WHOI engineer Paul Fucile invented an inexpensive, easy-to-deploy bathy-photometer. It measures light levels from bioluminescent marine life, which can reveal the positions of Navy ships, subs, and SEALs. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, WHOI Graphic Services)
By Laurence Lippsett
Editor, Oceanus Magazine
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
On a 1995 research cruise in the Arabian Sea, WHOI Research Engineer
Paul Fucile asked an innocent question, just to satisfy his curiosity.
He had been watching a three-person Naval Research Laboratory (NRL)
team use a deck-mounted winch and a steel wire to maneuver a half-ton,
golf-cart-sized, $500,000 piece of equipment called the High Intake
Defined EXcitation (HIDEX) photometer. It was monsoon season, the
weather was rough, and the crew struggled to lower HIDEX safely over
the side.
“What do you measure with that?” Fucile asked, not
thinking that his query would launch him into a completely new line of
research.
The answer was “light”—light created by living things.
Marine organisms ranging from bacteria to fish make their own
chemically induced light—called bioluminescence—to hunt, frighten
predators, attract mates, communicate, or camouflage themselves.
Movement in the water excites marine life to glow. It also stimulates
the Navy’s interest.
Bioluminescence has betrayed the
positions of submarines and sealed their doom. Sailors have detected
the luminous wakes of torpedoes. Returning pilots have followed
luminescent trails over many miles to find their aircraft carriers, as
have their enemies. Navy SEALs are mindful of certain beaches where
bioluminescence would give them away.
Building a better light-trap
Bioluminescence is ubiquitous in the oceans, and especially prevalent
in coastal regions where nutrients are abundant and life thrives. Yet
scientists have little basic understanding of how bioluminescence is
influenced by water temperatures, depths, seasons, geographic
locations, even different times of day. They have been limited by a
scarcity of observations and instruments to make them.
After
watching his colleagues’ difficulties with HIDEX, Fucile spent his
night watch that evening drawing a sketch for a light-sensing
instrument that was smaller, sturdier, less complicated, and less
expensive. From the ship, he e-mailed a list of materials to WHOI
Experimental Machinist Mark St. Pierre, asking him to get them ready so
that Fucile could start construction as soon as he returned.
Eight weeks later, back in the Arabian Sea with the same NRL team,
Fucile tested a prototype of his bathy-photometer, an instrument to
measure bioluminescence in the ocean. The NRL team was impressed with
the initial results. It worked well enough to earn Fucile a Cecil H.
and Ida M. Green Technology Innovation Award, given to WHOI engineers
to launch new ideas in instrumentation or technology. A year later, he
was awarded an Office of Naval Research grant.
Portable, tough, and inexpensive
Fucile’s patented 10-pound, 28-inch-long instrument is so inexpensive,
it’s expendable. His Expendable Bathy-Photometers (XBPMs) can be easily
transported and pitched over the side of a ship by one person even in
the worst weather conditions. As they descend, the XBPMs spool out a
thread-like wire that transmits digital data to a computer on deck.
Fucile also developed and patented this telemetry system.
The
sophisticated HIDEX is capable of making a wide range of subtle
measurements, including distinguishing individual types of
bioluminescent plankton. But for the first-order task of measuring
bioluminescence levels, the XBPM is about 90 percent as accurate as
HIDEX—without HIDEX’s fragile and expensive glass-tube technology.
Thus, Fucile envisions that XBPMs could be launched from submarines,
deployed by SEALs, dropped from airplanes, and used on fleets of
gliders.
Beyond military research, XBPMs are already being used
in an environmental study of Bioluminescent Bay in Vieques, Puerto
Rico. The bay, named for its rich marine life, is now deteriorating
because of a surge of coastal construction. In the future, Fucile hopes
that musters of XBPMs will be used routinely by scientists to make
inroads into our now-sparse knowledge of bioluminescence.
