Saturday, November 20, 2010

Into the abyss: The diving suit that turns men into fish - Science, News - The Independent

By Jerome Taylor

Saturday, 20 November 2010

Humans have proven themselves remarkably adept at learning to do what other animals can do naturally. We have taught ourselves to fly like birds, climb like monkeys and burrow like moles. But the one animal that has always proven beyond our reach is the fish.

The invention of scuba diving has allowed us to breathe underwater but only at very shallow depths.

Thanks to our inability to conquer the bends, diving below 70m still remains astonishingly dangerous to anyone but a handful of experts. Ultra-deep diving is so lethal that more people have walked on the moon than descended below 240m using scuba gear.

Arnold Lande, a retired American heart and lung surgeon, has patented a scuba suit that would allow a human to breathe “liquid air”, a special solution that has been highly enriched with oxygen molecules.

The idea immediately conjures up the terrifying spectre of drowning but our lungs are more than capable of taking oxygen from a solution.

“The first trick you would have to learn is overcoming the gag reflex,” explains Lande, a 79-year-old inventor from St Louis, Missouri. “But once that oxygenated liquid is inside your lungs it would feel just like breathing air.”

Lande envisages a scuba suit that would allow divers to inhale highly-oxygenated perfluorocarbons (PFCs) – a type of liquid that can dissolve enormous quantities of gas. The liquid would be contained in an enclosed helmet that would replace all the air in the lungs, nose and ear cavities.

The CO2 that would normally exit our body when we breathe out would be “scrubbed” from our blood by attaching a mechanical gill to the femoral vein in the leg.

By using oxygen suspended in liquid, divers would no longer have to worry about decompression sickness - the often fatal condition known as “the bends” which occurs when nitrogen dissolved in the blood under the immense pressures of deep water bubbles out as we rise. It could potentially allow them to descend to far greater depths than is currently possible.

Liquid ventilation might sound like science fiction – it played a major role in James Cameron’s 1989 sci-fi film The Abyss – but it is already used by a handful of cutting-edge American hospitals for highly premature babies.

Children born before 28 weeks have huge difficulties breathing, often because their lungs are not developed enough to comfortably adjust from the liquid environment of the womb to inhaling gaseous air. Immature alveoli, the final branchings inside the lung that feed oxygen into the blood, lack vital surfactants which stop the tiny cavities sticking together when we breathe out.

In response doctors have begun experimenting with highly-oxygenated PFCs with remarkable success.

Professor Thomas Shaffer, a paediatrics specialist from Delaware, has experimented with liquid breathing since the late 1970s. He spent much of his early career testing various animals in oxygenated PFCs.

Place a mouse in oxygenated liquid and instinct immediately kicks in as the animal flounders wildly. Everything the mouse has ever learned screams at it to avoid inhaling a solution it thinks will kill it.

Yet when we drown there comes a moment when the instinct not to breathe liquid is overridden by a stronger instinct to take in one last breath. It is a desperate final attempt to get oxygen into the blood. If the liquid we are in contains oxygen molecules that happily cross from the solution into our blood stream, life will return. After all, it is not water that kills us when we drown. It’s our inability to take oxygen from the water that condemns us.

By the mid-1990s, Shaffer and a handful of doctors had begun using liquid ventilation techniques on premature babies and were stunned by the results.

“A lot of the children I see have less than a 5% survival rate,” he explains. “But when we get them on to liquid breathing we see close to 60% going on to lead fully healthy lives.”

The technique remains rare, however, because of a chronic lack of investment.

“Liquid ventilation is not used widely because there is very little funding from the drug companies,” he says. “Unfortunately premature babies don’t have a voice. They don’t bring in money, so no-one really wants to invest. But it does work. Physiologically, liquid ventilation is very do-able.”

The recent oil spill in the Gulf may change that lack of interest. Although drug companies are reluctant to fully explore liquid breathing, the Deep Water Horizon disaster has reignited the debate over how to get divers safely down to extreme depths.

Currently the only way divers can work for long spells in the deep is either from the safety of robotic vessels and submarines; or by using saturation diving, an incredibly complicated technique where divers have to be brought up to the surface in a pressurised container over a matter of weeks.

With saturation diving, the deepest anyone has gone is 701m. Using scuba equipment the record is 318m, set by the South African diver Nuno Gomes in June 2005. It took him 14 minutes to descend and 12 hours to come back up to the surface.

The reason for these slow ascents is our reliance on compressed gasses to breathe in water. Under the incredible pressure exerted by billions of tonnes of ocean, gasses like nitrogen and helium dissolve into our bloodstream, much like CO2 is dissolved in a soda bottle.

Ascending towards the surface is like opening that soda bottle - the gas comes out of solution and into our bodies. If we don’t give our bodies enough time to expel those gasses by ascending slowly, we die.

“The beauty of doing it all from a liquid is that you don’t have to use these highly compressed gasses in the lungs that are going to dissolve into the blood,” says Dr Lande, who recently presented a paper on his patent to the first International Conference on Applied Bionics and Biomechanics in Venice. “You have a liquid that you can infuse just as much oxygen as you need.”

Shaffer has previously experimented with animals and PFCs at depth and found the technique to work. “I have personally put mammals down to a simulated depth of 1000 feet and then decompressed them in half a second and they have no decompression sickness,” he says.

The US Navy Seals also reportedly experimented with liquid ventilation in the early 1980s according to Shaffer who says he met a former Seal turned doctor that was on the team.

“This paediatrician never really revealed why they were doing it,” he explains. “Other than going very deep I don’t know what the point was. But they tried it. The Navy pushed them to the point where they did it several times a week.”

Being so much more viscous than air, liquid is difficult to breathe. Some of the Seals reportedly developed stress fractures on the ribs cause by the sheer force of trying to get a liquid in and out of the lungs.

But Lande envisages using a cuirass, a ventilation device named after a piece of medieval armour, which compresses the diaphragm and makes it easier to breathe liquid.

Now all he needs now are developers and a fresh set of human guinea pigs willing to test his ideas.

“I’m sure someone out there would be willing,” he says. “We’ve climbed the highest mountains, sent people into space. It’s time to find ways of exploring the deep oceans

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Massive Count a Drop in the Bucket - US News and World Report

Massive Count a Drop in the Bucket - US News and World Report

By Susan Milius, Science News
A 10-year international project called the Census of Marine Life has come to an end with what has to be one of the strangest census reports ever.
At the project’s finale in London October 4, a summary of the collaboration by 2,700 scientists from more than 600 institutions around the world highlighted their own undercounts and the vast realms they missed. That, however, was the point.

“There’s a lot of ocean left to explore,” says environmental scientist Jesse Ausubel, a census cofounder and program officer of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The water world covers the majority of the planet, feeds people far inland, offers exotic compounds for drugs and manufacturing, regulates the planet’s climate and provides half its oxygen, but has yet to be fully explored.
How many fish in the sea? The census didn’t try to count, since scientists haven’t even finished naming species of marine fish. According to the census summary, the tally of 16,764 marine fish species formally named as of early 2010 probably falls short by an estimated 5,000 species.
And fish aren’t the half of it. They’re perhaps 12 percent of the total of marine species, according to the census estimates. Fishes trail after crustaceans and mollusks in number of species, and researchers report evidence of major undercounts in the numbers of recorded species for these other groups too.
Overall at least 750,000 marine species, not including microbes, still await discovery, the census teams predict. In the seas, the mysteries easily outnumber known species, now estimated at 250,000.
For microbes, the census researchers report boggling diversity. Analyzing a liter of seawater revealed 38,000 kinds of microbes, and census DNA sequencing has turned up specimens of more than 100 phyla. Such breadth approaches three times the number of phyla known in the animal kingdom. Estimates for the total number of kinds of marine microbes run as high as a billion.
Undersampling afflicts oceans everywhere to some degree, the researchers conclude. Perhaps 80 percent of the nonmicrobial species around Australia have not been described. Even in the Mediterranean, 75 percent of deep-sea species do not yet have names.
Deep waters below 200 meters are so underexplored that their life forms constitute “biodiversity’s big wet secret,” says the census’s chief scientist, Ron O’Dor of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. Fewer than 10 percent of records of marine life come from the zone of abyssal plains between 4,000 and 5,000 meters deep, yet that zone accounts for half the oceans’ area.
To count fish, or even guesstimate abundance of the small proportion of known marine species, “you need a spread sheet,” Ausubel says. “And you didn’t have one.” So a major goal of the census has been to organize records of marine life.
The Ocean Biogeographic Information System database now allows anyone to look up what species have been found where. More than 90,000 of the species also have their own Web page in the Encyclopedia of Life.
Even though census scientists highlight how much is left to discover, they did a lot of exploring in 10 years. Out of the 17 teams that make up the census, 14 emphasized field expeditions, logging more than 9,000 days at sea sampling such places as seamounts or the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. More than 6,000 potential new species turned up, with 20 percent already confirmed.
These new explorations made a particularly big difference to the knowledge of life at the poles, which aren’t easy or cheap places to study, Ausubel says. Sending a ship exploring in Antarctica costs about $125,000 a day.
Among all the discoveries from the field, “what surprised me is the beauty,” Ausubel says. Census projects encouraged photography, and the stream of pictures over the years has introduced a wide public to the charms of deepwater crabs or free-swimming sea cucumbers.
Census workers also looked into the dark side of ocean studies, assessing how human activities such as fishing have changed marine populations. Delving into documents from monasteries or old tax records, researchers pieced together trends. Effects show up as far back as Roman times, researchers found. O’Dor, however, points out that the census also documents recoveries from human impact. “Under the right circumstances, the ocean is resilient,” he says.
These themes of a great undiscovered diversity of organisms at risk from human activity aren’t unique to the sea, says Peter Raven, president emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. “The Census of Marine Life certainly ought to be replicated on land, where the vast majority of species are unknown and for even those we know, we have very little information available,” he says. “This is basically an unknown planet when it comes to living organisms.”

Solving Engineering Issues by Studying Jellyfish - US News and World Report

Solving Engineering Issues by Studying Jellyfish - US News and World Report

By Marlene Cimons, National Science Foundation
Jellyfish create doughnut-shaped currents of rotating water when they swim. Visually, they resemble what happens when someone blows smoke rings from a cigar.

More importantly, however, this unusual method of propulsion, these so-called “vortex rings,” enable jellyfish to go further on less energy, an idea that scientists hope to translate into new engineering designs.
“We’re very interested in figuring out things that animals do better than we, as engineers, can do,” said John Dabiri, professor of aeronautics and bioengineering at California Institute of Technology, who is heading the project. “We’d like to co-opt some of those ideas.”
In particular, they want to build new underwater research vehicles that can remain beneath the ocean surface for years at a time, rather than only hours or months, and on less fuel.
“It is important to have underwater vehicles that can study the changing properties of the ocean, such as temperature and pH, so we can improve our knowledge of the ocean and how it works,” said Dabiri, who recently was among those named to receive a prestigious $500,000 MacArthur “genius’’ award, a “no-strings attached’’ fellowship. “This is especially important in trying to understand the impact of climate change on the ocean.”
Jellyfish propel themselves by contracting cells in their bell-shaped outer skin and generating jet forces in the tail end, with tentacles trailing behind. “Pretty much all underwater swimmers create these vortex structures, but theirs are a lot more complicated [than jellyfish] in flow currents,” Dabiri said. “Their rings are jumbled together in ways more difficult to measure.”
Beyond inspiring new energy-saving underwater technology, understanding the fluid dynamics of the jellyfish also ultimately could provide important information applicable to other related areas, such as blood flow in the human heart or the design of wind power generators.
The National Science Foundation is supporting the research with $170,000 as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
“In the short term, we’re using this money to buy equipment for the labs to build the experiments we take out into the water, which is supporting the small businesses that are building these devices for us,” Dabiri said. “In the long term, the most important investment is in energy efficiency. By making underwater vehicles that are less reliant on huge amounts of fuel, the fuel that is saved either can go to other uses or stay in the ground.”
Dabiri, a biophysicist whose research encompasses several fields, including theoretical fluid dynamics, evolutionary biology and biomechanics, has shown that explaining the workings of locomotion depends on a mathematical analysis of the fluid vortex rings that jellyfish form in the surrounding water by contracting their bells. His research team, in ocean experiments, “scuba dive up close to the jellyfish,” to video them and take certain measurements.
To get a rough idea of what the animals are doing, the researchers add dye to the water. Then, in order to gather more quantitative data, they illuminate the water with a laser, allowing the scientists to see the sediment generated in the water by the jellyfish movement. “We can track the motion of those particles over time to infer the water velocity,” a process known as digital particle image velocimetry, he said.
“We’ve already demonstrated reductions in energy use by 30 percent compared to conventional propeller-driven submarines,” Dabiri said.
Today’s ocean explorer vehicles can spend only short periods of time underwater, or, in the case of gliders, must change their locations frequently. Most other sea research is conducted primarily with satellite technology. The latter “gives coverage of the ocean surface, but doesn’t tell you what’s happening beneath the surface,” he said.

Ocean gliders can remain underwater for months, but must constantly change their depth in order to function. “It’s difficult to get one of them to stay at the same depth for an extended period of time,” Dabiri said. “We’d like to develop vehicles that can remain at a fixed depth for longer periods of time.”
He described what he considers the perfect arsenal of underwater vehicles, and the challenges involved, that would be necessary to draft a comprehensive map of ocean properties, satisfying current research goals.
“The fundamental issue is space,” he said. “Since these would be smaller, we can only fit so many batteries and so much fuel on board. If we can make them go farther and faster on the same amount of fuel, that would allow them to go for a long duration of time.
“We need tens of thousands of these underwater vehicles to get the proper coverage of the ocean,” he added. “We need them not for hours at a time but for years. They would be autonomous. They would have their own sensors that would navigate. We would give the vehicle a set of instructions, put it in the water and have it go on its way.”

Oceanographers With Flippers - US News and World Report

Oceanographers With Flippers - US News and World Report

By Alexandra Witze, Science News
Seals diving for their dinner near Antarctica have surfaced with an extra morsel: information, gathered by electronic tags on the animals’ heads, about the shape of the seafloor there.

The work has revealed previously unknown undersea channels, through which warm water might flow toward fragile ice shelves. And the seals do it all for a fraction of the cost of traditional seafloor mapping done from ships.
“It gives you a much denser picture of what the water depth is than anything you can conceivably do with ship tracks,” says Laurence Padman, an oceanographer at Earth & Space Research in Corvallis, Ore., and a coauthor of an upcoming paper in Geophysical Research Letters describing the technique.
Seals, walruses, whales and other large marine creatures have moonlighted as oceanographers before. Scientists typically glue sensors to the animals’ bodies that measures factors like temperature and salinity. Researchers have used this information to study water temperatures around Greenland, among other topics.
But the new work is the first to extract information on the shape of the seafloor—known as bathymetry—from the sensors, which also measure pressure and hence depth. “You can actually map the ocean floor,” says team member Daniel Costa, a marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The data came from 57 elephant seals, tagged by Costa’s group over five summers at the U.S. Antarctic Marine Living Resources camp in the South Shetland Islands. As the animals swim, the tags record information every few seconds, then relay it via satellite once the seals surface. About 30 percent of the time seals dive all the way to the bottom to forage for food, says Padman, so by studying enough dives for each animal—some 200,000 dives in total—the researchers can deduce where the seafloor lies.
“It’s a novel and useful technique for gathering bathymetry data,” comments Paul Holland, an ocean modeler at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, England.
Within the seal data Padman’s team discovered several significant troughs cutting across the continental slope off the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula. These features hadn’t been mapped before, says Padman, yet they play an important role in ocean circulation. Warm water can flow through such channels and up under the floating ice shelves that extend off Antarctica, such as the Wilkins ice shelf that partially disintegrated in 2008.
Better information on underwater topography could lead to improved models of how the ocean will respond to climate change, says Padman.
Other researchers might now be inspired to dig through seal data to see what features could be mapped, he adds. Ships can cost tens of thousands of dollars a day to operate in Antarctic waters, whereas there is a wealth of readily available information available on seal tags.
“We want to encourage other people who work with seal data to look into it,” says Padman. “We just thought it was really cool.”

Derbies helping eliminate invasive lionfish - ESPN

Derbies helping eliminate invasive lionfish - ESPN

KEY WEST, Fla. -- There are 659 less Indo-Pacific red lionfish occupying the waters of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.

Courtesy Fla-Keys.comA diver is careful while gathering one of the venomous lionfish.

The final in a series of three lionfish derbies was staged Saturday, Nov. 13, off the Lower Keys and divers captured 109 of the invasive species, adding to the totals of two previous contests staged in Key Largo in September and in Marathon in October.

During Saturday's derby, Melbourne, Fla., residents Rob Pillus, Jeremy Norcross and Mike Dugan caught 25 lionfish to capture the contest's top $1,000 prize.
Lionfish off the southeast U.S., Bahamas and in the Caribbean impact indigenous fish because they eat important juvenile reef species, such as grouper and snapper.
Lionfish have no known predators except man, said Lad Akins of the Reef Environmental Education Foundation.
They have venomous spines but, when properly cleaned, yield a white meat that is considered a delicacy. Saturday night's derby banquet featured lionfish.
Organized efforts to control the lionfish population and educate divers on the benefits of killing lionfish are to continue Dec. 8 with another derby that coincides with celebration activities surrounding the 50th anniversary of the establishment of John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park in Key Largo. The park is America's first underwater preserve.
Learn more and sign up at Pennekamp Lionfish Roundup.

Gulf corals adapt to warmer water, still in peril | Reuters

Gulf corals adapt to warmer water, still in peril Reuters

(Reuters) - Twenty years ago, divers in Dubai could swim through coral gardens teeming with brightly-colored fish and sea turtles. Today, says marine biologist Tom Goreau, dead reefs stand like gravestones for an underwater ghost town.
In the United Arab Emirates, some of the world's glitziest building projects, such as the opulent homes on one of Dubai's manmade palm-shaped islands, sit on these coral cemeteries.
"The best reefs were simply dumped on," said Goreau, who heads the U.S.-based Global Coral Reef Alliance. "Those areas that were supposed to have been protected areas were peddled off to developers. They're gone, wiped out."
Surviving reefs contend with desalination plants, necessary for supplying fresh water to the desert countries along the Gulf coast. The plants spew hot brine and chemicals into the sea, warming their surrounding waters and increasing salinity.
Twenty percent of the world's reefs are damaged beyond repair. Scientists are uncertain about what proportion of the Gulf's reefs have died. A Kuwaiti diving team recently reported that 90 percent of the coral off Kuwait's coast was dead or severely stressed. Qatar has also seen dramatic coral death.
Scientists worry pollution and construction continues at a rate that could kill Gulf reefs, which had proven resistant to rising temperatures and increased ocean salinity.
Coral reefs support a third of the Gulf's fish populations -- and local economies.
"We don't protect corals just because they're beautiful," said Rita Bento, marine biologist for the Emirates Diving Association. "Corals are a source of food, fishermen go there to fish. Tourism also -- places with good reefs that are protected have economic growth. We have a lot to gain from them."
The UAE is growing more aware of climate threats, adding government environment advisers to approve coastal construction plans. Abu Dhabi is sponsoring the development of what it calls the first zero-emissions city, Masdar.
Overfishing is another problem, but scientists say damage to reefs, where fish feed and breed, may also be behind what Dubai fishermen say is a 20 percent drop in their catch since 1990.
"It's not like it was years back. There were a lot of fish and it was so cheap," said one fisherman, dumping baskets of brightly striped fish off his tiny motor boat for market.
RED TIDE
Hamad al-Roomy, general manager of the Dubai Fishermen's Cooperative, says in 2008 Gulf waters were invaded by a red tide, or harmful algae bloom, often caused by a sudden temperature change.
"It hit like a nuclear bomb that kills everything around it," he said. "You could see the red tide coming. The fish were trying to escape. They'd just jump right onto the beach."
Red tides soak up oxygen, suffocating fish. Hundreds of thousands of fish were killed in a single day. Months later, residual algae killed swathes of coral on the UAE's east coast.

How Diving Leatherback Turtles Regulate Buoyancy - US News and World Report

How Diving Leatherback Turtles Regulate Buoyancy - US News and World Report

Leatherback turtles are remarkably versatile divers. Routinely diving to depths of several hundred meters, leatherbacks are occasionally known to plunge as deep as 1250m. The animals probably plumb the depths to avoid predators, search for prey and avoid heat in the tropics. However it wasn't clear how these mammoth reptiles regulate their buoyancy as they plunge down. Sabrina Fossette from Swansea University explains that no one knew how the turtles descended so far: do they swim down or become negatively buoyant and plummet like a stone? Curious to find out how nesting leatherbacks plumb the depths, Rory Wilson and his long time collaborator, Molly Lutcavage, decided to deploy data loggers containing triaxial accelerometers on leatherback females as they nested on beaches on St Croix in the US Virgin Islands. They found that leatherbacks probably regulate their buoyancy by varying the amount of air they inhale just before submersion and publish their discovery on Nov. 12, 2010 in the Journal of Experimental Biology at http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/content/abstract/213/23/4074.

'When you first see a leatherback turtle coming out of the water it's like a dinosaur it's really impressive,' says Fossette, having just returned from collecting data in the Indian Ocean. According to Fossette, Andy Myers, Nikolai Liebsch and Steve Garner attached accelerometers to five females as they laid their eggs, and then waited 8-12 days for the reptiles to return to the beach to lay more eggs having headed out to sea. Retrieving the accelerometers, the team found that only two of the five had collected usable data, but the data loggers that functioned showed 81 dives that the team could analyse ranging from 64m down to 462m.
Back in Swansea, Fossette, Adrian Gleiss, Graeme Hays and Rory Wilson analysed the temperature, pressure and acceleration data collected by the loggers. Describing the accelerometer data Fossette says, "You can almost see the animal swimming. It's the first time we could see the locomotor activity during those deep dives."
Extracting the acceleration data that showed the leatherbacks' movements, the team could see that the turtles dived deeply at an average angle of 41deg as they began their descent. Initially the turtles swam with each flipper stroke lasting 3s, but as they descended further they swam less hard until they stopped swimming all together, became negatively buoyant and began gliding down. At the bottom of the dive, the turtles began swimming as they heading to the surface and continued swimming until they regained buoyancy near the surface and began gliding again.
Fossette explains that many diving animals exhale before they leave the surface to minimise the risk of decompression sickness, however, leatherbacks do not. They dive carrying a lung full of air. Curious to find whether leatherbacks vary the amount of air that they inhale to regulate their buoyancy, Fossette and Gleiss compared the depths at which the turtles became negatively buoyant with the maximum depth that they reached. The team found that the deepest divers remained buoyant the longest and started gliding at deeper depths. So the turtles probably regulate their buoyancy before diving by varying the amount of air they inhale. Fossette also says, "The nesting turtles may glide for 80 percent of the dive's descent to optimise their energetic reserves, which is crucial for the production of eggs."
The team is now keen to look at the diving patterns of leatherbacks in their foraging grounds in the North Atlantic. Fossette explains that nesting turtles lose weight while foraging turtles are gaining weight and this could affect their buoyancy and diving behaviour. However, tagging a 400kg turtle in the ocean is a much bigger problem than tagging them on a beach.

Monday, November 15, 2010

Hunters Stalk the Lionfish - WSJ.com

Hunters Stalk the Lionfish - WSJ.com

KEY LARGO, Fla.—Fluctuations in the fish population are flummoxing marine scientists the world over. But few species elicit the solution served up for the lionfish.

The voracious lionfish hoovers up nearly everything in it's path, from shrimp and angel fish to lizards. The invasive breed from the Far East has bred by the thousands and spread from the Bahamas and Florida up to the Carolinas.

"Kill it and grill it!" says Sean Morton, superintendent of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, a 3,900-square-mile National Park that is entirely underwater. The park is licensing hundreds of scuba divers to exterminate red lionfish in "no-take" areas where other fishing and spearing isn't permitted. "We want people to get out there and kill as many as possible," he says.
The marine community is giving the same edict up and down the East Coast. Just as its fellow emigre from the Far East, the Asian carp, has shaken up the Great Lakes, the lionfish is taking on new territory.
The voracious species is breeding by the thousands, gorging on tropical fish near coral reefs and rapidly spreading from the Bahamas and Florida up to the Carolinas. The reddish-striped fish snarfs up nearly anything it can swallow, from crabs to shrimp to angelfish and other species divers like to see. Its prickly, venom-tipped spines fan out around its body and deter sharks and other predators.
Now, the hunt for red lionfish is heating up. The nonprofit Reef Environmental Education Foundation hosted its third "Lionfish Derby" over the weekend in the Florida Keys and handed out $3,350 in prize money to teams that brought in the most fish—109 were killed. Two derbies in the Bahamas the past two years netted more than 2,000 lionfish.
Near scuba spots, divers are increasingly submerging with spears, nets and protective gloves to try to battle the intruder—although divers say they still get stung through gloves. Websites, YouTube videos and Facebook pages describe how to catch and cook it.
"People have a sense that the waters they love are being invaded," says Renata Lana, a spokeswoman with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This year, the federal agency launched an "Eat Lionfish" campaign, aimed at creating a taste for them at high-end restaurants.
Stalking the lionfish isn't easy. The fish, which grow up to about 18 inches, are fast and feisty, divers say. Plus, the tips of their fanned spines give a sting more painful than a bee's.
"They can get nasty," says Bob Hickerson, of Vero Beach, Fla., who has killed dozens in the past two years. "I've been charged twice, in the face," he says. He has designed a 14-inch spear that he has used in derbies this year, his team placing first in one and winning $1,600.
Scientists aren't sure just how the lionfish came to the eastern seaboard. One tale says six lionfish got loose when a beachside aquarium burst during Hurricane Andrew in 1992. The lionfish "almost certainly was released from an aquarium" of some kind, says Mark Hixon, a professor at Oregon State University's Department of Zoology who studies lionfish.
As they have moved from deep to shallow waters, lionfish are eating up parrotfish, which help keep algae from overgrowing coral reefs. Fishermen worry lionfish gluttony will keep sport fish away.
Jason Doty and hundreds of other scuba divers are experimenting with new ways to eliminate the legions of lionfish. "Six months ago, I hadn't seen one," says Mr. Doty, who owns the Salty Dawg Scuba N Surf in Lake Park, Fla. "Now, I kill 12 on one dive."
Mr. Doty hunts lionfish with a 2.5-foot miniature pole spear with a paralyzing tip. His dive shop is hosting a lionfish hunting derby in December, like dozens of others on the East Coast.
While he keeps a few lionfish in a tank in his shop, he's also tried feeding diced lionfish to eels from his boat, to lobsters on the beach, eating it as ceviche with his crew and giving fillets to sushi chefs in local restaurants.

Ciro de la Fuente

A scuba diver and a lionfish near sunken equipment in the Bahamas.

A few entrepreneurs are designing special gear for the fight. Gregg Waugh in Walterboro, S.C., who has speared 100 lionfish in the Bahamas, launched SafeSpear LLC in April to sell protective gloves and a 4-foot, 10-inch spear designed to shish-kabob lionfish without a diver having to touch the prickly fish. "We don't want people to have to get too close to 'em," says Mr. Waugh. "These are very aggressive animals. Even the smaller ones swim right toward you."
Lad Akins, operations director at REEF, complains about ill-trained vigilante hunters. "I've seen people shoot and miss the lionfish and spear a sea cucumber or sponge instead."
Lionfish are an "ambush predator" with fast reflexes, Mr. Akins says. "It's very, very quick at a short distance. When you get close to the fish to spear it, you often miss." The lionfish learns and adapts. "If it sees a spear go by, it's not going to stick around to give you a second chance," he says.
Scuba divers and fishermen are finding statistics stacked against them in their hand-to-spine combat. "This could become one of the worst marine invasive species in history," says Dr. Hixon of Oregon State. "We probably cannot completely eradicate lionfish. Only nature can do that."
Scientists agree hunting may help, but won't halt the incredible population boom of lionfish that have seen densities increase 700% between 2004 and 2008 in parts of North Carolina. A lionfish can produce more than 2 million eggs per year. "They are just too widespread," says Mr. Akins.
The government says one way to fight the fish is to create a market for eating them. NOAA calls the lionfish a "delicious, delicately flavored fish" with a taste and texture similar to grouper, snapper or hogfish. A few restaurants in the U.S. and the Caribbean are serving it.
James Clark, executive chef at Waterscapes Restaurant in Myrtle Beach, S.C., recently had a roasted lionfish on the menu, with a pumpkin chorizo puree and crab velouté for $22. "It's tough for me to get," he says. "Sometimes fishermen don't want to handle it on their boat."
Ms. Lana, who organizes the government's "Eat Lionfish" campaign, says fishermen still often "throw [lionfish] overboard because they are not aware what they can do with them." The government is promoting lionfish as a do-good dish that helps balance ocean ecology. It's one of the few fish, she says, people can eat out of existence with a "clear conscience."
Write to Paul Glader at paul.glader@wsj.com

Newport Aquariums New Scuba Santa Show Debuts Nov. 26 Zoo and Aquarium Visitor News

Newport Aquariums New Scuba Santa Show Debuts Nov. 26 Zoo and Aquarium Visitor News

By Rodger Pille
Newport, KY - One of the most unique holiday attractions in the country, Scuba Santa’s™ Water Wonderland, is getting refreshed and updated this holiday season.
Now in his eighth year of entertaining and delighting guests at Newport Aquarium, Scuba Santa will still arrive in the 385,000-gallon Surrounded by Sharks exhibit. But this year, he’ll introduce a new show where even the most beloved animals in the tank can magically talk to the crowds. Sitting in his magical underwater sleigh – pulled by sea horses! – Scuba Santa will even read a new underwater version of his celebrated “Twas the Night Before Christmas” poem, complete with special Scuba Santa twists!
“Scuba Santa’s Water Wonderland,” which begins on Nov. 26 and runs through Jan. 2, has become one of the Tri-state area’s favorite and most unique holiday traditions.
There are so many great things to see and do at the Aquarium every day, but Scuba Santa’s Water Wonderland also features holiday festivities, activities and decorations.
Visit Scuba Santa’s Post Office, where kids can write letters to Scuba Santa and deposit them in a special mailbox for speedy delivery.
Take part in the Reindeer Roundup game by helping Scuba Santa find all the reindeer hidden throughout the Aquarium.
Enjoy Extended Holiday Hours on select days during the event! (See below for details.)
Admission to Scuba Santa’s Water Wonderland activities is free with a Newport Aquarium ticket.
For a complete schedule of Scuba Santa’s Water Wonderland show times or for more information, visit www.newportaquarium.com or call (859) 261-7444.
Extended Holiday Hours: 9 a.m. – 6 p.m.
November 26-27
December 26 – January 2
Newport Aquarium showcases thousands of animals from around the world in a million gallons of water. You’ll be amazed at all there is to see and do, including fun and interactive activities, like touching a shark or meeting penguins. Newport Aquarium is a Herschend Family Entertainment company (www.hfecorp.com) and a member of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA), a leader in global wildlife conservation. Newport Aquarium is open to the public 365 days a year and is located only two minutes from downtown Cincinnati at Newport on the Levee.
To view Newport Aquarium's web page on Zoo and Aquarium Visitor, go to: http://www.zandavisitor.com/forumtopicdetail-413-Newport_Aquarium

Thursday, November 11, 2010

The Scugog Standard weekly newspaper

Chalk Lake legend turned into fact by diversby Blake Wolfe/The Scugog Standard

In the southwest corner of Scugog Township near the Uxbridge border, there lies an area of ecological significance known as Chalk Lake. And in addition to the environmental features of the area, the waters of the lake have yielded at least a glimpse into the past of human habitation along the shoreline.

Homes line the northern and western shores along Lakeridge Rd. and Chalk Lake Rd., and the area has been the site of family farms and human habitation for decades. A dance hall on the southern side of Chalk Lake, built in the 1930s, once hosted community get-togethers and still opens for special events from time to time.

Recently, the area just north of Chalk Lake has been the focus of concern for residents and politicians on both sides of the Scugog/Uxbridge boundary, as work continues at a clean fill dump site advertised as a future heliport and landing strip. The site came under fire after work continued despite negative soil sample test results, displaying excessive levels of a number of toxic chemicals, and prompting Scugog staff to pull the site’s permits.

Given the history of human habitation along its shores, Chalk Lake likely holds a number of secrets within its waters. This summer, however, one of those secrets may have been at least partially revealed.

Uxbridge resident and recreational diver Michael Bice came across the story somewhat by accident.

A recent member of the Chalk Lake neighbourhood, Mr. Bice recalled speaking with another resident about the area when the conversation turned to talk of a local woman, who, one winter in the late 1800s, disappeared beneath the ice of Chalk Lake with her wagon and team of horses while trying to cross the semi-frozen surface.

“She was never found. Obviously, they didn’t have scuba gear back then,” said Mr. Bice.

Eager to find the remains, Mr. Bice and son Dylan went snorkeling in the lake this past June.
The pair found a wagon at a depth of 30 ft. near the northern shore of Chalk Lake, which could very well belong to the woman in the story.

“The wheel spokes are long gone, but the metal frame is still intact,” said Mr. Bice. “It must have been down there a long time. Wood should last a long time in cold water, and the fact that it’s gone from this wheel means it was there for quite a while.”

As for plans to remove the wagon, Mr. Bice said that it is half-submerged in a foot of silt at the bottom of Chalk Lake. That silt also makes for poor visibility at times, which Mr. Bice said was only about four feet at the time of the dive. In addition, the wagon may serve its purpose where it lies.

“We have no plans to bring it up as it has more historical value in the location where it went through the ice,” said Mr. Bice.

The search had a spin-off effect. Working with a weighted rope dropped from a canoe, the Bices mapped the depths of Chalk Lake this summer. At its deepest near the centre, the lake hits a depth of 70 ft., said Mr. Bice.

Human activity on and around Chalk Lake is only the most recent part of the lake’s story. Formed 10,000 years ago by a receding glacier signalling the end of the last ice age (around the same time the Oak Ridges Moraine was carved out of southern Ontario), the kettle lake is the result of a leftover block of ice creating a water-filled depression in the earth.

According to Jane Sirois of the Ministry of Natural Resources, Chalk Lake is the fourth largest of 32 kettle lakes on the Oak Ridges Moraine, measuring approximately 19 hectares.
The largest kettle lake in Canada is in Puslinch, Ontario. It is approximately 160 hectares.

The lake’s surrounding wetlands also contribute base flow to a major headwater tributary of Lynde Creek.

Wildlife in the area is also abundant. According to Ms. Sirois, Chalk Lake and its surrounding environs boast a number of plant and animal species, including 25 ‘locally significant’ plant species - species in which “there are 20 or less occurrences within a local ‘eco-district’ such as the Oak Ridges Moraine.”

Fish species living in the waters of Chalk Lake include the brown bullhead, white sucker, largemouth bass, pumpkinseed, central mudminnow, bluntnose minnow and rainbow darter.
The lake and its surrounding wetlands also provide a stopover point for migrating waterfowl, said Ms. Sirois, who added that the lake supports “provincially significant” wetlands as well as a noteworthy fen community (a wetland that occurs on peat and calcium carbonate deposits), measuring approximately two hectares in size and fed by groundwater coming out along the southern edge of Chalk Lake.

“This fen community is one of only a few on the Oak Ridges Moraine,” she said. “It is also one of only a few dozen fens known to exist in southern Ontario south of the Canadian Shield.”

As for the story of the wagon, Mr. Bice has future dives planned in which he hopes to unveil more of the story.

“I’m positive that her bones will always be there,” said Mr. Bice. “They’ll be preserved in the cold water and it’s our quest to find them. Who knows what else is down there?”

Terrifying moment shark took a bite out of sea paparazzi | Herald Sun

Terrifying moment shark took a bite out of sea paparazzi Herald Sun

AN underwater photographer got the fright of his life when a shark snatched the camera from his hands.
The diver was left shaking while the tiger shark swam off with the camera between its teeth.
The 2m creature later dropped the camera several metres away on the sea bed off the Bahamas.
Tiger sharks are considered one of the most dangerous shark species in the world and are responsible for many recorded attacks on humans, second only to the great white shark.
Photographer Karin Brussaard, from the Netherlands, captured all the action on camera.
She said: "There were about six or seven tiger sharks down there and we couldn't believe our luck.
"We were having a great time photographing them all until one diver swam towards one of them trying to get a better shot.

"The shark suddenly seemed to get angry and snatched the camera right out of his hands. I couldn't believe it. It swam away with it and we all just looked on in amazement.
"Luckily it did drop it eventually and remarkably the camera only seemed to have a couple of scratches on it."

Underwater Sculpture Cancun and Isla Mujeres Underwater Art Museum

MUSA Museo Subacuático de Arte
In 2009 the first steps of a monumental underwater museum called MUSA (Museo Subacuático de Arte) were formed in the waters surrounding Cancun, Isla Mujeres and Punta Nizuc. The project founded by Jaime Gonzalez Cano of The National Marine Park, Roberto Diaz of The Cancun Nautical Association and Jason deCaires Taylor, will consist of over 400 permanent life-size sculptures, becoming one of the largest and most ambitious underwater artificial attractions in the world.
The Museum aiming to demonstrate the interaction between art and environmental science forms a complex reef structure for marine life to colonise and inhabit. Each of the sculptures is made from specialized materials used to promote coral life, with the total installations occupying an area of over 420sq metres of barren sea bed and weighing over 180 tons. The Cancun Marine Park is one of the most visited stretches of water in the world with over 750,000 visitors each year, placing immense pressure on its resources. The location of the sculptures will promote the recovery of the natural reefs, relieving pressure on them by drawing visitors away.
To date the underwater museum comprises of 4 installations; La Jardinera de la Esperanza, Coleccionista de los Sueños, Hombre en Llamas and The Silent Evolution all by Jason deCaires Taylor. The Silent Evolution. His most ambitious work to date, is a collection of over 400 life-size figurative works forming a timeline of the changes both visually and socially in humans over the past centuries. For more information see The Silent Evolution (pdf).
The third stage of the museum commencing in 2011 will involve commissioning local and international artists to contribute further sculptural installations and host special underwater cultural events celebrating the Arts and ScienceThe National Marine Park of Isla Mujeres, Punta Cancun and Punta Nizuc is located in the northern part of the Mexican state of Quintana Roo. The island of Cancun is in the shape of a “7” and is bordered to the north by the Bahia de Mujeres; to the east by the Caribbean Sea; and to the west by the Nichupte Lagoon. Cancun is Mexico’s largest tourist destination and boasts 146 hotels with a total of 28,808 rooms. The sculptures are located within the boundaries of The National Marine Park on sandy areas of substrate close to Isla Mujeres, Punta Cancun and Punta Nizuc.

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Underwater photograph of a moray eel taken at world beauty spot | Mail Online

Underwater photograph of a moray eel taken at world beauty spot Mail Online

And you thought you'd had a bad day... Astonishing image of moray eel in underwater photos taken at world's beauty spots

By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 12:27 PM on 9th November 2010

His face says it all. Perhaps fed up with having a camera thrust in his face, a moray eel bares is wonky teeth as he confronts the photographer.
This image of a grumpy-looking creature was one of the top pictures in a competition which shows this years' best underwater photography taken at the planet's most beautiful nature spots around the world.
Big names working in underwater photography have just announced the winners of their two major world competitions aimed at showcasing the best images captured in the depths of our Oceans.

Up close and personal with a moray eel in one of the top pictures in this year's underwater photography prize

A diver swims along a continental trench in Silfra, Iceland in the picture that scooped the top prize

Whittling down thousands of entries, judges selected winners from several categories in their 'Our World Under Water' competition and sister event, the Fourth Annual Deep Indonesia International Underwater Photo Competition.
Prizes for the events make up the largest prize pool in the world for underwater photography.
A lonely diver traversing a cavernous underwater crack has scooped the 2010 Deep Indonesia photography competition.
The incredible picture was taken by 45-year-old professional photographer, Magnus Lundgren from Sweden as he was guided though the eerie fissure in Thingvellir Lake, Iceland.
Briton John Hill took the Silver award in the compact cameras category for his action packed image taken from the heart of a school of silver coated jackfish.

John Hill's photo of jack fish in Sipadan, Borneo, Malaysia took second proze

'Mystery Wreck' taken by a diver of his girlfriend in Gran Canaria scooped the best overall prize while this image of Lion fish in Red Sea, Egypt also featured

Amateur underwater photographer, Mr Hill was diving off Sipadan Island in East Borneo, Malaysia during September 2009 as part of a year he spent travelling south-east Asia with his girlfriend, Jenny.
'I was diving at the edge of the school simply observing them,' said the 30 year-old construction worker and ex-dive instructor from Portsmouth.
'Another diver from my group accidentally drove them towards me and before I knew it I was surrounded.
'Luckily I had the presence of mind to quickly reach for my camera and take my shot.
'I was amazed by the results and thrilled to have gained a silver award in such a prestigious competition.'
My advice to anyone who hasn't tried diving is to jump in and have a go.' The Deep Indonesia competition was launched alongside the Our World Under Water competition as a unique international mega-event which supports underwater photographic expos under the same names held in Jakarta, Indonesia and Chicago in the US in February next year.

Baltic herrings struggle for freedom inside a net in Baltic Sea

A diver explores a continental trench in Silfra, Iceland

A multitude of Schooling Catfish fill the photographer's frame in Indonesia

The competitions are so big that a total of over $120,000 (£74,000) worth of prizes were up for grabs this year, The aim, according to organisers, is for Our World Under Water and Deep Indonesia to showcase the art of underwater photography and seeks to underline the mystery, beauty and delicacy of the underwater realm.
The categories for Our World Underwater included macro traditional, macro unrestricted, super-macro traditional, wide angle traditional, wide angle unrestricted, compact cameras and novice.
Deep Indonesia categories included compact cameras, divers, animal portrait, animal behaviour, reefscapes, environment and conservation, and Indonesia residents.
The two competitions attracted over 5000 entries and winners were picked from 20 countries across the world.
David Barrio, 37 from Spain took the overall prize 'Best in Show' for the Deep Indonesia award for a haunting image of his girlfriend, slowly rising through a cabin of a deep sea wreck off the coast of southern Gran Canaria.

Sailfish attacking schooling fish in Port St. Johns, South Africa

A Stargazer in Blue Heron Bridge, Florida

A Frogfish and Shrimpfish in Indonesia

A Mantis Shrimp with eggs in Anilao, Philippines

Other award winning pictures included a dramatic picture of a leopard seal snapping its' jaws directly at the lens of Bartosz Strozynski from Poland, landing him the gold award for animal behaviour.
'I was playing with the seal,' said 35 year-old Bartosz from Poznan in Poland.
'They are curious and they do try to test you in the water.
'This one saw his reflection in my lens and must have thought I was another leopard seal.
'So she displayed her teeth as a warning.
'I'm very happy with this photo. Braving the cold was worth it.' The competitions threw up other gems such as the poignant picture of a male sea horse moments after he gave birth to his first born, a photograph of hunted baltic herring battling vainly against fishermen's netting and an image of colourful sweetlip fish racing over the reef.
The two competitions are organised by Eric Cheng of Wetpixel Online and Jason Heller of Dive Photo Guide, who each run the two acclaimed websites for dive photographers.
They launched underwatercompetition.com which hosts Our World Underwater and Deep Indonesia after the overwhelming popularity of their first underwater photography competition in 2005.

A juvenile Flying fish in Raja Ampat, Indonesia

A hungry Leopard seal in Antarctica

A Leopard seal in the Antarctic perches on an iceberg

Harlequin shrimps in Tulamben, Bali, Indonesia

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Praying underwater in Bohol | ABS-CBN News | Latest Philippine Headlines, Breaking News, Video, Analysis, Features

Praying underwater in Bohol ABS-CBN News Latest Philippine Headlines, Breaking News, Video, Analysis, Features

MANILA, Philippines – Adventurous Catholics now have another place of meditation and worship.

Bohol, a province known for its natural wonders, now has another tourist attraction – an underwater grotto at the Danajon reef in Bien Unido town.
Here, experienced divers can pray and pay their respects to 14-foot statues of Mother Mary and the Holy Child Jesus, which were installed 60 feet below sea level.

Our Lady of Danajon-Bien Unido

Santo Niño
“(Divers) can pray underwater to have a moment of deeper reflection than those normally experienced, and be thankful (to God) for safely guiding (them) through all their diving adventures,” a statement from the mayor’s office of Bien Unido read.
It continued, “Because in diving, one is immersed in another amazing world where everyone can really appreciate God’s wonderful creation.”
Bien Unido officials thought of installing religious statues underwater to discourage illegal fishing in the Danajon reef, which slowly deteriorated due to excessive dynamite and cyanide use.
To encourage more tourists, a mini hotel, a dive shop and other basic facilities have been put up in the area.
“(The underwater grotto was created so that) No man can destroy it for the sake of the future generation,” the statement said.
It added, “The double barrier reef represents a potential global attraction for divers and eco-tourists, potentially providing numerous jobs and stable tax revenue.”

Saturday, November 6, 2010

Celebrity Invention: Harry Houdini's Diving Suit - Rebecca Greenfield - Technology - The Atlantic

Celebrity Invention: Harry Houdini's Diving Suit - Rebecca Greenfield - Technology - The Atlantic

Some celebrities aren't just pretty faces. A few of them are also touched with that Yankee prowess for tinkering and invention. In this weekly series, we introduce you to the Patents of the Rich and Famous. And maybe you learn a little bit about how patent literature works along the way.
Inventor: Harry Houdini
Known For: Harry Houdini was one of the greatest entertainers of all time. While we have David Blaine and his days-long stunts, Houdini was escaping impossible situations more than a hundred years ago to titillate the top hat-wearing and petticoat-clad gents and ladies. Impossibly muscular and flexible, Houdini could escape from anything, even, as we see below, from a straightjacket while being suspended in the air.

While many remember him as a famous magician, more accurately, Houdini practiced escapology; he understood how to get out of things. This involved not only knowledge of human anatomy, but also of the apparatuses in which he encased his hunky figure.
Given that Houdini mastered escaping deadly situations, it makes sense that he would share his expertise with America, patenting a device which might prove helpful for those less skilled in escapology during a risky situation.
Invented Apparatus: "Diver's suit"

The master escapist created a diving suit which the wearer could easily remove while submerged underwater. The suit's design includes separate upper and lower sections connected by a lever-operated metallic belt, allowing the diver to more easily escape, unaided, while submerged.

The lower section having means to allow the diver when submerged to step out of the lower section, and the upper section having means to allow the diver when submerged to draw the upper portion of his body out of this upper section, and instantaneously operably releasing an automatic separable means at the said overlapping ends the said means having exterior actuating devices under the control of the encased diver to permit the latter when submerged.

Rationale Behind Invention: Master escape artists think things through. Houdini created his suit to help divers avoid death by any means. And obviously, it might come in handy for underwater tricks.

Its object is to provide a new and improved diver's suit arranged to permit the diver, in case of danger for any cause whatever, to quickly divest himself of the suit while being submerged and to safely escape and reach the surface of the water. Another object is to enable the diver to put on or take off the suit without requiring assistance. Another object is to prevent the diver when submerged from being crushed by the pressure of the surrounding water in case the air supply gives out or the air line becomes fouled for any cause. A further object is to enable the diver to go quickly down to a greater depth and to readily rise therefrom without consuming as much time in effecting a "compressing or a decompressing action" as now required and practiced.

That's right, his suit not only allows self sufficient easy escape, preventing drowning, it also counteracts underwater pressure, preventing that kind of death too.
Off Label Uses: This diving suit has three possible uses: underwater stripping, Steve Zisou costume prop, or a combination of the two.
Future Directions: Kenneth Silverman's Houdini biography attributes the magician's death to a punch to the stomach. While this invention addresses every possible danger while submerged, it doesn't protect from possible underwater punches -- or other attacks. Like shark bites. Insulate the suit with body armor or this shark-resistant chain mail.

Toilets and chatrooms - the challenges of freedom

Sat, Nov 06, 2010
The China Post/Asia News Network

What would Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp say to a group of divers who left a toilet carrying their signatures underwater off Taiwan's Green Island?
What would the Chinese government say to Taiwan's Ministry of Education which recently suggested the island's top university harness its online chatroom posts?
These two episodes made minor headlines this week in Taiwan media that has otherwise been overwhelmed the upcoming mayoral elections.

But they provoke some thoughts about a fundamental value in this country - namely freedom, or the abuse of it.
Those recreational divers apparently were not satisfied only with being able to enjoy the natural beauty of the coral reefs around the small island off the eastern coast of Taiwan.
They wanted to do some "plastic surgery" - so to speak - to the marine world by creating their piece of installation art, which they reasoned would add fun to diving there.
They brought along a new clean toilet, and signed their names on it.
They carried it with them on their underwater trip, and left it there among the reefs.
They filmed the entire process, and posted the video online.
They did enjoy the trip, but their fun sparked the rage of many netizens who condemned their stupid, selfish and polluting act.
They have since pulled the video from the Internet, and the authorities are mulling whether they have to be slapped with a fine for their act of pollution.
These divers are not the only ones who have left such "we were here" objects around the Green Island.
To be fair, underwater installation art is nothing new, though still quite rare.
But is the Green Island toilet a work of art?
What would be the verdict of Duchamp, who provoked a controversy by submitting a urinal to an art exhibition in 1917?
In private, artists may embrace their own definitions of art, but when their works enter the public domain, the general public will have a say.
Banksy's graffiti is widely recognized as art although many British people may not think so.
But in Taiwan we can see many examples of graffiti that are much closer to vandalism than to art.
These graffiti "artists'" messages - if any - fail to convey anything meaningful.
They have the freedom to express their thoughts, but they abuse it.
Those divers abused such freedom in a similar fashion.
Freedom of speech and expression is also the core issue in the case concerning the education ministry's suggestion for National Taiwan University (NTU).
After receiving complaints about political postings on a NTU-run social networking site, the ministry suggested the university tighten control to prevent students from being manipulated by politicians.
The suggestion has prompted many of the site's users to accuse the ministry of trying to clamp down on the freedom of speech.
The ministry has responded by claiming that it simply passed on the complaints to NTU.
NTU's response is that it will ask the managers of the site to strictly enforce the house rules and watch out for libelous postings.
The ministry may have committed the same kind of mistake that those divers did: they both attempted to force something on others.
The divers tried to force others to share their "fun," while the ministry attempted to force its ideology on NTU and its students.
Freedom of speech and expression is fundamental in Taiwan although under certain circumstances it has to be harnessed.
The NTU students, as well as their counterparts from all other universities, must be allowed to exercise such freedom, as well as making their own judgments, instead of being told what they can say or read.
In the divers' case, it is obvious that their "freedom" to have irresponsible fun should be restricted.
Let's return to the questions we asked at the beginning of this editorial.
The Chinese government would probably tell NTU to down the networking site, or filter out anything political or anti-government.
And we are not sure what the French artist would tell the divers.
But we suspect that Duchamp would tell the NTU students to speak freely, and not be afraid of expressing themselves or challenging the authorities. -The China Post/ANN