Off the coast of Costa Rica, at a depth of 321 meters, the school of cutlassfish hung suspended in the water column. Bright light glinted off of their shining scales, creating scintillating patterns of pink and green against the deep blue of the tropical ocean. As they glistened and drifted, spiral fins undulating to keep them held in place, occasionally one would dart in or out, creating flashes of silver which sent ripples through the array.
It was one of the most beautiful things Jeff Day had ever seen.
He wasn’t there, underwater — nor was he onboard the ship, Falkor (named after the character from The Neverending Story) from which the remotely operated vehicle named SuBastian (ditto) was being piloted. He was at home in Texas, watching a livestream being broadcast directly from the ROV to YouTube.
And he wasn’t the only one watching the cutlassfish. The ROV had been streaming for nine hours, with dozens of people popping in and out to silently observe, identify a species, or comment on the stunning sights.
like a susurration of silver starlings, wrote one commenter. surreal, like candles in the night, wrote another.
The Schmidt Ocean Institute, SuBastian’s owner, had begun livestreaming its dives to YouTube in 02016 when the ROV was first launched. “I don’t think it was ever up for discussion whether or not we would livestream,” said Hannah Nolan, who is in charge of community outreach at Schmidt. “It was a necessary aspect of the ROV in the initial design.” The pop-up chat was also a central part of their outreach strategy, aimed broadly at raising awareness for the deep sea, underwater life, and scientific discovery.
ROVs and underwater exploration have long been a fertile site for amateur and community science. There’s the film director James Cameron, of course, who has visited the site of the Titanic wreck 33 times; and 02012 saw the launch of the OpenROV, an independently developed and cheap ROV that aimed to democratize ocean science. Schmidt, for its part, took inspiration from the pioneers of institutional deep-sea livestreaming: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who began posting long-form excerpts of deep-sea dives on YouTube in 02010. Live broadcasts began a few years later in 02012, and have remained a central part of the organization’s outreach strategy since then. NOAA, Schmidt, the Ocean Exploration Trust’s Nautilus Live program and Ocean Networks Canada form the main pillars of live underwater broadcasting.
“We designed the SOI Divestream to invite the viewer into a fly-on-the-wall experience of our mission control room,” Nolan said of Schmidt’s flagship streams. Watching a stream, you hear scientists chat excitedly to each other in the control room of the dive ship about what they see pass by the ROV’s camera; their passion is contagious. Dive videos go viral on TikTok regularly featuring the happy exclamations of marine scientists at a glimpse of a whalefall or a really really big shrimp. It’s like marine biologist Discord (a popular online chat platform, like Slack) one commenter observed. The commentary feels so human, enjoyable to listen to, makes me happy, said another.
The audio is mainly made up of scientists physically present on board the expedition ship, but sometimes experts call into the SPL (Scientist Party Line) in order to contribute their specific knowledge. One such caller is Dr. Christopher Mah, a research fellow of the National Museum at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC and a leading scholar on sea star biology.
He had been blogging and tweeting under the name @echinoblog since 02006, partially to fulfill the outreach requirements of his National Science Foundation grants, but also to get his name out there as a marine authority. It was when he began live-tweeting the NOAA Ocean Explorer dives that his audience really began to grow. He would post screengrabs of deep-sea creatures from the streams, along with their scientific identifications, accompanied by explanations of what he was seeing. “A lot of my posts about these dives, especially when they were accompanied by identifications, people were really kind of getting into it,” he explained. Then, frustrated by the frequent passing-over of starfish he thought deserved a closer look, he began calling into the SPL and giving IDs directly.
This in turn attracted more people to his online presence. “After a couple of years of this, or even months, there were regulars,” he told me. People like Day, the cutlassfish admirer, and Lisa Price, a dedicated deep-sea enthusiast who goes by The Unknown Explorer on social media, would consistently engage with Mah’s posts, and tag him in screenshots of new starfish sightings as they came in.
The most consistent engagement came from Twitter, but Mah was also pleasantly surprised at the popularity of a Facebook group prosaically called “Underwater webcams screenshot sharing.” The group features contributions from amateur viewers as well as scientists, who will collaborate on identifying species captured on camera. “Lovely Histioteuthid!” reads one typical screenshot caption.
Day posts prolifically in the Facebook group as well as on Twitter, TikTok and Discord. His TikTok about his cephalopod obsession, and the online community he found to share it with, is what first alerted me to the existence of the dive fandom.
A software engineer by trade, Day had long been interested in underwater life — cephalopods, to be precise. During the pandemic, he had joined Science Twitter — a loosely affiliated group of scientists and science enthusiasts sharing news and research — and been alerted to the regular livestreams put on by NOAA and Nautilus Live.
Realizing the wealth of backlogged material, hours upon hours of dive recordings full of cephalopod sightings going completely unremarked upon, he set himself the gargantuan task of combing through each stream and time-stamping the appearances of various undersea critters.
Why? Well, just to see what was there. As he points out, the streams are so long and cover so much ground that important sightings are missed the first time around. Depending on the science lead on each dive, their area of expertise might not overlap with the expertise of the citizen scientists. A science lead who knows cephalopods but not sessile organisms, for example, might quickly learn to take the word of an amateur expert that what the ROV is seeing is a brisingid and not a crinoid.
The fiddly, complex art of taxonomy requires an enormous amount of commitment to become an expert. For someone like Day to be able to identify, for example, a glass squid (Liocranchia reinhardti) from the barest glimpse on an ROV’s feed is, to many scientists I spoke to, absolutely remarkable.
“It’s more than just recognition; he actually can identify them. I realize that's a fine distinction, but Jeff actually looks for the characteristics that provide you with a proper professional diagnosis rather than just saying, oh, it's the blue one that we see at five o'clock every day,” Mah said.
Fernando Á. Fernández-Álvarez, a postdoctoral researcher in the Marine Sciences Institute of Barcelona, is one of the many professionals bridging the gap. He has been active both on the expeditions themselves and in the online communities dedicated to the dives. Like Day, cephalopods are his game; he’s currently a principal investigator on a project studying the microbiome and ecophysiology of the common octopus.
“The whole community who view [the livestreams] is paramount to find out about many cephalopod sightings,” he agreed. He frequents a few marine biology Discords, including ones dedicated solely to cephalopods, and during a recent Schmidt expedition off the coast of Chile, participated simultaneously in Discord conversations and livestream chatter. “It was cool being able to have a familiar voice pop up on chat and everybody being like, Hey Fernando, what's up?” said Day.
Fernández-Álvarez and other onlookers are impressed at the generosity of these communities in teaching newcomers and casual viewers about the intricacies of underwater biodiversity that they are so passionate about. The power of a few enthusiastic and dedicated individuals to convey that passion has never been so apparent.
It helps that the scientists have a matching passion, enthusiastic about bringing others into their world. “Scientists really want to engage with the audience and invite them into their journey of exploration,” said Hannah Nolan of SOI.
“There was a time when if I had mentioned the term brisingid asteroid [a type of starfish], nobody would know what I was talking about [...] other than perhaps other deep sea biologists,” said Mah. But with the rise of the livestream community he saw a huge change. Sounding awed, he went on, “These people have just become completely inundated and infatuated, if you will, with all of the fauna.”
Lisa Price, a.k.a. The Unknown Explorer, is one of these people. Living in southeastern Texas, she hasn’t been able to work because of disability. In 02016 the YouTube algorithm recommended a livestream video to her, and her dormant passion for marine biology was awakened. She became devoted to the streams, posting alerts on Twitter when a new one began, and screenshots of creatures that she spotted, including sea stars.
This caught the attention of Chris Mah. “And he just started commenting and giving me IDs, so I just started tagging him in every seastar or urchin or any kind of echinoderm,” Price said. When she tagged him in a sighting of a pumpkin sea star, of the genus Astrosarkus, during a dive off the coast of Australia, he ended up using the screengrab as a figure in a 02023 paper, and crediting her in the acknowledgments.
It was something she had no idea would happen or would ever have expected to happen. But, as Mah points out, capturing the streams is real, and incredibly valuable scientific labor. “On the Facebook group, anything that is seen by the videos that is noteworthy gets screen grabbed. And scientists don't have time to watch all of these from beginning to end.”
Fernández-Álvarez agrees. He’s grateful for stream viewers who share new sightings with him, and tag him on social media to get help with identifications. “It would not be possible for me to follow all these dives and collect that information by myself.”
It was the Twitter community of livestream watchers that helped get the spectacular, ultra-rare burrito-shaped ram’s horn squid in front of legendary squid expert Mike Vecchione, when Hannah Nolan posted a Tweet asking for ID. The community organized to get Vecchione’s attention to identify the squid. “Mike Vecchione, they’re calling you on the squid phone,” Mah messaged him.
Do these squid phone callers have dreams of being professionals? On the Discord server, there are a number of younger members of the community who plan to go into marine biology as an academic career. But there’s plenty of discoveries out there to go around, for both aspiring scientists as well as those content with keeping it as an (all-consuming) hobby. The ocean, immeasurably vast, still holds innumerable secrets. Schmidt’s Chile dive earlier this year discovered more than 100 new species. Stream viewers, bringing their amateur expertise to bear, have the chance to contribute from home without ever stepping foot in a lab or on a ship.
“When you're sitting there watching these dives, only the people that are watching are seeing it for the first time,” Lisa Price told me. “A lot of these areas have never even been dove on [before]. So it's like a once in lifetime opportunity — but it happens constantly.”
During a Schmidt expedition last year near the Galapagos Islands, a group of stream viewers spotted a rough shark, a triangular and spiky-looking relative of the dogfish — and realized quickly that there had never been a documented sighting of a rough shark in that part of the world. They quickly posted the sighting to the Facebook group to confirm what they were seeing.
“The scientists in the Facebook group were like, wait, what?” Day remembers. “And they started tagging the serious experts, like David Ebert, the guy who has done the identification guide for sharks in that area. And he's like, ‘...that's a rough shark. Can I get some video of this? We need to publish on this.’” Dr. Ebert reached out to one of the spotters, under the mistaken impression that she was a professional scientist. The spotter in question, who goes by Veronica online and is a NICU nurse in her day-to-day life, had to correct him. The forthcoming paper on the sighting is as yet unpublished, but she may end up being credited just like Lisa Price.
For her part, Price would love to be a part of an expedition one day. “The spots on those ships are really limited,” she said. “I wouldn't want to take that away from somebody who is doing this as their career. But if they ever were like — take a super fan on an expedition! — I'd be all for that. I don't foresee that happening for all kinds of legal reasons, but that would just be totally rad.”
Her terminology is fascinating. The ROV-watchers are easily able to think of themselves simultaneously as citizen scientists and as super fans of the creatures they encounter at a distance. Increasingly aware of the importance of their work, thanks to the digital bridge that they’ve been able to build between their community and the community of academics and professional fieldworkers, they yet maintain a sense of levity and awe when encountering and identifying new sightings.
The cephalopoda, arthropoda, glittering fish and filter-feeding brisingids are the celebrities of the seafloor, a world which has opened up to audiences all around the world thanks to livestream technology and social media. There are fancams for giant isopods and Japanese Twitter accounts devoted to stanning squid. And this exuberance is put to use in the form of citizen science.
Like devoted birders who track numbers of vulnerable species around the world, or amateur OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) investigators who in their spare time contribute to sensitive political and journalistic investigations, the best citizen engagement projects not only make use of the enthusiasm of members of the general public but continually reward and renew it, materially and emotionally, in the form of recognition and community. Undersea livestreams, when done well, are a nimble format which can suffice for pure entertainment, or background vibes alone — wow, look at that gorgeous squid! — but, unfolding their richness to the interested, can also provide a fertile environment for a casual or fannish interest to be nurtured into something resembling a serious, and seriously fun, purpose.
To be a fan of the ocean and what lives inside is to have immense opportunities for joy and excitement every day as one watches the livestreams. The communal excitement when a new or rare or favorite creature comes up is a sensation to be savored. Viewers have their own wishlists about creatures they dream of encountering on a livestream. “I hear about birders talking about their lifers,” said Day, referring to sought-after bird sightings, “and I feel like there are definitely deep sea equivalents.” One came true when he was able to see a giant phantom jellyfish (Stygiomedusa gigantea) observed on a livestream.
Lisa Price, meanwhile, has a deep and abiding love for phronima, a type of parasitoid amphipod that resembles a transparent shrimp. On streams, they’re often seen inside a hollowed-out salp (a gelatinous, plankton-like creature) or floating about on their own. She’s been searching for her own preserved specimen for years, but has found it’s hard to track down one for private purchase. She was shocked and delighted when Jon A. Moore, an ichythologist who has helped out stream-viewers with identification, offered to bring her one collected on his next cruise.
These and other personal connections that the livestreams have engendered are part and parcel of the larger benefit they bring to science. Just like the creatures they observe, enthusiastic citizen scientists are a vital part of the ecosystem everywhere on Earth. Every month, devoted users of the nature app iNaturalist report new spottings of species thought to be extinct, and document vital shifts in habitat and population due to climate change. Services like Zooniverse allow citizen scientists and history fans to participate in volunteer transcription and data-cleaning projects needed for academic research.
Even though the ocean occupies such vast areas of our planet, making up 90% of the Earth’s habitable regions and up to 80% of its total biodiversity, it is much harder for your everyday enthusiast to interact with and collect sightings of that life compared to the ever-popular moths and birds.
That’s why the livestreams are so important: they allow easy, free, and friendly access to an unimaginably massive part of nature that, by its nature, often feels far away and inaccessible, locked behind academic doors or aboard expensive and elite expeditions.
The streams “can make them feel like they are a part of something by watching it. That's how I feel when I tune in,” Hannah Nolan of SOI told me. Deep sea enthusiasts and scientists are universally nice people, as far as Lisa Price has experienced, and the Discord and Twitter communities have allowed her to go beyond just exchanging amphipod identifications. “A lot of these people, I've known them for years, I know about their families,” she said, “and just supporting each other, even though we can't be close together, is a shared experience.”
Schmidt’s streams are more popular than ever, and they’re planning on exploring new features to add in order to encourage participation. The close-knit, dedicated online community continues to grow, too, as the chance to contribute to marine science comes into reach for people of all ages, backgrounds, and experience levels. “People need to see what's out in the world more,” Chris Mah said. “And I think there's a hunger for that.” The deep sea has always surrounded us; now it can unite us too.
