Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Candid camera, January 9, 2008
The deep ocean around us is so inaccessible that some species of deep-living fish became known only because the Mauna Loa lava flow of 1919 killed them, and their bodies were collected after they floated to the top.
In the 1970s, mechanical observation platforms began taking pictures of depths beyond scuba diving limits, and since 1987 the Pisces V of the Hawaii Underwater Research Laboratory has been reaching depths of more than 6,000 feet.
"In Deeper Waters" is a collection of photographs of what was found, primarily animals but also of various geological formations.
With photographs (and also direct observation), the odd looking creatures known earlier from dredging turn out even odder.
There are, for example, brisingid sea stars (like starfish but with more than a dozen arms) that hang upside down under ledges and wave their feet in the currents to snare small crustaceans -- unlike their cousins who crawl around breaking open molluscs.
And there are urchins that, unlike their shallow water cousins, zip along so fast on short spines that collectors have difficulty catching them.
Once the specimens are deposited in the collection basket (by a remote controlled arm), the most intelligent inhabitants of the deep water, the fish, treat the baskets like a buffet.
Though there are about 200 kinds of animals pictured in this book, there is no telling how many remain to be seen. The authors say that even in the clearest water, at depth the photographic lights can penetrate no farther than 12 feet. If the Loch Ness monster were 13 feet away from the lens, nobody would ever know.
For a different reason, the most numerous multicellular inhabitants of the deep zone do not appear in this book. There are no pictures at all of worms, and University of Hawaii researchers E.H. Chave and Alexander Malahoff mention them only twice in passing.
Considering how difficult it was to get pictures of Coronaster elipes, which is bright orange and has arms 16 inches long, the absence of pictures of worms in the mud is no surprise.
It is odd, though, that this little book does not even discuss the deep biotic community as a whole. Worms do get recovered from dredges.
In fact, "In Deeper Waters" is an oddly divided book.
The picture section, with minimal text, is written for Joe Six-pack. The other half of the book consists of "A Taxonomic List of Animals Photographed from HURL Submersibles" and a list of scientific publications.
Only specialists will want to read past page 75.
The pictures, despite the difficult conditions, are mostly gorgeous, though small.
One thing they show is life is scarce down there. In some areas, there is only one animal per 20 square meters, on average.
Among the most beautiful and strange animals are the sea fan and sea lilies.
Shallow water species are common throughout most of the Pacific, say the authors, but for some reason never made it to Hawaii. The deepwater species, however, exist in luxuriant variety. There are, for example, 10 different sea fans listed, though all but two are rare.
Apparently none has been scientifically described, so they are listed by the descriptive names chosen by the sub pilots -- broom, brush, gold, gray, leather, pink fan, purple, red, spider and yellow. These names suggest how spectacular these animals can be.
This collection makes it evident how difficult the struggle for life is at depths. The ocean floor and the slopes of the volcanoes that make islands and seamounts are really a crazy quilt of (often) very small living spaces, defined by the type of surface (silt, sand, bare rock), water chemistry and currents.
Very few of the pictures here display more than a couple of individuals of any one species. The deep ocean does not display the vast wet prairies dominated by one species, like kelp or oysters, that are seen in shallow places.
Though HURL has now been diving systematically for years, many parts of the Hawaiian island chain have scarcely been touched. These include Maui County except Penguin Bank and the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
The vast majority of HURL dives have been on the western slopes of the islands. Some have been to Loihi, the emerging next volcano in the chain, and a few to seamounts (especially Cross Seamount) that are far older than the Hawaiian Islands.
These sometimes have rather different faunas, although today they are comparatively close. Cross is about 150 miles from Kona. But the seamounts were created closer to South American and moved on shifting plates to the North Pacific.
Meanwhile, the hot spot now under Loihi has been stationary for about 75 million years, generating islands that also drift northwest on the plate.
Since the Hawaiian islands were colonized mostly from the west, there seem to be some differences between the later faunas and the earlier deep faunas that crept over from the east. There has, of course, been some mixing, too.
One interesting point made by Chave and Malahoff is that "the deep sea larvae were probably carried along in currents coming from different directions and of different strengths than those that transported shallow-water animals."
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