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MISSION DISPATCH 6 August 22, 2007 Mark Schrope - @SEA Correspondent aboard the R/V SEWARD JOHNSON Location: Near Gouldings Cay Stranded Camera = Change of Plans It was a busy day, but one that ended with a stranded Eye-in-the Sea (EITS) that is forcing a change in plans. But first, a run down on the earlier parts of the day. Sonke Johnsen had the first dive and continued his study of animal camouflage. He and Harbor Branch sub pilot Craig Caddigan began at 1,000 feet where they found what Sonke described as an absolute "desert" with nothing around. 
Making their way up, at about 800 feet, things didn't look much better but a few small corals began to appear. They were ascending a nearly vertical wall, and at about 400 feet, says Sonke, the scene changed dramatically and the cliff face began to take on the look of a shallower tropical reef. "It was pretty amazing," says Sonke, "All of a sudden everything was just thick, lush, and abundant." A Fancy Trick Sponges in a rainbow of colors covered the rock, and fish and corals abounded. The most interesting sight, he says, was an octopus trying to hide itself against an orange background. Octopus camouflage is something of a mystery, because research has shown the animals do not have color vision, yet they are able to change their body color to match a variety of backgrounds. So, how do you match a color you can't see? Nobody has the answer yet, though one idea is that the animals have some kind of color sensing organs on their bodies besides their eyes. Once they made it to the lush zone, Craig and Sonke made sweeping runs horizontally at 50-foot depth increments all the way to 100 feet. The dive allowed Sonke to complete a full analysis for his camouflage work from the bottom to the top of the cliff the team has been exploring during submersible dives. 
A Runaway Trap A second short dive with Misha Matz in the sphere with Craig was sidetracked by a search for a runaway crustacean trap. Tammy Frank had feared that if the traps were knocked off the small ledge where they were placed, they would be in for a long fall and that seems to be what happened with one of them, which was nowhere to be found. The other was recovered from its original location. Trouble in the Deep The final dive of the day didn't go as we had hoped, to put it mildly. It was scheduled to be the last dive at this site. Warwick Sloss, a videographer with the BBC working on a new documentary series called Life, was in the sphere. He had grand plans of capturing spectacular footage of animal behavior after a quick side trip to pick up the Eye-in-the-Sea. That's where the trouble began. EITS has a rack that holds bait and the bioluminescent lure in front of the camera, and the sub pilot has to fold it up until a latch grabs before taking the system to the surface. Somehow, the rack had become misaligned. I watched, silently cheering from the back chamber through a video feed as the latch came just a hair from clicking. But in the end it simply was not possible for pilot Phil Santos to lock it in the up position. 
No problem, says Phil, we'll surface with the rack still down. It's been done
before - a sub crew member on the ship just has to jump in and lift the rack
and tie it into position before the sub is loaded onto the ship. An excellent
plan, except that the robotic arm was damaged from the strain of trying to get
the rack in place, so we couldn't pick up EITS at all and had to instead cut
the dive short and return immediately to the surface.
The plan had been to start steaming for our next destination, Little San Salvador, as soon as this dive was done, but now we'll have to stay another day. Plan B is to repair the arm as quickly as possible, retrieve EITS in the morning, do a couple of short dives, and then we'll be off. 
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