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THIS WEEK IN
CALIFORNIA WILD

a letter from the field

A Half Mile Down
Figments of Fancy off the Galapagos Islands

John e. mccosker

Descending 3,000 feet beneath the surface in a submersible gives one a lot of time to think. As the sunlit, equatorial waters fade to a pale blue-green, then dark gray-green, then a miasmic gray, day becomes night and starbursts of light sporadically appear outside the five-inch-thick acrylic window.

As we pass 1,000 feet the clarity of communication with topside also becomes dimmer. Amidst stuttering, popping, and crackling, Don Liberatore, the pilot beside me, advises Dan Boggess, our topside tracker on board the RV Seward Johnson, "Passing 1,000 feet, temperature is 52 degrees F. Do you read me, over?..." Hearing nothing, he repeats, "Seward Johnson, Seward Johnson, come back, do you read me, over?"

Being fairly new to all this, I am both concerned about the conversation, or the lack thereof, and at the same time a kid in nature's ultimate candystore, feasting on bins of silvery lanternfish and hatchetfish zipping by, an occasional outburst of luminous squid ink, and delicate chandeliers of siphonophores. In the deep sea we are encountering a mostly Lilliputian fauna, punctuated occasionally in our light beam by an elongate yard-long silver-sided lancetfish, grinning at us with toothy mouth agape, staring skyward through the stygian gloom in search of the silhouette of a potential prey unlucky enough to be revealed by a bioluminescent burst above.

At 2,000 feet, it's 39 degrees F outside and getting cold and foggy inside. It is the darkest darkness. The dim green and red numbers, dials, and meters arrayed overhead in our cramped quarters, and the bursts of living light outside only accentuate the blackness. As I stare out the window, my childhood fascination with a well-read 1934 copy of National Geographic comes crowding back. In his article, "A Half Mile Down," William Beebe described how "strange creatures, beautiful and grotesque as figments of fancy, reveal themselves at windows of the Bathysphere."

Beebe was a naturalist and oceanographic explorer with the New York Zoological Society who, in 1934, along with inventor Otis Barton, descended inside a tethered 4,500- pound iron sphere into the Atlantic Ocean southeast of Bermuda. Through the quartz windows of the Bathysphere, Beebe described in vivid detail via telephone wire the fascinating creatures that swam or hovered within his searchlight beam. The descriptions, complete with creative monikers like abyssal rainbow gars, sabre-toothed viperfishes, scimitar-mouths, great gulper eels, long-finned ghostfishes, gleaming-tailed serpent dragonfishes, and exploding flammenwerfer shrimps, were carried to a surface audience which included artist Elsie Bostelmann, who painstakingly took notes in order to illustrate the explorer's observations. Those paintings, which appeared in the National Geographic and in a book, also entitled Half Mile Down, whetted the appetite of a 10-year-old explorer-to-be.

Many years later, as a graduate student, I was told by my professors that much of what Beebe saw was colored by his vivid imagination and a combination of anxiety, fear, and condensation on the window. Nonetheless, it was now my turn to experience firsthand what life is like in a realm so foreign to our light-dependent lives.

I was in the cockpit of the Johnson Sea-Link, a helicopter- sized submersible, participating as Chief Scientist of the California Academy of Sciences/Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution (HBOI) expedition to the Galapagos Islands. I have an ongoing interest in the marine creatures of the Galapagos (see "Letter From the Field," Pacific Discovery, Fall 1994) and have been working with colleagues to identify and enumerate the fish life of what has long been thought of as Darwin's living laboratory of evolution.

My colleague and Academy Associate Al Giddings and I had proposed to television's Discovery Channel that we team up to create a film entitled "Galapagos: Beyond Darwin," describing the world that Darwin could have experienced had he the benefit of modern scuba equipment and submersible technology. The specimens, film, and data exhilarated the scientific party--and the Discovery Channel's millions of viewers--beyond our wildest dreams.

Our journey aboard the Seward Johnson began in Academy Bay, Isla Santa Cruz, ventured to the deep seamounts of the southeast, encircled the west edge of the archipelago along Fernandina and Isabella islands, sailed to the far northern islands of Darwin and Wolf, and returned via Tower Island and the central plateau after 55 sub dives. When not in the sub, we were observing, curating, and photographing specimens, querying colleagues via the Internet and satellite links, and taking every opportunity to scuba dive among the hammerhead sharks, whale sharks, and penguins, all part of the unique and wondrous Galapagos bouillabaisse.

Also in the scientific party were: Grant Gilmore, a senior scientist at HBOI who studies the deep reef fishes of the Caribbean; Bruce Robison, Academy fellow and a senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, who studies deep sea fishes and invertebrates and the role of bioluminescence; David Steadman of the Florida Museum of Natural History, a terrestrial paleontologist studying the fossilized remains of cave-dwelling birds and mammals, many of which are now extinct in Galapagos; and Ecuadorian biology students and observers from the Instituto Nacional de Pesca in Guayaquil.

Some nine months earlier, the eruption of Volcan Fernandina sent a lava flow cascading off her southeast shore at Cabo Hammond. The sea temperature near the coast rose to boiling. Amidst the gaseous explosions and flowing, belching lava, hundreds of deep water fish died and floated to the surface. My friend and colleague Godfrey Merlen, a Galapagos naturalist, raced his boat to Fernandina and entered the maelstrom, netting the dead fishes as they floated among the boiling, violent upwelling waters.

At the Charles Darwin Research Station Merlen showed me the fishes that he had collected and would ultimately deposit in the Academy's fish collection. His trophies included 22 species of deep sea eels, cods, groupers, and lancetfishes. There were species that had never before been seen in the Galapagos, and two new species that we subsequently observed from the submersible. Douglas Long, a research ichthyologist associated with the Academy, and I are naming one of the new species in Merlen's honor.

The eruption will also provide us with an opportunity to examine the rate of colonization of a barren habitat. During November we made both sub and scuba dives along the boundary, observing the sharp demarcation of recent black pahoehoe lava flowing like thick ropey syrup over a mature, invertebrate-laden benthos. Very few fishes and even fewer invertebrates had entered the new habitat in the months following the eruption and, like Krakatoa, it will be interesting to watch the future progression of its pioneer species.

My research goals for this expedition involved my continuing inventory of the Galapagos fish fauna and an analysis of the relationships, origin, and degree of endemism of the deepwater species. Using traditional scuba diving, hook-and-line fishing, and relying on specimens collected by Galapagos locals like Tui de Roy and Merlen as well as photographs taken by divers like Paul Humann, I have compiled a list of 336 fish species, which must be a nearly complete sample of the community to a depth of 180 feet. Below that is anyone's guess.

The volcanic nature and steep underwater terrain of much of the Galapagos archipelago make fish collecting all but impossible by normal oceanographic methods. The majority of specimens known from deep water at the Galapagos were collected during the 1891 voyage of the U. S. Fish Commission Steamer Albatross. They dragged nets and chain bags along the volcanic bottom, and brought up a collection of fascinating creatures never captured before--or since. The Johnson Sea-Link enabled us to extend the survey to 3,000 feet. We used video cameras, slide cameras, claws, and suction devices to document and sample the creatures that inhabit the cracks and crevices of the steep volcanic slopes and basement of the Galapagos archipelago.

When fully charged, the batteries allowed us to descend to the bottom and spend two to three hours ambling upslope, using our high-pressure atmospheric/water ballast system and numerous propulsion thrusters to hold ourselves motionless or fight against the currents and eddies for which Galapagos waters are famous. After several clumsy attempts, I was able to aim the suction tube at some incautious fish or invertebrate stunned by our bright submarine lights, and inhale it into one of two dozen specimen containers. Many of those specimens came to the surface alive; those without gas bladders like the telescope-eye fish (Gigantura chuni) and the polka-dotted jello-nosefish (Guentherus altivela) suffered little ill effects from the dramatic change in pressure. They were hurried to a darkened, refrigerated shipboard aquarium where they were examined, photographed, and ultimately preserved.

I had an opportunity to study rare creatures like viperfishes and goosefishes, firsthand--in fact so intimately that they both bit me on the fingers. We captured and recorded many fishes previously unknown from the Galapagos, and at the time of this writing, with the aid of a grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, we intend to publish the descriptions of nearly three dozen new species and genera of Galapagos fishes. The invertebrate specimens captured are even more poorly known, and my Academy colleague Terrence Gosliner advises that they too will surely result in many new records, new species, and surprises.

Our expeditionary exhilaration was tempered by our observations above and below water of the ongoing societal and fishery practices. The population growth rate of from ten to twelve percent per year continues in Galapagos. Although the islands are a National Park, a Marine Reserve, and a World Heritage Site, Ecuador has allowed a variety of unsustainable fisheries to occur which are dramatically changing the marine ecology. The fishing for sea cucumbers to satisfy an insatiable Asian appetite has devastated stocks and damaged the shorelines of Fernandina, where the pepineros have cut mangroves to cook their product.

Shark, baccalao (an endemic grouper), and lobster are becoming dangerously depleted. A commercial spearfishery has begun and a 2,500-ton longline vessel has begun fishing in Galapagos waters. Longline fishing is particularly risky in that albatrosses, including the endemic Galapagos waved albatross, are accidental victims. And last January, pepineros occupied the Charles Darwin Research Station and held the lab and the tortoises (including "Lonesome George," the last giant tortoise of his subspecies from Pinta Island) hostage for four days. While at sea, we watched an Ecuadorian commercial purse-seine tuna boat illegally fishing within a half mile of Roca Redonda; the protests of fishery observers from the Instituto Nacional de Pesca aboard the Seward Johnson were rebuffed by the fishermen. Laws are on the books but Ecuador has an obvious unwillingness to enforce them or its stated environmental precepts. The problems of Galapagos are not unique, but they deserve international attention if Darwin's laboratory of life on Earth is to survive for future generations.

John E. McCosker is Senior Scientist and head of the Aquatic Biology Department at the California Academy of Sciences.

Winter 1997

Vol. 50:1