Diving Suits This Volunteer’s Purpose

Purpose defines Bob’s pursuit of diving. A certified scuba diver since 1969 (and an avid snorkeler since boyhood summers spent swimming in Lemont quarries), his dive trips to the Caribbean made him appreciate Shedd’s 90,000-gallon re-created reef. In 1979, the now-retired Chicago Public Schools teacher took advantage of a snow day after a landmark blizzard to hop a bus to Shedd. “I got down there, and nobody was diving,” he recalls. He spoke with the volunteer coordinator. “They needed a diver, one thing led to another, and in February 1979, I did my first dive in the Caribbean Reef.

“It was diving with a purpose,” he continues, “and it paralleled my belief of finding the ‘edutainment’ opportunity. When you’re in the exhibit, you get people’s attention, and you’re able to talk about corals and reef fishes and their interdependency.”

Laughing, he adds, “My wife was tired of me talking about it at home and suggested I go someplace else and talk about it. Good idea! I went to Shedd Aquarium!”

Volunteering is a rewarding experience: You learn, teach and inspire. Bob notes that his many years as a volunteer diver in the reef exhibit have also opened other interests and other doors as his familiarity with and understanding of Caribbean sea life expanded.

“I went to places I otherwise would have never gone to in my life,” he says. With Shedd researchers, he made three trips to the Dominican Republic to assist with fish and conch surveys. Because of his volunteer work at Shedd and what he calls “a little cold-water work, including Antarctica,” in 1987 he was accepted on an international dive team to spend two summers in Sweden diving on a gold-laden 1676 Swedish warship at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, a project that was featured in National Geographic magazine. “It was the best thing that I did in my life, and Shedd Aquarium is responsible for that,” Bob says.

Halfway around the world to Midway

His most recent adventure, several years ago, was a 9-day trip to Midway Atoll. This 2.4-square-mile volcanic-and-coral outcrop dead center in the North Pacific has tremendous historic and ecological significance. As the site of the pivotal defeat of the Japanese Navy by outnumbered U.S. troops in World War II, it has been designated the Battle of Midway National Memorial.

When the U.S. naval facility there closed in 1996, the island was turned over to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for a refuge. And since 2006, the land-and-sea Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge has been part of the 138,000-square-mile Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, the largest fully protected marine conservation area on Earth.

Trips to Midway are few and far between, Bob says, “So when one came up, I jumped at it because there was a purpose in it. Midway was one of the least human-impacted coral reefs in the world, and I wanted to see what that looked like.”

It looked like whole families of fishes: surgeonfishes, frogfishes, cardinalfishes, triggers, trevallies and jacks, butterflyfishes, gobies, wrasses, angels, damsels, parrotfishes, barracudas, 18 species of morays, five species of reef sharks. And more and more. The USFWS checklist of Midway Atoll reef fishes numbers 357 native species, 87 of them endemic. (You can see more than two dozen fish species native to Midway, including blacktip reef shark, golden trevally, snowflake and zebra morays, and flame angel in Wild Reef.)

In Midway’s coral-ringed lagoon, Bob saw spinner dolphins and endangered monk seals. Humpback whales visit in winter. Its beaches are nesting sites for Pacific green turtles, which are unique among sea turtles for also coming ashore just to bask. “Every 50 yards there was a turtle,” Bob says. As he snorkeled, he found it hard to maintain the mandated 50-foot distance between himself and curious juveniles. “Little 7- to 10-inch-diameter turtles would swim up to me and look at me like, what are you?” he says.

In addition to being a diver’s paradise, Midway is a magnet for birders who want to add short-tailed albatross, Laysan duck, Christmas shearwater and 20 other species of Pacific seabirds, some endangered, to their life lists.

The refuge also supports a small staff of USFWS and other federal scientists along with volunteers who sign up for three-month stints. They are working to study, recover and conserve Midway’s diverse species and their habitats. Diving 250 feet off relatively nearby Kure Atoll, researchers discovered new coral species and other animals. With volunteer help, they also removed marine debris, including huge quantities of discarded fishing nets. A lot of the research, conservation and educational projects are supported by Friends of Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge (FOMA), a 300-member not-for-profit group.

Wetsuit donation a perfect fit

“I joined FOMA as soon as I got home,” Bob says. “I knew they supported a lot of scientists working out there. One day I was helping fold retired wetsuits. They were too worn for Shedd guests to see during our dive presentations, but they were still in good shape, and they are worth as much as $300 apiece. With Shedd’s go-ahead, I contacted FOMA and asked, can you use them out there? In four hours I got an answer by email: 'YES!' ”

Shedd donated 3-, 5- and 7-ml wetsuits in a variety of sizes. The FOMA contact was especially happy to get small sizes for a group of women researchers on Kure. The thicker wetsuits went to Midway, where water temperatures range in the 60s and the ocean can be rough. “Divers can get bounced around and bumped into corals,” Bob says. “The heavier wetsuits will take that kind of a beating day after day.”

The suits were packed in four big boxes and shipped to Honolulu in time to be loaded on the barge that drops bulk supplies at Midway twice a year.

“With these wetsuits,” Bob says, “Shedd is helping more researchers and citizen scientists do a lot of good work for the wildlife in this remote refuge.”

And that’s a great purpose.

—Karen Furnweger, web editor