body to move and to feed.
They remind me of a jet engine with no airplane attached.
Some salps grow in colonies that are linked together like a chain.
These chained salps are harmless to people but they are deadly to the small plankton
they devour.
We also find lots of cool little jellies.
They might look adorable, but some of them pack quite a sting.
Hey, we also see one of those.
This jellyfish is in the genus Merga, and it has a larval amphipod hiding inside it.
Dive guide Jeff points out the coolest thing yet.
This is a Apolemia, also known as a net-casting siphonophore.
These are some of the longest animals in the world, sometimes reaching up to 30 meters
long.
Siphonophores might look like chain salps but they are hydroids, which are related to
jellies.
So they can sting.
Speaking of siphonophores, we are finding lots of them.
Talk about a plankton hunting sea monster!
This siphonophore has a defense mechanism, when it senses my camera.
Some of the animals found in this environment are in their larval phase, like this anemone
larva.
When it matures, it will settle down on a reef and become a familiar looking anemone.
Animals that mature to live on reefs use this planktonic larval phase in order to travel
great distances to populate new reefs.
We’ve just found something super rare!
Pelagic seahorses almost never appear on black water dives.
Here this little fish decides to hang out with Jeff.
Pelagic seahorses spend their entire lives drifting in the currents of the ocean.
They spend their days at depth for shelter, but at night come up nearer to the surface
to feed.
Ironically, this fish that adapted attributes for life on a reef will never actually spend
any time camouflaged in the coral.
She seems to want to take a break from the ocean current and perches on Jeff’s fingers.
Back in Florida, we find a swimming brain!
Well, it looks like a brain.
This animal is called a larvacean.
It’s actually related to a salp—a tiny pelagic tunicate that swims with a flapping
tail like a tadpole.
It generates an enormous bubble-like net called a house to catch prey.
This house, made of protein and cellulose, gets discarded regularly when it gets clogged
up.
We also see juvenile fish.
This larval Dragonfish looks to me like Randall from Monsters, Inc.
Which is no surprise because it’s going to look like this when it’s mature.
We’re seeing a bunch of juvenile fish as well.
Only fish with a very long juvenile stage can reach Hawaii from other islands.
Here is an Indego Dartfish.
There’s also a juvenile Moorish Idol.
This is a fish that we commonly see as adults on the Hawaii reef.
We see a juvenile Squirrel fish as it floats by.
Jeff points out his favorite fish, a juvenile Longjaw Flounder.
We’re interrupted by something unexpected-- an Oceanic White Tip shark comes out of the
darkness and appears to be curious about us.
He investigates our safety light and hangs around for a little bit.
Most people see their first shark on a reef dive with bait, but I’m really lucky to
see my first on a black water dive like this.
We didn’t find any sharks, but we did find what is considered to be the holy grail of
Florida blackwater diving: the Scalloped Ribbonfish.
This is a pelagic deep water species, that lives its entire life in the deep, open ocean.
It’s shiny like a mirror and makes filming really difficult because it reflects my lights
right back into the lens.
This is an adaptation for camouflage in open water.
Biologists suggest that the long thin, filament-shaped fins are an adaptation for mimicry--making
this fish resemble a jelly--deterring predators.
This is considered such a great find because they are so rarely seen.
We really got lucky on our first blackwater dive.
Beginners luck.
We stay with the ribbonfish for a long time trying to get some shots without the mirror
effect.
Finally, it’s time to head back to the boat.
The shark seems to have moved on and we’re getting ready to head back to the boat, but
not before a surprise visit from a Mobula Ray!
This is the first time dive guide Jeff has seen one of these on a black water dive.
Okay that was the coolest dive ever.
I saw my first shark guys, and seahorses all over the place.
Blackwater diving can be a little spooky, but it’s such a unique diving experience,
and a chance to see things that we would never see during the day, or diving on a reef.
With only one dive in the Pacific and one dive in the Atlantic, we saw an amazing amount
of stuff—but we barely scratched the surface of what’s out there!
Who knows what we might find on our next blackwater dive in the blue world!
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