Sunday, July 18

This is our last full day of diving and it is also the day Sylvia Earle will pay us a visit during the afternoon. Greg, Cliff, and I took our morning dive out to the Pinnacle, the gazebo we visited the first day, for a final look and to take gazebo pictures. The Japanese are especially happy today because they have finally finished their experiments. During the last few days they had been taking shifts monitoring their computers inside the habitat, recording a 24 hour respiratory cycle of a common hard coral on the reef, massive starlet coral (Siderastrea siderea).

By lunch time we are all hungry and eager to get back to the habitat so we don’t miss Sylvia’s visit. Her appearance will be included in the Sea Stories National Geographic television program filmmaker Adam Geiger has been shooting for the week of our visit to the habitat. Sylvia and Greg Stone first met while Greg was working for NOAA in Japan at JAMSTEC (Japanese Marine Science Technology Center), the organization that supports Mineo’s research on coral reefs and it will be a fitting reunion, Mineo, Sylvia, and Greg, and a celebration of Japanese American cooperation and good will.

Soon after we have finished our noodles for lunch, Sylvia’s smiling face appears in the porthole over the dining table. She is bearing gifts: a bag of cherries and two packages of M and M’s. Only an experienced aquanaut would know the craving for fresh fruit we have in our underworld home and it is a swiftly consumed offering.

While the camera is rolling, Sylvia surfaces at the wet porch and is led to the dining table in the main compartment of the habitat. As Sylvia lays out her gift of fruit and M and M’s Greg, Mineo, and she reminisce about Japan, and then talk about Mineo’s current project here on Aquarius. Greg observes that the aquanauts on Aquarius are a little like medical doctors, here to examine the health of the reef. Everyone agrees that coral reefs are in trouble around the world, and that if coral reefs are in trouble, so is the ocean, and so are we humans. Although her visit is brief, Sylvia brings new and infectious energy wherever she goes, and so it is now. We are reminded that she did the same kind of habitat saturation with an all women’s team on Techtite II thirty years ago. Now that’s impressive.