A late return “makes you very unpopular.”īut as they were preparing to come up, Widder saw something extremely weird swimming out in front of them: a fish with a super long, skinny tail, a long, racing-stripe-like strip running down its side, and a huge, pelican-like mouth. “You really don’t want to mess with people’s dinner times,” she says. As she remembers, it was late in the day, and they’d already been called to return to the surface. Widder and Phil Santos, the submersible’s pilot, were nearing the end of their dive. At the time, it was one of the few submersibles available for research into questions about life in the middle of the ocean, instead of just the seafloor, or the surface waters. This was a deep-water vehicle with a big, transparent sphere that researchers like Widder could sit in and observe ocean life while maneuvering robotic arms to drop samples into collection buckets. Widder had squeezed into a Johnson Sea Link submersible. An amazing discovery that left Widder wanting more It started decades ago, with journeys down into the depths of the ocean, where Widder encountered some very strange fish. And so, she did, by mimicking the amazing adaptations of sea creatures she’d studied, and using them to design a camera she calls “The Eye in the Sea.” In her book, Below the Edge of Darkness, and on the latest episode of Vox’s Unexplainable podcast, Widder recalls her quest to build this underwater eye, and the unexpected scientific treasures it has allowed her to witness. “I don’t think people have any concept of how little we understand life on our own planet,” she says.īut in order to understand that life better - at least in the ocean - she would need to create the equivalent of a blind for the ocean. This was why Widder wanted the chance to observe ocean animals like the gulper eel, or sixgill sharks, or even the extremely elusive giant squid, without them noticing her presence. “It just leaves you with so many questions when you see an animal like this,” Widder says. Ocean biologist Edith Widder, early in her career as a marine explorer, in a diving suit known as a WASP. Animals that might normally swim around would just float at the top of tanks and generally act like they were in a glass cage, thousands of miles away from home. Over the course of her decades-long career, when Widder captured animals from the deep ocean and brought them into laboratory aquariums for study, the ocean animals would sometimes start behaving weirdly. Studying fish in labs is also not a perfect solution. And so, Widder suspected that there were lots of great scientific insights and lessons of natural history, all being left unlearned. “When we go down there with our big, noisy thrusters and bright white lights.” She says the fish and other animals are disturbed by the noise and the vibrations, so even if they don’t swim away, they won’t necessarily act naturally. “We’re just so obtrusive,” Widder says, when she describes the options that are most readily available to a marine biologist, like observing sea creatures aboard a submarine. But for a long time, Widder couldn’t conceal herself enough to glean these kinds of details from underwater research subjects. Undisturbed, animals will reveal amazing secrets: mating rituals, hunting habits, or special behaviors that help them avoid predators. On land, if scientists want to observe animals in their natural habitat, undisturbed, they can set up special concealment spots, or “blinds,” that hide their presence from their subjects. Marine biologist Edith Widder loves the ocean, but there is one thing she envies about her colleagues who study life on land.
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