A Summer of Scientific Diving

Sara Di Girolamo – Contributor

If you’re looking to spend the summer swimming around, helping to mitigate invasive plants in lakes, and having an experience of a lifetime, look no further than scientific diving. This summer, approximately 20 students participated in an internship, getting practical fieldwork as scientific divers at local lakes. Scientific diving is a specialized branch of underwater research and a vital tool for exploring and understanding marine environments. Unlike recreational diving, scientific diving is guided by research objectives that require meticulous procedures and safety protocols to ensure accurate data collection and minimal risk. This field encompasses a diverse range of disciplines, from marine biology and ecology to underwater archaeology and geology. The students participating in the course and the internship focus principally on ecology.

To participate in the internship, students must first complete ESG 288, underwater environmental assessment. The six-week spring semester course is intense: two weeks are spent in the classroom; two weeks in the Bishop’s pool; and the last two weeks at Orford lake, around 50 km from campus. This class examines the human impact on the underwater environment, as well as the monitoring and restoration of ecosystems by invasive species. The course is dedicated to learning how to dive not just recreationally, but scientifically – learning how to do underwater assessments and scientific missions in freshwater environments. The tasks range from collecting samples, to environmental monitoring and aquatic inventory, to restoration operations. Once the class is completed, students receive specialized training in scientific diving, which includes an open water certification from PADI. Students must also receive certification from the Canadian Association for Underwater Sciences, as a diver in training. Dr. Elisabeth Levac, head of the ESG department, told The Campus that this program and course is very new. “[We] started in 2022. We had the course, initially, ESG 288, and then last fall we proposed the new courses [and] the internship, and then the scientific diving minor was approved just last fall.”

Once the class is completed, successful students may register for ESG 290, which counts as credits towards a degree, as it gives them field work experience and hours counting towards future diving endeavors. The diver’s objective is to remove Eurasian Watermillfoil from lakes. The millfoil is an invasive plant species that is transferred to lakes through improper cleaning on boats or birds dropping fragments into new lakes or zones. The main way to mitigate millfoil is by manually removing the plants: students dive down and pick the plants, making sure to get the roots, and filling bags to bring to the surface. Another technique to combat denser zones of millfoil is to lay down tarps that will disintegrate over time, which blocks the sunlight and prevents the millfoil from growing. Although this method is quite effective, it also prevents the indigenous plants from growing, so the zone must have a density of at least 70 per cent millfoil to proceed with tarps. The main objective of this work is to control this aquatic invasive plant and to return the lakes to their previous status.

Many challenges arise when doing this job: being reliant on the weather, they have to stop sometimes because of thunderstorms. It also requires divers to be responsible for their equipment. Many divers also experience a learning curve when starting the internship, as they spend upwards of five hours a day in the water, but Levac notes that most students are comfortable within a week. She jokes that others are “like fish… they would do nothing else”. She also noted the benefits of the internship on students’ careers in environmental fields: “They’re gaining field work experience, they’re working as teams… they’re learning to coordinate for transport, for equipment, for everything.”