from Undercurrent Magazine

The GoPro Hero range of action cameras is a marvelous addition to your dive gear bag. I first wrote about GoPro and its Hero3 model in the November 2013 issue of Undercurrent, but in its latest Hero 4 incarnation with its watertight housings, these little POV cameras have an application for almost any activity, especially risky activities that might destroy a more conventional camera. No wonder GoPros proved to be the most popular Christmas present of 2014.

The Underwater Photography Guide is now accepting entries for the 5th annual Ocean Art competition. Prizes worth over $75000 are on offer in 15 categories giving underwater photographers of all levels a chance to win.

For the less experienced photographers there are novice, compact camera and mirror-less camera categories. Then there are the wide-angle, macro, marine life portraits and marine life behaviour. More unusually, this competition also features categories of supermacro, cold or temperate water and nudibranchs.

Imagine it’s your job to dive for scallops deep in the cold, murky waters off the Maine coast. It’s a hard job and one that fewer fisherman are doing.

Now imagine you have use of just one arm. That’s the case for James Sewell, who lost his right arm in a 2009 snowmobiling accident and resumed diving less than a year later, according to this New York Times video by Maine filmmakers Christoph Gelfand and Caroline Losneck.

“I’ve never been a person that likes for people to do stuff for me,” said Sewell, who also dives for urchins and fishes for bluefin tuna. “I like to do for myself.”

According to the Times, Sewell, 43, is one of only about 30 active scallop divers working on the Maine coast.

The video shows what that job is like for Sewell, who dives off his boat, the Sophie Elizabeth, out of Cushing.

“It’s just not a 9 to 5 job. Deep diving puts a lot of nitrogen into your blood. It’s hard on your joints. It’s hard on you,” Sewell says in the video. “Once you get to a certain age you’re not going to be able to keep doing it. I think about my family and the risks you take. Every day that you go down on bottom you have that chance of something fails or something happens — that might be the last time that you see them.”

It turns out that blindfolding a shark or plugging its nose isn't enough to deter it from going after prey. When a shark gets hungry, it will use all the senses it has available to hunt down something to eat, a new study reveals.

The goal of the study was to figure out how sharks use their different senses together, rather than isolating one sense at a time. Researchers examined three species of sharks — blacktip, bonnethead and nurse sharks — in an artificial flow channel inside the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla.