In this episode we talk to Captain Nate Schwarck about the science of scuba diving. We discuss what is scientific diving, the history of diving, and what happens to the body as people dive down to dark depths.
While Jordan shares his love of diving and his experiences, Dr. Regina shares her horrible fear of ocean creatures. We continue the discussion to sea star wasting disease, ROVs, gastropod sex and Hollywood’s depiction of scuba life.
Please enjoy the images of underwater creatures taken by WH Longley in 1910 and images of abalone referenced in the last portion of our show (click on the “Scuba Science Images” on the left side of the podbean site).
Photograph by Charles Martin & W.H. Longley
Click Here for Transcript
>> Here we go.
[? Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ?]
? Neutron, proton, mass defect, lyrical oxidation, yo irrelevant
? Mass spectrograph, pure electron volt, atomic energy erupting
? As I get all open on betatron, gamma rays thermo cracking
? Cyclotron and any and every mic
? You’re on trans iridium, if you’re always uranium
? Molecules, spontaneous combustion, pow
? Law of de-fi-nite pro-por-tion, gain-ing weight
? I’m every element around. ?]
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Welcome to Spark Science where we explore stories of human curiosity. I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff, I teach physics and astronomy at Western Washington University and I’m here with my cohost, Jordan Baker.
Jordan Baker: I’m Jordan Baker. I do not do anything at Western Washington University. I have no degrees.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Have you ever been on campus even?
Jordan Baker: Oh, yeah. Remember in band when we had the San Juan Music Educators Association competition?
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Nice aside there. How’s the Upfront improving going?
Jordan Baker: Upfront is going well.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Good. How’s the musical going? I know I asked you that last time.
Jordan Baker: I actually went and saw it and it was amazing.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: And it’s different every night.
Jordan Baker: Yeah, to see these people like making up songs. Musicals are rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed. These people are just making it up on the spot. It was incredible.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: And you haven’t gone up there yet for the part in the musical?
Jordan Baker: No. It’s still during practices and stuff.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Do people use like part of their life, like things they like to do kind of in improv ever?
Jordan Baker: I mean, it’s a lot easier than making something up is using your life experiences and some of my like horrible life experiences I’ve applied in a scene and it got huge laughs because my life is sometimes super ridiculous.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. So do you ever use your scuba diving stories in your improv?
Jordan Baker: I actually, not scuba diving stories, but I’ll like there’s an incident with scuba diving and I’m like, “Get your BCD” and nobody knows what a BCD is so I have to explain it.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Well, Jordan, you’re in luck because today we have Captain Nate Schwarck and he’s a diving safety officer at Shannon Point Marine Center and we want to welcome him and so . . .
Captain Schwarck: Thank you.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: How’s it going?
Captain Schwarck: Great.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: You know what that means, what Jordan just said, because I don’t.
Captain Schwarck: You bet. A BCD: a buoyancy compensator device.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Like a balloon? [Laughing.]
Captain Schwarck: Kind of. Once you get down to the bottom, you’re trying to find your neutral buoyancy so you add air from your tank to try and get you to float.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: I should have you come to my physics class when we’re talking about buoyancy.
Captain Schwarck: Can I float?
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Well, you can just like talk and like act it out. In musical form.
Captain Schwarck: Oh, OK.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Well, Captain Nate, thank you so much for coming. Can I call you Nate?
Captain Schwarck: Sure.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK. Can you tell us something about your position at Shannon Point and then after that maybe tell us your life story, your whole life story this whole show?
Captain Schwarck: Easy, piece of cake.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Like 5 minutes.
Captain Schwarck: So, I work with a really good team of people at Shannon Point Marine Center and Shannon Point is a facility at Western, so we support the scientists on main campus and we have some resident scientists at the marine lab. So we are located in Anacortes, Washington, right next to the ferry terminal if you’ve ever taken the ferry in Anacortes, you’ve been right next to our property.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: I have.
Captain Schwarck: It’s a beautiful piece, about 80 acres, waterfront. There is no dock because Shannon Point is high energy, so the university actually owns slips in the marina and that’s where the research vessels are kept in Skyline Marina.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Isn’t that expensive to own slips in the marina?
Captain Schwarck: Well, if you purchased them a long time ago, it’s a lot better than it would be now.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: So if I go back in time and buy them? Got it.
Captain Schwarck: I wear three hats.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh, none today. This is radio, so . . .
Captain Schwarck: My position is kind of split three ways is what I mean by that. I am the lead research vessel captain for the university vessels and I share the operational duties of those vessels with two other wonderful individuals who actually, one of them was in Bellingham Bay today. He picked up some students. They did a really neat project looking at water quality in Bellingham Bay.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: That’s awesome.
Captain Schwarck: Some collaborations taking place with Lummi, or the Northwest Indian College.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: They are doing a lot of work.
Captain Schwarck: You may have seen. They are! You may have seen Research Vessel Magister at Fairhaven. Sometimes we come to that dock.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: How big is that dock?
Captain Schwarck: It’s all of 38 feet, so whoa! [Laughing.]
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK, OK.
Captain Schwarck: So we’re not ocean-going, but what we are is fast, so we can head, you know, I can beat you to Anacortes. We race, you drive, I am operating the vessel and I’ll win.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Did you take the boat here today?
Captain Schwarck: No.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Because that would have been a great story. No wonder you were early, you took the boat!
Captain Schwarck: That’s one of my hats is maintaining those vessels, operating those vessels, keeping them mission-ready.
The second hat, and the one that people like to talk about the most it seems, is diving safety officer. I teach and train faculty, staff, students in scientific diving. I am the diving safety officer for the entire university so anybody on campus that wants to use science as a tool to do their research, I help them get there and be able to turn them from a recreational diver who’s thinking about “OK, I’m under water, what do I need to do to stay alive,” to that being second nature, and “OK, I’m underwater, I’m a scientist and how do I get good data.”
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Wow. That’s terrifying to me.
Captain Schwarck: Well, it’s great. It’s a fun process. I think you’d really enjoy it.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: No, but we’ll talk about that. Jordan would enjoy it. We’ll talk more about my horrible phobias later, but what’s your third hat?
Captain Schwarck: I work as a marine technologist. We have lots of fun, interesting pieces of equipment that sometimes break and I try to keep them running. Some instruments, well we’re mixing electricity and seawater and that doesn’t always work well. You know, instrumentation that’s doing water quality measurements under the water and there’s electricity going down to make this thing work, it’s communicating with the vessel real-time, so we can see what’s going on and then we can actually capture water at different depths and bring it to the surface . . .
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Wow.
Captain Schwarck: And oceanographers love this. It’s fun stuff. So maintaining those types of instruments, instruments at the lab, vessels, that’s kind of the third hat that I wear.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: So how did you get into diving to begin with? Have you always loved it? Like you were three years old and loved diving?
Captain Schwarck: Actually, September will be my 30th anniversary as a diver. I started diving when I was 12-ish years old.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: So I wasn’t being ridiculous! [Laughing.]
Captain Schwarck: It has pretty much defined my life and my thought process for 30 years. I love it. I think about it a lot. I find myself still exciting to learn new things and learn different aspects of diving, so yeah, I really do enjoy it.
Jordan Baker: That’s awesome.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: So, my phobia I was alluding to is that I don’t like sea creatures at all. So, I haven’t even snorkeled. I just don’t want them near me. They have the upper hand. They rule the ocean and I don’t want to be in there with them. I like pools, but I don’t want to. I couldn’t even get to those depths. I should ease into it, shouldn’t I?
Captain Schwarck: Well, an area with good visibility helps.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: So try Hawaii first or something?
Captain Schwarck: We can have good visibility here, but not always.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. When’s the best visibility?
Captain Schwarck: Late winter after the storms have slowed down and we’re not getting a ton of river input and then before we get so much light that the plankton blooms. There is a cycle where we can have amazing visibility and it’s gorgeous. The marine life here is spectacular but it’s not always easy to see. Sometimes you get under water and you can only see four or five feet, if you’re lucky.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah, I remember swimming in I believe it was Lake Padden and suddenly things started touching me, like seaweed, and I’m like, “I’m done. No more.”
Captain Schwarck: Being able to see is a big part of getting over phobias.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yes, I think it’s a very evolutionary thing to be afraid of the dark and then in the water where you can drown and dark seems a bit much.
Captain Schwarck: The ultimate.
Jordan Baker: I dive with my wife a lot, every time we go on vacation, and she has a super big phobia about diving around here just because of the visibility, everywhere else we go is usually 80 foot of visibility and four to five feet is not necessarily . . .
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: 80 foot – wow!
Jordan Baker: … you can’t really swim away from something if it just “boom,” all of a sudden it’s in your face.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Sure.
So, what exactly is scientific diving? Is it just what you just explained before where you’re just diving a taking data as well?
Captain Schwarck: Yeah. And well, it depends. If you’re thinking about what does the federal government define as scientific diving versus what the general population defines as diving.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK. What’s the difference?
Captain Schwarck: If you’re employed to do that work, or employed to do diving or science under water, then the federal government gets really excited about that because there’s an employee and employer relationship, and so that changes the activity from, say, recreational diving, where you’re just out having fun.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK. So only if you’re employed then you might be doing scientific diving? But you could do other kinds of diving when you’re employed too. There are like treasure hunters.
Captain Schwarck: Archaeology would be . . . [group laughing.]
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: I like how you translate “treasure hunter” to “archaeology.” Yes.
Captain Schwarck: So, legitimate treasure hunting, yeah, that’s not really scientific diving. But certainty archaeology is. And some of the earliest scientific divers were in fact doing really cool archaeology.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. Treasures in a sense, for the museum!
Captain Schwarck: Right.
[? Interpol’s “Stella is a Diver” ? ]
? She went down, down, down there into the sea
? Yeah, she went down, down, down there
? Down there for me, right on
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Spark Science is an all-volunteer run show and if you’d like to help out, go to KMRE.org and click on the button “donate.” I’m Regina Barber DeGraff and today we’re talking about scientific diving with Captain Nate Schwarck.
[? Interpol’s “Stella is a Diver” ? ]
? So good, oh yeah, right on
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Well, I just finished the book Cryptonomicon, which was long. It’s like the longest book ever. Have you ever read it, Nate?
Captain Schwarck: No, but I feel like I should have though.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: There’s tons of diving in it. They actually go through the process of what happens to your body and how this guy, he’s diving from a very, very deep place and he actually comes up in these water pockets that are still very deep. So he does it slowly so it doesn’t affect his body too much. Can you explain that more to me? I think Jordan probably knows all of this stuff, but like, how far can you go, why do people’s eye blood vessels pop?
Captain Schwarck: Well, I try not to focus on those types of things.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right! But my phobias! That’s why I want the answers.
Jordan Baker: You’re just going to encourage her.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: I’m still not going to go.
Jordan Baker: I feel like you’re being influenced too much by popular media.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: My uncle, he was scuba diving, his blood vessels popped.
Captain Schwarck: Recreational diving, scientific diving, most diving takes place from the surface to 120 feet, so we’re not talking about that deep.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: 120 seems a bit.
Captain Schwarck: Well, consider the ocean!
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: That’s true!
Captain Schwarck: That’s nothing compared to what’s out there in the ocean. We’re looking at three atmospheres on average.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK
Captain Schwarck: Every 33 feet under water is equivalent to one atmosphere of pressure.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
Captain Schwarck: So right now, in this room, we are under one atmosphere of pressure and that’s what our body is feeling. So you can double that by going to 33 feet and you are actually feeling the effects of two atmospheres. That is kind of where all the cool physics, physiology starts, and you know, we can go on and on about how that affects your body.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah, let’s just go on! Just a little bit. So, what happens, for instance, what has happened to your body, Jordan? How far have you gone?
Jordan Baker: I’ve gone to 90ish feet.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: So still, what Nate was saying, in the recreational range.
Jordan Baker: Yeah.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: So tell me physically how you felt, and then Nate maybe can talk a little bit about the science of that.
Jordan Baker: I don’t know. For me, it’s like second nature almost. I don’t really remember a lot of my training really, as in fear or anything, or how my body felt. It’s honestly just second nature.
Captain Schwarck: Zen!
Jordan Baker: Once you get down there, you just want to focus on your breathing and just trying to move as slow as possible, conserve your air, and take in as much stuff as you can. That’s basically my goal once I get down neither.
Captain Schwarck: Sure. One thing that is talked about quite a bit is nitrogen narcosis.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
Captain Schwarck: At 90 feet, you know, you are probably starting to feel a bit “narced” which is how we term.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
Captain Schwarck: And this has been described as being a little bit drunk, a little big euphoric. I notice that when I’m at that depth, I’m incapable of taking in too much at once. So, I have a gauge, a set of gauges, a console of gauges, and one of the gauges is my depth gauge, and one the gauges is my air pressure. And so I am at, you know, 90 feet, and I need to check my air, so I’ll pull the gauge up and I’ll look at my air pressure and “oh good, I’m great.”
And then I’m like, “Oh, I really need to check my depth.” And so I’ll pull up my gauge and “oh, that’s good.” But I’m incapable of pulling that console up and looking at both at the same time. That seems to be how it manifests itself in me. I don’t feel that euphoric, so to speak. I just notice that I’m not quite firing on all cylinders at depth.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
Captain Schwarck: There are ways to overcome that.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK, so how?
Captain Schwarck: One of the ways we do that is using enriched air nitrox, so nitrogen necrosis is the result of having a high partial pressure of nitrogen in your bloodstreams. Right now we’re breathing, you know, 70-some percent nitrogen and 21 percent oxygen.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK, I didn’t know that percentages exactly, so thank you.
Captain Schwarck: And under pressure, the partial pressure of nitrogen is much greater than what’s in your bloodstream, so nitrogen begins to enter your bloodstream and that physiologically is causing narcosis.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: And the symptoms of narcosis are . . .
Captain Schwarck: Euphoria and being a little bit drunk.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Got it.
Captain Schwarck: The deeper you go, the worse it gets.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Got it.
Captain Schwarck: Until you get too deep and then you’ll probably pass out.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
Captain Schwarck: So, one of the ways they combat that is reduce the amount of nitrogen in your breathing mix.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
Captain Schwarck: So you’ve probably heard of enriched air nitrox, or nitrox divers. These are divers who have taken additional training on how to use this enriched gas, so you reduce the nitrogen, increase the oxygen, hopefully reducing the effects of narcosis.
Jordan Baker: Does that allow you to stay down at the bottom longer?
Captain Schwarck: It does . . .
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: You seem hesitant. Why?
Captain Schwarck: So then you’re pushing your limits even more. The way we do it at the university is I like to not use it to stay longer, I like to use it to be safer.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. To be more sane and not drunk.
Captain Schwarck: Right.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: So, the bends. Is that the same thing? Is that what people call the bends? What are the bends?
Captain Schwarck: Sure.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: I hear these words and I want to know what they are.
Captain Schwarck: You’ve got this nitrogen in your bloodstream again. And the bends starts to really become a problem as you come up.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK
Captain Schwarck: So all of this nitrogen is dissolved into your bloodstream and as you come up, it wants to come out of solution. It will form little bubbles in your capillaries, in your veins, in your arteries . . .
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Wow, that sounds dangerous.
Captain Schwarck: And a lot of these get washed out by your lungs. So if you trace the path of blood through your body, returning blood from the capillaries is going to the lungs, and the lungs will wash out some of those nitrogen bubbles, but every once in a while, especially if you’re not following the diving tables, or your computer, a bubble will lodge itself somewhere and start to give you troubles, so paralysis, if you have a limb that’s starting to go to sleep, so that blood flow is restricted, that means maybe there’s a bubble there and maybe you’re going to have trouble.
And that’s not as bad as if you get one of these bubbles in your brain, because then you can end up with a stroke or much worse symptoms.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: And that’s why in this book, the person was trying to breathe at different depths so he could get used . . .
Captain Schwarck: Yes, and allow some of that nitrogen to kind of slowly come to the pressure of the current depth. So if you take your time and allow the bloodstream to go back to what the ambient is, wherever you’re at currently, then you go up a little bit more and then allow it to diffuse out again.
They also use different gases, so instead of just high mixes of oxygen, you can throw in helium. So if you’ve ever seen fun movies where the divers are going talking like they just sucked on a helium balloon, it’s because they’re adding helium to that mix to reduce the amount of nitrogen in there.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK. This is super interesting! We’re going to take a break and then when we come back we’re going to talk about the actual science that’s being conducted with the scientific diving.
Captain Schwarck: Alright.
[? Interpol’s “Stella is a Diver” ?]
“This one’s called Stella Was a Diver and She Was Always Down”
? When she walks down the street
Jordan Baker: If you’re just joining us, this is Spark Science. I am Jordan Baker.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: I’m Regina Barber DeGraff and today we to talking about scientific diving with Captain Nate Schwarck.
[? Interpol’s “Stella is a Diver” ?]
? To hide the people watching her
? But once she fell through the street
? Down a manhole in that bad way
? The underground drip
? Was just like her scuba days
Jordan Baker: So, how does somebody like me, with just my initial open water diver certification start to get into scientific diving? What other classes would I have to take?
Captain Schwarck: Usually, it’s best if you have had recreational training through Rescue Diver. Traditionally, you start out diving and it’s called open water, or the entry-level course, and then there’s the advanced course, where you learn some different techniques, maybe do a night dive or a deep dive.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: A night dive seems terrifying.
Captain Schwarck: It’s awesome! [Laughing.]
And then kind of go into rescue skills and lot of this is self-rescue. So, you’re starting to think more about keeping yourself out of trouble than really trying to rescue somebody else. It’s basically self-rescue techniques, so how do I keep myself from becoming the next statistic is one of the key things about that course.
Once you’ve kind of reached that level as a recreational diver, it’s easy to transition into becoming a scientific diver and learn about what is needed to do that.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Is there a need for more scientific divers to take data?
Captain Schwarck: Sure! Always! A lot of it depends on what cool projects are taking place at the time. It will wax and wane. What Western, we have some diving scientists who do cool research.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: We’ll get to that in a little bit. I realize that we probably should talk about the history of diving first. Do you want to do that? Let’s talk about the history of scientific diving.
Captain Schwarck: I love the history of scientific diving. It’s a really cool topic. It’s a neat interest to mine. I was going talk about where did scientific diving come back. If we look back, Alexander the Great in 332 BC was lowered into the sea to observe marine life.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Did he do everything? [Laughing.]
Jordan Baker: He was great!
Captain Schwarck: He was great!
Captain Schwarck: But this was a bell-type thing. He got lowered into a breathing bell and a lot of early dives were bell-type, or breath-hold type diving.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: So they would just have an air pocket.
Captain Schwarck: Right, and get lowered down, and as you get lowered down, and as you’re getting lower, the air pocket would get smaller and smaller, less is getting pumped in to the surface to match the pressure. It sounds exciting. I’d like to try that sometime, maybe to moderate depths.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: To that 30 feet we were talking about!
Captain Schwarck: Yes. But the first real recorded scientific dives was made by Henri Milne-Edwards. He was from Sicily and it was around 1844 and he used a commercial diving suit, a new invention. And he went to depth of 25 feet, so he is attributed as the first modern scientific diver.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: And what kind of data was he taking? Or what was he …
Captain Schwarck: Mostly observation.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: OK.
Jordan Baker: Just making sure he didn’t die, basically. It’s a new technology.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Captain Schwarck: Yeah, nobody knew what was down there, really.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: That’s a good point. I mean, nobody knows what’s down there still.
Captain Schwarck: In a lot of places, that is true. So in the early 1900s, there was a lot of hard hat diving commercially. There was a few scientists who used this technology as a tool for their research, not that many, but there was commercial diving that took place.
In the United States, one of the first scientific divers was this guy named W.H. Longley and it was around 1910. He’s best known for the first color underwater photographs in National Geographic. I actually brought that to show you guys.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: I was looking at those pictures. What I want to do for this show, I’ll probably post these pictures for our listeners to look at. But they are amazing! When you say that they were made in like 1910, that’s ridiculous! Our listeners will be looking at this while we’re saying this.
Captain Schwarck: Prior to this, the general population had never seen colors that were underwater, and the beauty of the life underwater. In order to get this, it was huge amounts of flash powder that would explode under water in time with the cameras in order to get proper lighting to do this. So that sounds pretty fun.
It was around this time that universities began using scientific diving. There was University of Miami in the early 1900s conducted scientific diving in a river right next to campus, so they actually had students put on diving helmets and go down in the river, so air was being pumped into the helmet, and they could observe . . .
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: With a hose.
Captain Schwarck: … with a hose, marine life under water. There was a long tradition of education going along with scientific diving. But it wasn’t really until Cousteau and Émile Gagnan developed the Aqua-Lung in 1942 that scientific diving began to really take off.
Jordan Baker: The song from Jethrow Tull.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Wait, what song?
Jordan Baker: “Aqua Lung.”
[Laughing.]
Captain Schwarck: I guess it’s an old song, and we’re the same age, so I should have gotten that reference.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: We’re like four months apart.
[Laughing.]
Captain Schwarck: If you’ve ever seen the Bond movie Thunderball.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: I want to say that I just watched it, but it was like 7 years ago. [Laughing.] There is a lot of diving in that movie.
Captain Schwarck: Yeah. The diving equipment they’re using is very similar, the two-hose regulator, you have these hoses that come around and there are great shots of James Bond cutting them with the knife and then they have to come to the surface.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: And they’re shooting stuff
Captain Schwarck: Oh, yeah, it was wonderful.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: With gun arrow thingies. [Laughing.]
Jordan Baker: Gun-arrow-thingies?
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: What are those called? I don’t know.
Jordan Baker: Spearguns.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yes. It’s a gun arrow. It’s a different brand. [Laughing.]
Captain Schwarck: The adolescent Nate, that was his favorite movie.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Adolescent Nate, he’s gone.
Captain Schwarck: And maybe it’s a secret shame that adult Nate still likes it too.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: No, my husband loves those movies and he would constantly talk about Jacques Cousteau. My husband loves the ocean, and like fish, and is obsessed with all of that stuff. He wanted to be an ichthyologist, is now a lawyer. [Laughing.] Big difference.
Jordan Baker: Sometimes we have to compromise.
Captain Schwarck: It’s probably easier to find employment as a lawyer.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: It is not. People don’t know this. The legal market is flooded.
Captain Schwarck: Really?
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah, it’s terrible.
Jordan Baker: Maybe he should specialize in like diving. Diving lawyer.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Hey, if you have any connections, he would totally do it. He actually really loved maritime law and this idea that people can be stateless. Do you know about this? If you are born on a ship during a certain time in our history, you only had citizenship if you were born physically in that country, but now you’re on a ship, you’re stateless, you don’t have citizenship.
Captain Schwarck: And then you don’t have to pay taxes or how does that work?
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: You have to go to a country that will accept you as a citizen and that can be hard.
Jordan Baker: You have to beg? “Please accept me!!”
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah, but he said, the other day, he said, “I’ve got it. I have my future career. I’ll do space law.” [Laughing.]
Captain Schwarck: Nice!
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Sorry. Back to Jacques Cousteau.
Captain Schwarck: Yeah, Cousteau. Cousteau did a lot of things and most of it was for cool TV shows that a lot of our generation grew up on.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yes, he did. But he did great science outreach.
Captain Schwarck: He did. And he actually was an early scientific diver, he used his Aqua-Lung to excavate a large amphora mound off the island of Grand Clay [sp?] near Marseilles. And amphora’s were ancient vases [Laughing about pronunciation of “vases”]
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: It’s OK. Either. It’s a vase.
Captain Schwarck: There are actually some great pictures of him adding airs to these things, hundreds of years old, and then shooting them up to the surface.
Jordan Baker: What was the name of that book?
Captain Schwarck: The Living Sea. Yeah, wonderful book, if you want to hear about early diving from Cousteau’s perspective.
So, in the United States, it was this guy called Conrad Limbaugh who introduced this new technology of Cousteau’s to the scientific world. He was a graduate student at Scripps in California and he started using this new invention as a tool to do his research.
And Conrad Limbaugh became the first diving safety officer. He is attributed with actually teaching other people how to use this tool for science. One of the cool things that I was going to talk about is early diving in Washington State. What about our state, what about right here who was doing this early on?
Jordan Baker: I’m sure you have tons of favorite diving places, but I heard Cousteau really liked this area.
Captain Schwarck: Yeah! He is on record as rating it as one of his favorite spots in the world.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Of course he did. He’s awesome!
Captain Schwarck: It must be cool then, right? In 1955, there was this guy from Seattle named Bill Hig, and Tony Botany [sp?], they actually used diving to help set up some of the early salmon ladders and some of the things taking place on this creek for development of dams. He’s, in our state, what I would call an early scientific diver. He was followed by, actually, my major professor, Larry McCloskey did his first scientific dives at Rosario beach in 1957.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Where is that? I grew up in Washington. Been here almost all my life, but where is that?
Captain Schwarck: So, do you know where Fidalgo Island meets Whidbey Island?
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: No.
Captain Schwarck: Deception Pass?
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yes!
Captain Schwarck: So that area.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Ding, ding, ding, yes. So, did you grow up in Washington?
Captain Schwarck: I did not. I’ve only been here I think 20 years.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Where did you learn to dive?
Captain Schwarck: I learned in a lake in the Midwest.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Ooh.
Captain Schwarck: I saw a fish. I wrote that in my dive log. “I saw a fish.” But it must have been cool. It got my hooked.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: What part of the Midwest?
Captain Schwarck: I grew up in Nebraska and I actually had to travel north to a big reservoir and that’s where we learned how to dive. I don’t remember the name of the reservoir.
Jordan Baker: I’ve actually heard a lot of people from the Midwest diving in reservoirs and quarries and stuff like that.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: So, not to be mean, but do you like it here better? [Laughing.]
Captain Schwarck: There’s probably a little more stuff to look at.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: There’s a little more than the fish?
Captain Schwarck: Johnny was his name. Some of the big reservoirs along the dams, if you ever get a chance to dive them, there can be amazing, huge fish. Stories of people settling down on what they thought was the bottom and then the entire bottom moving. You would love it! I think it’s right up your alley! [Laughing.]
Jordan Baker: That was a catfish.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Listeners don’t know that I instantly tensed up when he said that!
Jordan Baker: Went into the semi-fetal position.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yes, terrifying.
Captain Schwarck: So back to the early history of scientific diving in our state . . .
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: You avoided that question quite well.
Captain Schwarck: 1954, Friday Harbor lab’s Paul Sonne [sp?] is really the first scientific diver in our area. He mail-ordered his equipment. I think there was an ad in the back of Popular Science or Popular Mechanics. He mail-ordered this stuff and was like, “Well, I got to figure out how to use this now.”
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Read the manual a couple of times.
Captain Schwarck: Right, and taught himself, was self-taught. He’s still alive. He lives in Anacortes, Washington, and I’ve talked with him. He’s a really interesting guy. He talks about the scientists at Friday Harbor Labs, which is associated with the University of Washington and all the cool things that they had him do, and things that he did for his research. I got to mention him.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Maybe he’ll listen to this podcast.
Captain Schwarck: Throughout the ’50s and ’60s, diving was really a heyday.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah, it was cool.
Captain Schwarck: Yeah. And things started to change around the mid-’70s.
[? Interpol’s “Stella is a Diver” ?]
Captain Schwarck: This is Captain Nathan Schwark from Shannon Point Marine Center. You are listening to KMRE LP 102.3 FM in Bellingham, your community, your voice, your station.
[? Interpol’s “Stella is a Diver” ?]
? Well, she was my catatonic sex toy, love drug diver
? She went down, down, down there into the sea
? Yeah, she went down, down, down there
? Down there for me, right on
? Oh yeah, right on
? So good
Jordan Baker: If you’re just joining us, we’re talking about scientific diving with Captain Nate Schwarck. I was on a diving trip, I think it was in Manzanillo, Mexico and there was like red tides all around so we had to switch our diving locations and we ended up going into this little cove area and there was a bunch of sea stars that were like deteriorating. There were like lost limbs and stuff. Can you explain a little why that is? I think the divers there were blaming it on Fukushima, or whatever it was, but I don’t know.
Captain Schwarck: In our area, well really the entire west coast has been hit by what’s called “sea star wasting disease.” I have a professor at Western Washington University named Ben Miner who is looking into sea star wasting disease and he’s collaborating with other scientists, some from University of Washington, some from the UC Santa Cruz system, one of them being his wife, but they’ve also set up a team of divers to see is this happening in our area and how bad is it?
During fall of 2013 and then on into the winter of 2013 and 2014 this wasting disease hit right here. You may have heard of it. It’s been on the national news. But it caused one of the largest disease-related mortality events ever recorded in the ocean. So we have over 30 species of sea stars that live in our waters, so it’s very diverse. And their impact on the ecology of the area is huge. And removing them from the area, or having them no longer exist, is a huge effect on the ecology of our area.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: So here in Washington, there were sea stars that were deteriorating and limbs were falling off. What does that exactly look like?
Captain Schwarck: Well, I call it melting.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh, it’s awful.
Captain Schwarck: There are some videos. At first, some of their arms curl up and are deformed and then sometimes the arms leave and detach themselves and then crawl away from the main bodies.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: [Gasping.]
Captain Schwarck: Limbs exiting . . .
Jordan Baker: Zombie movie!
Captain Schwarck: Yes, exactly! And then the entire organism melts into this gelatinous ooze. It takes a while. They don’t just happen overnight. They are suffering. I am anthropomorphizing, but it really did look that bad.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: And so this happened in 2013 and 2014, but is it still a problem, or did it suddenly go away?
Captain Schwarck: That’s one of the big questions, is are they all dead? Are they coming back? Are we seeing any juveniles? Are we seeing any adults? Until recently, it had been almost a year since I had seen one of the adult sunflower stars, so one of the coolest, iconic species we have around here is this giant sun star. It’s multi-rayed, lots of arms. They get huge.
They used to be everywhere. I used to see them all the time. They are an incredible predator. They can move things and eat things. We don’t see adults any more. The last survey dives we did with Dr. Miner, we saw some sub-adults, so not completely large, but there were some and one of the things we even saw started to have some arms curling, so we aren’t even sure if they are going to live. So they’re not all wiped out. There are still stars out there, but the diversity and the number is vastly decreased.
Jordan Baker: Did they find out what the cause of it was?
Captain Schwarck: It looks like it’s a virus. One of the cool new projects, there’s actually a sea grant proposal by three professors at Western, Dr. Ben Miner, Dr. Robin Kodner who is a molecular biologist, and then Dr. Shawn Arellano. They proposed this project to use a combination of field surveys and laboratory molecular techniques to answer some of those questions. So they can take planktonic larvae and sequence it on a DNA sequencer and tell what organism it’s from. So you can collect plankton or collect larvae and tell are there new sea star larvae out there in the water and is that virus even still present? You can look for the presence of the virus.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Or did all the zombies not find brains and are all dead now? Leave them on the island. That’s a very sad thing, but maybe we can figure out what’s happening.
Maybe we can go to a happier projects . . .
Captain Schwarck: Sure, sure.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: … that’s being done at Shannon Point.
Captain Schwarck: One of the really cool projects that’s been ongoing for several years is the Pacific Northwest Abalone Restoration Efforts. And this is a collaboration project. There’s a lot of groups. We have just a small piece of it but there are groups like NOAA, the Puget Sound Restoration Fund, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, Department of Natural Resources, the Seadoc Society, Skagit County Marine Resource Committee, the Port Townsend Marine Science Center, the Jamestown S’klallam tribe.
I mean, there are all these groups collaborating and one of the cool things about scientific diving is, if they’re all trained at the same level, can all dive together, which is a neat part of it. But not all of the project involves diving.
But the pieces we’ve been directly involved with, and there are many students at Western, graduate students mostly who have been able to work on this, looking at larval and juvenile abalone outplanting.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: What’s that mean?
Captain Schwarck: The story of abalone in Washington State is really fascinating. We have one species of abalone. They are a marine gastropod.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: And you brought one, right?
Captain Schwarck: Absolutely. I actually brought some babies.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Well, not them.
Captain Schwarck: Not live, the shells.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: And we are going to take a picture to show our listeners.
Captain Schwarck: Sure. They’re beautiful. You’ve probably seen abalone. It’s used in jewelry. In fact . . .
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Jordan has a belt.
Jordan Baker: I’m wearing a belt buckle and it’s got abalone on it. I did not do that on purpose.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: It was accidental today.
Captain Schwarck: It’s a traditional resource that was used by local Native Americans artwork so it has importance there. But the abalone, we have one species that are in Washington State and what we’re finding is that over the years, we’re seeing larger and larger individuals, but fewer of them. We’re not getting any new recruits. There are no babies out there.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Except for the ones you brought in today. They’re dead.
Captain Schwarck: Well, we’ll get to those.
Jordan Baker: He’s a baby killer!
[Laughing.]
Captain Schwarck: What they feel is happening is it has to a lot to do with the life cycle of the abalone. They actually release gametes into the water, so you have male abalone and female abalone and they’re releasing sperms and eggs into the water . . .
Jordan Baker: Sick!
Captain Schwarck: … and fertilization is taking place. Marine sex, gastropod sex.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: That is the first time “sex” has been said on our show.
Captain Schwarck: I’m glad I go down on record!
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: You win!
Jordan Baker: This all got “50 shades in here,” wave and water sex.
Captain Schwarck: It’s not that exciting for abalone. They never actually come down in physical contact . . .
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Let’s bring it down.
Captain Schwarck: … with each other. They need to be close to each other for fertilization to actually take place, so if you have an abalone that’s living over here on this rock, and one’s five feet away on this rock, and the current is going this direction, it’s possible that nothing ever gets fertilized. They need to be closes together, within a few feet.
Jordan Baker: Physically and mentally.
Captain Schwarck: True. And it’s best at a full moon in June.
Jordan Baker: It pulls you together.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: The problem is that there weren’t very many, so they were too sparsely . . .
Captain Schwarck: And why wasn’t there very many? What happened to them?
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah, what happened to them?
Captain Schwarck: They’re yummy.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: And people make belts out of them.
Jordan Baker: I was actually just talking to somebody the other day and they said they used to go down to the beach and they would just get them right off the rocks and just feast on them.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: I’ve never had one. Have you?
Jordan Baker: Yeah. In Mexico somewhere. It was Delicious.
Captain Schwarck: They are good. I mean, they aggregate, so oftentimes at low tides, you can find several of them in the same area and collect a bunch of them. And so we think that that had an impact on it. It was never really a commercial fishery for them, but there was a recreational fishery for them. We think there was an awful lot of poaching taking place.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh.
Captain Schwarck: They are worth quite a bit of money, especially in Asian markets, and the shells are also used in jewelry, so there is a multi-benefit to having an adult organism. So that’s what we think took place. So there is still adult abalone out there, but the aggregation sites aren’t dense enough to be effectively reproducing new baby abalone.
So what Fish and Wildlife and many of these other groups have done is gone on a lot of different dives in a lot of areas where there was historically lots of abalone and find those few lone remaining adults that are getting larger and larger and not producing any babies and bring them back to a hatchery and get them nice and close together and give them tons of larval abalone.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: So we’re facilitating parties.
Captain Schwarck: We are, we are.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: That’s good! [Laughing.]
Captain Schwarck: So what you do with these larvae? Do you try to raise them to sub-adults? Do you release the larvae back into the wild, thinking that will help?
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: I think you do half/half? You release some of them, put them next to each other, hopefully some stick and then you keep doing this hatchery thing?
[? Interpol’s Stella is a Diver ?]
? Days
? Daze
? Days
? Daze
? She was all right because the sea was so airtight, she broke away
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: This is Spark Science. This is Regina Barber DeGraff.
Jordan Baker: And I’m Jordan Baker. If there’s a science idea that you’re curious about, send us an email or post it on our Facebook page, “Spark Science.”
[? Interpol’s Stella is a Diver ?]
? She was all right but she can’t come out tonight, she broke away
Captain Schwarck: So one of the first projects we were involved with at Shannon Point was we were actually planting juveniles. So you’ve got to find good places. Where’s going to be a good place to put these where there’s not going to be a lot of predators, a lot of crabs and different things that are like, “Oh look, look at these baby abalone! Yummy, yummy!”
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: A lot of Jordans taking them.
Captain Schwarck: If you look at one of the ones I brought in, you will see that they are actually marked with little bumble bee tags, so there are numbers on them.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh there are! I’m going to have to take a picture of that now for our listeners.
Captain Schwarck: They are glued onto the top of the shells, so these juveniles are a couple centimeters less than an inch long. So outplanting a lot of these in a specific area and then seeing if they will grow up and when they become reproductive, are they dense enough in that area to effectively reproduce.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: How’s it been going on so far? How long as it been going on?
Captain Schwarck: They outplanted I think it’s been five-six years when it first started and the last survey we were able to do on one of the outplant sites, they are still at a density that is greater enough that we think there will be effective reproduction, so it seems to be going well.
There is an effort that it takes them to the sub-adult, actually settle them down from the plankton in the hatchery. So what would be easier is if we could just take larvae and shoot larvae out into the environment and see if that works. So there’s been other projects where they’ll take, you’ve seen like super-soakers.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: We have seen super-soakers!
Captain Schwarck: They are the best things to dive with, is imagine your super-soaker and you suck up a bunch of seawater that has thousands, maybe a million juvenile abalone larvae in it, and then you go under water and you find a good rocky reef area that you think “oh, they’re going to love this place” and you hit them with a chemical cue that causes them to decide “oh, I no longer want to be in the larval stage, or I’d like to settle down and become benthic” and then shoot them out in this area under water and hopefully they all settle down and when we come back in several years we will be able to see abalone years. So that’s one of the more recent projects that’s taken place.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Wow, that sounds awesome.
Captain Schwarck: Yeah. Some students that are able to . . .
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Play with super-soakers for their major! And fertilize things! Yeah, I eventually want to get to movies, because that’s my favorite thing ever to talk about. Well, science and then movies. So, you were talking about, earlier, when we were off air, about remote operated vehicles (ROV). I didn’t know what it meant before you explained it to me. And how you use those at Shannon Point and what programs are related to ROVs.
Captain Schwarck: Sure. One of the early projects we did was looking in areas locally for proposed marine protected areas. These would be areas that are a no-take, no fishing, no collecting, and then hopefully organisms in those areas would grow and develop and have lots of babies that would then spread out to other areas and then the shellfish would be better throughout the entire region. Surveying those areas was done by scientific divers.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: That’s a lot of time.
Captain Schwarck: Right. And how do you know above water if that’s going to be a good place to set aside as a marine protected area. You really need to send somebody down there, look at the relief, what is the bottom substrate, is it sandy, is it muddy, is it rocky reef, and then look at the number of fish there. Is there any fish at this area? Maybe there’s no fish there, so why are we protecting this area if there is no fish there. So, divers do an excellent job at this, in my opinion.
One of the other ways to get at that question is use an ROV. If you’ve ever seen Titanic, at the beginning of Titanic, you will see these really cool robotic submarines that go down. They are tethered, so they are connected to the ship, sending a video feed and you can manipulate the arms. They send them down at great depths and you can see the bottom, so why would we send a diver when you could just send an ROV.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. It’s less dangerous.
Captain Schwarck: Well, yes, I guess, if you consider diving dangerous.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Did we just go through?
Jordan Baker: You could get more information if you’re down there longer without having to be down there physically.
Captain Schwarck: Sure, and then go down to greater depths. The ROV we have at Shannon Point can go to a depth of 300 feet. I’ve never dove to 300 feet, so that’s what’s down there. That’s awesome. Let’s see what’s down there.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: You just said Titanic and James Cameron, he puts a lot of money into these devices, right? So the ROV that was in Titanic, how deep can it go?
Captain Schwarck: Thousands of feet.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Wow. That brings us to, let’s talk about movies. Let’s talk about inaccuracies. One, was the ROV in Titanic, was that all believable?
Captain Schwarck: Oh yeah, it was a beautiful ROV.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Well that’s good.
Captain Schwarck: And the pilot, because ROV operators love to be referred to as “pilots”…
Jordan Baker: Is this an ego thing?
[Laughing.]
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: So if you’re a drone operator, you’re a pilot.
Captain Schwarck: So yeah, I thought they did a good job with that.
Jordan Baker: Did they actually go down and look at the actual Titanic?
Captain Schwarck: Oh yeah.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: So it was real footage.
Captain Schwarck: I believe so.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Wow. So we were talking about The Abyss, which I still have not seen, and we were talking about it in the volcano show.
Jordan Baker: Yeah. In the labs, they were trying to get mice to breathe in it, sort of like amniotic fluid. I actually found out that they were still testing that for humans and do you know how far they have gotten with that?
Captain Schwarck: I don’t. It’s not my area of expertise. It sounds cool. So it’s a high oxygen solution that you’re actually taking into your lungs and your lungs are able to absorb oxygen from the solution.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Would you do it?
Captain Schwarck: [Laughing.] Probably not at this stage in my life. Maybe once my family is grown and I don’t have as much to lose. [Laughing.]
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: He’ll be a tester then.
Jordan Baker: Do you think the science behind the idea is sound?
Captain Schwarck: I’m sure there is legitimate science behind the idea.
Jordan Baker: I was watching “Shark Week,” which I’m addicted to every year, so they were talking about a bunch of reserves, or things where they think shark breeding happens.
Captain Schwarck: I see.
Jordan Baker: I just wanted to relate that to what you were talking about with the shellfish.
Captain Schwarck: Right.
Jordan Baker: It’s not just shellfish, but it’s other species as well.
Captain Schwarck: Yeah. Sharks are an important part of the ecosystem and a lot of parts of the world love to eat parts of them.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right, oof.
Jordan Baker: Also, there is an ROV that they had attached, it was a remote that that they attached to the dorsal fin of the shark and it followed the shark.
Captain Schwarck: Oh, cool.
Jordan Baker: And it was cool . . .
Captain Schwarck: … study the behavior.
Jordan Baker: … just watching a bit. You heard about those ROVs?
Captain Schwarck: I know there are “critter cams” and so it’s not quite an ROV in that it’s autonomous. It’s not being manipulated directly.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Oh.
Jordan Baker: Sure.
Captain Schwarck: But yeah, critter cams, you get amazing footage from them that you would probably never get any other way.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Before we move away from sharks, though. I’m so happy, Jordan, that you brought up sharks because my favorite ocean movie is Deep Blue Sea with L.L. Cool J. It’s about sharks that have been bred to have brains that are very, very smart. Do you guys know what I’m talking about?
Jordan Baker: Is this one where L.L. Cool J is a cook?
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yes!
Jordan Baker: Sort of like a Stephen Siegel?
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yes! And Samuel L. Jackson is doing this like really, really inspiring speech and then there’s a section in the room that he’s doing the speech where it’s like a pool and then at the end, “We can do this, we can all live,” like the shark comes up, sorry – spoiler alright – comes up, and just out of the water kills him and then takes him back in.
Captain Schwarck: This isn’t a normal shark. This is a genetically engineered shark. He’s smarter.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah, he’s smart. If you haven’t seen that yet, for our listeners, it’s a terrible, great movie.
Jordan Baker: No, I think a really great movie out there with sharks is Sharknado 1, Sharknado 2 . . .
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: 3’s coming out.
Jordan Baker: Yeah, Sharknado 3 is about to be out.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: See, I think Captain Nate would not be . . .
Jordan Baker: See, that’s real science.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: See, I think Captain Nate would not be interested in that, not because it’s terrible, but because the sharks are not in the water; they’re in tornadoes! He’s interested in the ocean.
Captain Schwarck: And we have some really cool sharks in our area.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Do we really?
Captain Schwarck: Yes!
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Bring it back to normal! [Laughing.]
Captain Schwarck: One of the cool things, and if you’ve ever been to Seattle Aquarium, they focus on this somewhat, but it is the six-gill sharks. So they are considered more of a prehistoric shark. They are often deep water. They are often slow, kind of lethargic but you can actually dive and see these. Sometimes they’ll come up within diving depths. They are slow, they are large, 12-16 feet.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: They don’t bite you?
Captain Schwarck: Well, I have no documented case of a diver getting bitten by a six-gill shark. It’s actually kind of a tourist activity is to try to find them.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: I’m not afraid of sharks, I’m just afraid of everything else in the ocean, which makes no sense.
Captain Schwarck: And then we have lots of what are called dogfish locally.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right.
Jordan Baker: Yes.
Captain Schwarck: They can be 30-some years old and only a few feet long. They are an important part of the local ecosystem as well.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Yeah.
Jordan Baker: Are the six-gill as aggressive as the seven-gill?
Captain Schwarck: [Laughing.]
Jordan Baker: I just watched a documentary with a seven-gill how they are testing the agressiveness and how they were starting to pack hunt and stuff.
Captain Schwarck: No, I do not believe the six-gills are as aggressive.
One of the things unique about them is that they’re very limber. They don’t have as pronounced dorsal fin. They can actually turn and bite their own tail.
Jordan Baker: Like a dog!
Captain Schwarck: Right.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: So when it’s approaching you, you know, you have jaws and [singing Jaws theme song] and it’s not really like that is what you’re saying.
Captain Schwarck: Not really like that.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: So is it more stubby?
Captain Schwarck: Um, blunt. Yeah. Still, anytime you see something underwater, your heart rate starts to go.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Right. I’m afraid of whales that apparently aren’t terrifying, but I’m just like “they’re so big!”
Jordan Baker: You’re also afraid of seaweed.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: I’m afraid of seaweed!
Captain Schwarck: We’re lucky: our local pods, the resident orca whales that live in our area, really do not like seals. They eat fish. It’s the transient whales that hunt seals. So, I’m glad of that because I have been diving in areas where I’ve heard killer whales under water and I would not really like to come face-to-face with one of them.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: So you’re saying that you in your outfit look like a seal, so therefore our local orca whales are not going to murder you?
Captain Schwarck: Hopefully not. They are more interested in the salmon that swim out in the open water.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: Just put in your scuba suit salmon, so you just throw it. Like dogs coming out of you, you throw sausages.
Jordan Baker: Then you’re a big piece of bait. It’s like a dog coming up to you, knowing you have a treat in your pocket!
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: You don’t have to take my advice. I don’t even go into the ocean.
Alright, I want to thank you, Captain Nate Schwarck to come in and talk with us and dealing with our ridiculousness. We learned a lot! I actually learned a lot about scientific diving, so thank you for coming.
Captain Schwarck: Thank you. I enjoyed being here.
[? Interpol’s Stella is a Diver ?]
At the bottom of the ocean she dwells
From crevices caressed by fingers
And fat blue serpent swells
Stella, Stella …
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: This is Spark Science. I am Regina Barber DeGraff.
Jordan Baker: And I am Jordan Baker. We’ll be back again next week. Listen to us Sunday at 5PM, Wednesday at 9PM and Saturday at noon.
Dr. Regina Barber DeGraaff: If there’s a science idea that you’re curious about, send us an email or post a message on our Facebook page, Spark Science.
? She was all right because the sea was so airtight, she broke away
? She was all right because the sea was so airtight, she broke away
? She was all right but she can’t come out tonight, she broke away
If you liked our show and would like to support us, please go to KMRE.org and click on the button “donate.” Today’s episode “Scuba Science” was produced in the KMRE Spark Studio radio located in the Spark Museum on Bay Street in Bellingham. Our producer and engineer and Susanne Blaze [sp?]
Jordan Baker: Our theme music is “Chemical Calisthenics” by Blackilicious. Our featured song is “Stella is a Diver” by Interpol.
[? Interpol’s Stella is a Diver ?]
? She broke away, broke away
? She broke away
[? Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ?]
? Lead, gold, tin, iron, platinum, zinc, when I rap you think
? Iodine nitrate activate
? Red geranium, the only difference is I transmit sound
? Balance was unbalanced then you add a little talent in
? Careful, careful with those ingredients
? They could explode and blow up if you drop them
? And they hit the ground
[End of podcast.]