Roving in Deep-Sea Canyons

A story from Geoff Shester.

The mysteries of the deep sea have captivated the imagination of people since the first sailors set out from shore. Geoff, California Campaign Director for Oceana, takes us in a remote operating vehicle on a deep sea adventure where bright pink and purple corals and sponges grow in the company of teeny fish, tubeworms, anemones and other critters usually hidden from our view. This secret, magic world comes to life as we follow Geoff’s account.

GEOFF SHESTER is currently California Campaign Director with the non-profit organization, Oceana, and he is based in Monterey. He work involves advocacy and marine policy, and he works with state and fishery management bodies to try to protect ocean habitat and reduce by-catch in fisheries.

Geoff was born in Santa Monica, California and grew up in Carlsbad, CA. He came to Santa Cruz on the north edge of Monterey Bay to go to school. He studied Environmental Studies and biology, science, and policy at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC). After graduating, Geoff started working at Oceana in Alaska in 2002, engaging in policy efforts to try to protect seafloor habitats from overfishing, and protecting some coral reefs that were recently discovered there.

After his Alaskan stint, Geoff decided to go back to school to get additional tools to be more effective. He knew that Stanford had a marine lab in Monterey and his wife was there. He enrolled in Stanford’s PhD program, where he studied marine biology, population models, ecology, and the human dimension in sociology. His focus was and is on maintaining fisheries while protecting habitats.

You can watch Geoff’s story on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/eNncIwn8o0k  

ROVING IN DEEP-SEA CANYONS

Ten years ago Oceana helped secure some protections for seafloor habitats off the West Coast[1], and we got over 135,000 square miles protected from bottom trawl fishing, which is a type of fishing gear that drags on the seafloor. The purpose was to protect some of these deep-sea habitats. We discovered in going through that policy process that the most compelling information was video footage. Most of the seafloor had never been seen before with human eyes.

In scuba diving we go down maybe a couple hundred feet at most, and then we basically have a huge other planet down there. So the idea is we can start providing more photos and images, and bring some of the dark, deep sea to the light of day and actually show this to policy makers. That can be a really effective tool to compel governments to protect some of these areas before they are damaged. Many of these deep-sea corals may be hundreds of thousands of years old, so if they are damaged, in many cases, it’s a really an irreversible impact. That’s simply not something that can recover.

So we learned about some of these corals and saw some of the footage that MBARI [2]was making in the deep-sea canyon here. We didn’t want to just wait for a bunch of other scientists or governments to try to go down there. We were like, “Can we do this ourselves?”

So we worked with our office in Chile, which has actually hired an engineer who built remote operated vehicles (ROVs) about the size of a beer cooler, and we had one shipped up all the way from Chile. They shipped it to the east coast first, which was right around the time of the Deep Water Horizon oil spills. They used it out there.

Then we managed to get a sail boat, the Derrick M Bayliss. It was a research sailboat that normally just took tourists around, and they take it on whale watch trips, but it had an A-frame, and so we were like, “Let’s see if we can use this.”

Some of our staff drove this remote operated vehicle all across the country in a U-Haul. And the question was: Could this work? Could we actually do it? So we got the remote operated vehicle, the ROV, and we loaded it up in the boat, and it took about a day or so to get it all set up to see if it would work.

So yeah, we’re just learning how to use this thing. It reminds me of an old video game system. It has these little joy sticks on it, and we’re basically putting this thing out there and really feeling like we’re astronauts. We’re kind of going and exploring the depths, and it’s amazing, it’s like, it’s right here! !t’s the backyard of all these people that live around Monterey Bay, all these people that come here to go whale watching. It’s the perfect disguise; it’s gorgeous! We have no idea what’s down there!

And so having scuba dived for a while, I knew that the kelp forests were really an amazing ecosystem, and that these undersea cathedrals that we have just right off Cannery Row are some of the most spectacular spots I’ve ever been to.  I’ve been around the world scuba diving, then you go right here at home, and it’s some of the most amazing stuff I’ve ever seen!! So we were just thrilled to go down to some of these canyons in the ROV.

We’ve learned about all of the places that have been already explored, but we really wanted to go to spots where no one had been yet. So we got some amazing maps showing these big huge pinnacles and reefs and canyons. And we went out right off Pt. Pinos, and all around the Peninsula and basically tried to put this ROV in to see if we could even do it, and could we get footage of this stuff.

I have to say, we started out and we went to some of the shale beds and some of these reefs just right off the coast here, and we got the ROV down. Once we could actually see the footage from this thing our minds were just blown! Right! I mean you’ve got huge reefs, teaming with life, rockfish hiding in crevices, octopus scurrying around. Some of the corals and sponges they’re just like bright pink and bright purple, with fish swimming around them, and it’s just like, “Whoa!”

So we started going deeper and deeper, and we went down into Carmel Canyon, which comes out here, and we’re just looking at vertical cliffs and every little hole had little eyes poking out. The more we would go explore, the more we found fascinating things that you would never expect to see. Surprise after surprise! Just crazy tubeworms and sponges, and we’d go over and we’d see these things called metridium anemones. They looked like gigantic cauliflowers this big. There’d be rocks just covered in hundreds and hundreds of these things.

And then you’d look a little closer and there’s ling cod nestled inside there, hiding, and small little fish and small little snails. It’s just like this fantastic, unimaginable ecosystem that’s there that no one ever sees. So it’s pitch black, you’ve got these amazing things, and here we are with this space ship basically going down there with big lights and getting this video for the first time.

It’s great to now have the ability to show people what it looks like down there. A lot of people think oh well it’s just the shallow stuff and the deeper you go it’s just gonna be a bunch of mud, but the deeper you go here, the more fantastic it is. And I think that’s one of my favorite wildlife experiences where we just start seeing all these amazing critters and fish.

We discovered fish right off Pt. Lobos that no one even knew existed there. They thought that the furthest south they were found was hundreds of miles to the north. And we’re discovering species, improving the understanding of what species even live here. What species do we have? The fact that just going on a few dives you can actually see some of that stuff is absolutely amazing.

One of my favorite dive sites is the Carmel Pinnacles, and we can dive down to the top of these pinnacles. The top’s about 80 or 90 feet down. You can dive down there, but you can’t stay down there very long and you can’t go down a whole lot deeper. So we went out there in one of these newly protected marine reserves with the ROV, and we brought it lower and lower, and deeper and deeper into the dark and to the deep part of the pinnacles. And some of these walls, are a 100% covered.  You can’t even see rock, it’s like a garden of living animals. They’re covering the entire rock. There’d be these vertical walls hundreds of feet high just covered in bright pink strawberry anemones and purple nudibranchs, and bright yellow sponges, and then beautiful corals, and big huge sea fans down there. It’s an absolutely fantastic world. We just got the smallest glimpses.

The fact that we were able to get a remote operating vehicle, drop it off the back of a sail boat right here in Monterey and see things that nobody’s seen before – I mean, that’s spectacular!

[1] West Coast of the United States

[2] Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute