Ever Heard of a Safety Sausage,
Mate? Englishman Bobby Ratib, his
Dutch girlfriend, two other tourist
divers, and an instructor guiding
them spent 24 hours adrift. Their
dive boat driver missed them on a
drift dive off Sri Lanka. Diving with a
shop in the town of Negombo,
Ratib said: "The plan was to go
down, drift with the current, then
come up some distance away -- but
the boatman didn't realize what was going on. When we surfaced 50
meters from where we'd started, he
couldn't see us. We shouted to him
but in vain. All the time we were
being carried further away by the
current. It was very frightening, but I
knew we had to remain calm. ... I
kept telling the others to hold on to
each other, to relax, and to gently
kick our way towards shore, but
there were strong winds and the sea
became heavy." Rattib said he and his girlfriend survived by holding
hands and following the stars until a
fishing boat plucked them to safety
a full day and night later ... and after
the official search had been called
off. All five recovered at a private
hospital in the town, in time for
New Year's Eve.
For a Sea Snake, There's No
Place Like Home: The yellow-lipped
sea krait, a sea snake that fascinates
divers in the south Pacific, has been
hunted to near extinction in both
the Philippines and Japan. So Singapore scientists speculated that
they could transplant snakes from
other islands. To test their hypothesis,
they set up camp on Fiji's uninhabited
Mabualau island to compare snake
populations there and on Toberua, a
resort island 5.3 kilometers away.
Snakes from both islands travel out to
feed in the shallow waters between the
two islands, so scientists captured and
marked them, then released them all
on Mabualau. A year later they recaptured
530 marked snakes. All had
returned to their original homes. New
Scientist, 5 October 2002.
Lobster, Too: Researchers Larry
Boles and Kenneth Lohmann caught
several spiny lobsters in the Florida
Keys and took them to a laboratory 10
miles away. They carried the lobsters
in an opaque container and in water
from the collection site so they would
not have any visual or chemical cues.
At the testing site, they covered their
eyes and yet they always figured out
where they were relative to the collection
site and walked in the direction of
their home. "When we produced a
magnetic field found at a location
north of the site, the lobsters walked
south," Lohmann said. "And when we
produced a field similar to one found at an area south of the site, they
walked north. Somehow, they could
always figure out exactly where they
were." This proved that the lobsters
not only had a directional or compass
sense but also the ability to determine
where they were geographically by
relying only on the earth's magnetic
field -- similar to the way a person
can use a global positioning system
device. The New York Times, January 7.
What Can Women Teach Men
About the Bends? An expansive study
was conducted in the United
Kingdom, involving 2250 divers, 47
percent of whom were women. Of the
458,827 dives reported, 31 percent
were by women. Differences in diving
habits were observed between men
and women, which included number
of dives per year, maximum depths
dived, and dives with extra stops. The
findings were a surprise. When they
took experience into account, the rate
of DCS in men was 2.6 times greater
than in women. As you might imagine,
further studies are needed. Space
Environmental Medicine, 2002 Aug; St
Leger Dowse M, Bryson P, Gunby A,
Fife W. Diving Diseases Research
Centre, Plymouth, Devon, U.K.