Ann and Bill were really getting into scuba diving. It was everything they had imagined it would be, and more. They were diving at a local quarry, and conditions were good overall. When they reached the platform 60 feet down, Ann noticed Bill was having trouble with his weight belt and moved in to help him out. She didn’t expect it to be a problem. Fighting with the belt and his gear, Bill twisted to one side and knocked Ann’s regulator from her mouth. Things went downhill from there.

The health benefits of scuba diving and the transferable skills gained from this sport make it one of the best alternative medicine therapies around.

As part of my role as a Miss Scuba United Kingdom finalist, I recently took my first flipper steps into the underwater world at Deep Blue Scuba diving club, Edinburgh, Scotland where I successfully completed Discover Scuba.

During the dive, I was amazed at how therapeutic this underwater sport is and how being underwater enhances teamwork and communication skills.

The underwater environment is proven to provide food for the soul where the body and mind is submersed into a state of calmness and wellbeing. The ocean has long been portrayed as a healing force – the cure of saltwater for cuts and wounds as well as the hypnotic and dream like trance of the waves in feeling at peace with the world. It provides an opportunity to “wash away the pain” and “feel replenished”. This is part of what makes scuba diving effective as a rehabilitation aid in support programmes for people with mental and physical disabilities as promoted by the highly admirable work of the charity Deptherapy.

I have known since my first days as a diver that people under stress are fighting panic and tend to make wrong choices. In an emergency, divers need a limited number of survival responses. The main danger with Scuba is no air. We need to get gas quickly, either from a buddy or the surface. Simple.

Rebreathers though can be quite complex as the manufacturer attempts to make them ‘hands-off’ or ‘fool proof’. As divers, we are taught to develop muscle memory so when a problem occurs we choose the correct response. With some rebreathers we are offered too many choices – which one do we select when we are stressed? Have we practiced all the drills since completing our training. Remember that we are often in deco so can’t just free ascend to the surface.

Within the Tech Dive community there is a mantra that too many gadgets equals too many points of potential failure. This does not seem to apply to rebreathers. My first CCR gave me a huge number of options depending on the problem I was presented with. Each one of those options had to go into the memory bank, and individual muscle memories had to be developed. My chest seemed to be covered in hoses, counter-lungs and fittings of various descriptions. To make matters worse, I had to learn drills for all these mechanical and electronic gadgets.

We are told during CCR training that we have more time to sort out a CCR problem than we do a Scuba problem. Usually a catastrophic failure on Scuba results in a sudden massive loss of air. Being out of air is easily recognized as there are masses of noisy bubbles and we inhale water, or nothing at all. Some CCR failures are insidious and develop over time, while others lead to unconsciousness very quickly. So what can we do about it?

The logical thing would be to simplify the rebreather operation and reduce the points of potential failure. ‘Simple’ is less likely to go wrong, particularly if it allows us to bail out.

Sharks: A Key Part of Ocean Ecosystems

As one of the top predators of the oceans, sharks play an important role in the food web and help ensure balance in the ocean’s ecosystem. As demand and exploitation rates for some shark species and shark products (i.e., fins) have increased, concern has steadily grown regarding the status of many shark stocks and the insustainability in global fisheries. 

Relative to other marine fish, sharks are characterized by relatively slow growth, late sexual maturity, and a small number of young per brood. These biological factors leave many species of sharks vulnerable to overfishing. Fishermen catch sharks in directed fisheries and also as bycatch in other non-directed fisheries. Many shark species have been over-exploited because their fins are highly valued for shark fin soup. 

Globally there is a general lack of data reporting on the catch of sharks, particularly species-specific data. For these reasons, sharks present an array of issues and challenges for fisheries conservation and management both domestically and internationally. Despite the challenges, NOAA Fisheries is committed to achieving sustainable management of sharks. 

Since Pacific lionfish were first detected off the coast of Florida three decades ago, they have spread around the Caribbean, gobbling up everything that fits in their mouths and reproducing at a phenomenal rate. Scientists have shown that soon after they descend upon a reef, there is a sharp fall in the number of small fish, notably the herbivores on which coral depends for survival. “They’re eating their way through the reefs like a plague of locusts,” said Mark Hixon, a lionfish specialist at the University of Hawaii. It is by far the most destructive invasive species ever recorded at sea, and the blight is believed to have started with aquarium fish released off the Florida Atlantic coast in the mid-1980s.