Take a Deep Breath |

Take a Deep Breath

Freediving has a very simple premise: you, underwater. That’s it. No SCUBA tanks or any other breathing assistance. Just you, holding your breath for as long as you can. Simple, but increasingly popular, and potentially very dangerous.

Freediving started out of necessity. Finding food was probably the original incentive, but eventually people would also dive to find items worth trading or to retrieve something that fell off a boat. Those are still valid reasons for freediving, although these days it’s more of a recreational pastime and has even become a competitive sport.

Beginner freediving courses usually use vertical weighted ropes, so that the divers have help getting down and guidance getting back up. Getting disoriented while surfacing and getting “lost” underwater is one of the most dangerous parts of freediving.

Many freedivers also use fins, because if you’re going on a deep dive, you might need some extra help to get back up to the surface. Most of us know the sensation of being buoyant while swimming—the water is pushing you up. As you go deeper, that reverses. By the time you get to between 13 to 20 meters below the water’s surface, the weight of the water is so much that pressure is pushing you down instead of up.

Freediving as a sport became popular in the 1990’s, though it is quite dangerous. Between 2006 and 2011, 417 freediving accident cases were reported. Of these, 308 were fatal.

One of the most famous freedivers is Austrian Herbert Nitsch. He started freediving as an accident. His equipment got lost on the way to a dive, so instead of SCUBA diving, he went snorkeling, and from there discovered his talent for and love of freediving. Less that two weeks after he started freediving, he was only two meters short of the Austrian National record.

In 2012, Nitsch (who can hold his breath for more than nine minutes), set a world record by diving to 253.2 meters (830.8 feet). It’s unlikely that record will be broken soon, due to the dangers in going that deep. Nitsch developed an acute case of decompression sickness on that dive and had to overcome severe physical challenges because of it.

Sources:

• https://www.deeperblue.com/what-is-freediving/
• https://theconversation.com/free-divers-have-long-defied-science-and-we-still-dont-really-understand-how-they-go-so-deep-92690
• https://www.outsideonline.com/1896841/open-your-mouth-and-youre-dead
• http://www.herbertnitsch.com/herbert/biography.html
• http://divewise.org/education/freediver-blackout/statistics/

Curriculum Reference Links

Biological World / Systems and Interactions / 6: Students should be able to evaluate how human health is affected by: inherited factors and environmental factors including nutrition; lifestyle choices; examine the role of micro-organisms in human health

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2. Most missions last about two or three weeks.

3. Fabien Cousteau, grandson of Jacques Cousteau, beat his grandfather’s record month-long underwater expedition by spending 31 days on the Aquarius Reef Base in 2014.

4. The lab is used by NASA, the US Navy, and researchers and educators from around the globe for training and research.

5. The internet connection is better in the Hab than at many places above the water.

6. You have to swim underneath the facility in order to enter it.

7. Crew members are called aquanauts (NOT aquaNUTS!)

8. In 1994, a crew of scientists and divers had to evacuate Aquarius and climb up a rescue line to the surface in 15-foot seas after one of the habitat’s generators caught fire.

9. Aquarius was featured in the comic strip Sherman’s Lagoon in 2012.

10. The Hab was originally built in Texas.

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2. Parts of a coral reef can be harvested to make medications to treat cancers and other illnesses.

3. A coral reef isn’t a single organism; it’s actually a community of life that lives and thrives in one location.

4. Only about one percent of the world’s oceans contain coral reefs. That’s about the size of France.

5. Coral reefs are the largest biological structures on earth.

6. Corals are related to jellyfish and anemones.

7. There are over 2,500 species of corals. About 1,000 are the hard corals that build coral reefs.

8. Reefs grow where there are stronger wave patterns and currents to deliver food and nutrients.

9. The Great Barrier Reef is 500,000 years old.

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2. Some invasive species are introduced accidentally, but others are brought deliberately.

3. Ship ballast water transports between 3,000 and 7,000 foreign species daily around the globe.

4. The total loss to the world economy as a result of invasive non-native species has been estimated at 5% of annual production

5. Invasive species have contributed to 40% of the animal extinctions that have occurred in the last 400 years.

6. Rodents are some of the worst invasive species.

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8. Black and Norway rats annually consume stored grains and destroy other property valued over $19 billion.

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10. Starlings were introduced to New York in the late 1800s, as part of an attempt to bring animals that were mentioned in Shakespeare‘s work to America.

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