Summer in a Sub

Dr. Carole Baldwin, a research zoologist and fish expert with the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, gives viewers an inside-look at the Deep Reef Observation Project (DROP). She and her colleagues are trying to understand the biodiversity in coral reefs near Curaçao, an island in the southern Caribbean. Part of the research involves descending far below the ocean's surface in a five person submersible.

Smithsonian research zoologist Dr. Martha Nizinski takes viewers with her as she searches for crustaceans in the deep sea. She's particularly interested in finding squat lobsters, which despite their name, are actually crabs. On this dive in the waters off Curaçao, she discovers some living on a sunken piece of wood. This work is part of the Deep Reefs Observation Project (DROP), you can read more about it in the "Summer in a Sub" blog series.

Dr. David Pawson is an expert on echinoderms—sea cucumbers, sea urchins, and sea stars. In this video, Dr. David Pawson talks about what it is like to be on a dive in one of the deep-sea submersibles. In the 1980s Pawson was a member of a team of four scientists who made more than 150 submersible dives off Florida and in the Caribbean, to study the echinoderms. They discovered about 200 species of these beautiful animals, about thirty percent of which were new to science.