Diving in the name of Science
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Ah, scientific diving! Supposedly everyone's dream job, or at least that is the marine biologist's 9-to-5 that lives in the public imagination. You know the reels: someone in full corporate attire, captioned "marine biologist on her way to work," scooting off a jetty straight into the ocean.
If only my commute looked like that!! But here is the thing, the reality is somehow better than all of the memes.
Diving on its own is already magical: a whole hour breathing underwater, no phone, no emails, no one able to reach you. Just you and the blue. Now, hand yourself a slate and a transect tape and an actual job to do down there, and instead of ruining it, it becomes the most absorbing, yet exhausting, hour(s) of your week(s).
My diving journey: the best kind of exhausting
I got my Professional Association of Diving Instructors’ Open Water certification in 2022, at 18 years old, and was lucky enough to do it on the Great Barrier Reef, which is an absurd place to learn, as I set the bar pretty high. I live in Sydney, which means temperate diving: kelp, cold water, and a moodier kind of beauty that I've grown to love. As a broke undergrad, I worked at a dive shop for a few months, and instead of a paycheck, they gave me my own gear, which was amazing.
From there the addiction took hold: in 2023 I backpacked through South America and finished in the Galápagos (an absolute melting pot of biodiversity) where I dived for five days straight. Then in 2024, I spent a month as a research assistant with the Institute for Marine Research in the Philippines, on a little island called Dauin. That was my first real taste of what scientific diving felt like.
We dove twice a day, every working day. Coral transects, benthic surveys, 3D photogrammetry, fragmenting corals of opportunity, assessing reef impacts, culling crown-of-thorns starfish. There is a particular kind of focus that takes over when you are working underwater, you are counting, measuring, framing photos, watching your air gauge and minding your buddy, all while a turtle cruises past like you are not even there.
Your brain is completely full and completely calm at the same time. I have never found anything else quite like it. Forty-plus dives later I was wiped out in the best possible way, and my determination to protect reefs had only grown. Here, finally, was a way to have a tangible impact, even if it was just one small patch of reef at a time!
Where modelling meets the water
My Honours project was designed to be underwater doing transects, and then translating those numbers into an ecological model. I am using fine-scale field surveys, remote sensing and ensemble species distribution modelling to map habitat suitability for two of Sydney's hard corals: the subtropical Pocillopora aliciae and the temperate Plesiastrea versipora, across the Northern Beaches region.
The maps generated by the models are the tidy end product that people picture when they hear "ecological modelling." But every single data point behind the mathematical machinery starts with my dive team and me in a very thick wetsuit, kicking along a reef, taking data points on a dive slate with numb fingers. The dive is the front end of the whole science, and it has got to be my favourite part.
The bit(s) nobody warned me about
Now, I would be lying if I pretended it was all effortless wonder. Scuba is inherently high-risk: we are essentially borrowing an hour in an environment that does not especially want us there. There is the equipment, an intimidating number of moving parts that all have to work perfectly. There is the nitrogen, quietly building up in your body at depth, which is how you end up with decompression sickness. And there is the paperwork… oh, the paperwork!!!
Before I started Honours, divers in my lab warned me that the fieldwork planning was tedious. It is only once you are actually in (deep) it, reconciling university requirements, Work Health and Safety guidelines, risk assessments, buddy checks, dive plans, weather windows, gear servicing and approvals, that you actually realise the depth of regulations surrounding this type of fieldwork.
I have absolutely had the grumpy mid-field-week thought: is there an inverse relationship between how tightly scientific diving is regulated and how much science actually gets done? When you have spent more hours on forms, it can certainly feel that way!! Now, thinking about it (post-fieldwork season), those rules exist because the risk is absolutely real, and a safe diver is one who can keep contributing across an entire career, not just one big field season.
It was also my very first field season as a leader, which comes with its own challenges, such as working out the system, knowing who to contact, etc. I realised that the paperwork is simply the price of being allowed to keep showing up. What is also pretty exciting is the future in this marine fieldwork space. Remotely Operated Vehicles and emerging technologies keep expanding what we can do, reaching depths and durations no human diver safely can (like the mesophotic coral systems!!).
For all the planning headaches, I still cannot quite believe I had these learning opportunities as part of my Honours year. I got to spend days underwater gathering data, organising dive teams, learning how to pilot underwater drones, even taking a cohort of undergraduate students enrolled in the subject “Ocean Systems and Climate Change”, to help me with gathering transect data for a particular site.
Happy days!
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