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The Real Big Blue

May 11, 2017

Sometimes you have to get into the remote environment where marine organisms live to study them: WHOI biologists Larry Madin and Richard Harbison were part of a small group in the United States that pioneered blue-water scuba diving in the 1970s to observe jellyfish and other soft transparent creatures in their natural habitat—the open ocean. Divers used a tether system, with a designated “safety diver,” so that they could concentrate on observing transparent organisms and avoid drifting away from the team and becoming lost in the vast blue world. (Photo by Larry Madin, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)