A marine ecologist studies the inter-relationships between marine organisms and their environment. Marine ecology is the study of living things in the ocean and how they interact with their environment. It is an interdisciplinary science that combines biology with physical sciences (e.g. geology, chemistry, oceanography, geophysics, statistics). A marine ecologist performs research on aquatic systems, focusing on how water organisms interact with their environment. They can work in laboratories or out in the field, gathering data and experimenting. One main goal is to preserve life in waterbodies.

Marine ecologists collect animals which live on the sea floor or in the sediment by using sleds, dredges, grabs, and corers. Animals can also be directly observed in their environment using underwater video and still imagery. Once collected, the animals are preserved, sorted, and identified. This information is analysed and combined with existing national environmental data and maps. This allows ecologists to understand what animals and plants live on and beneath Australia's sea floor, why they may be there, and what potential impacts they may face.

A marine ecologist studies the interaction between sea creatures and their habitat. He or she can also focus on the human population's effect on marine environments. Marine ecologists work as researchers, environmental consultants, and resource conservation managers. Some marine ecology projects seek to generate more knowledge and understanding of a particular region, while others are geared toward investigating the impact of humans and solving related issues. For example, a marine ecologist may study how the coastal populations of crustaceans affect each other or how the movement and migration of tiger sharks influences both sea turtle behavior and sea grass nutrients. Other marine ecologists may develop ways to restore wetland habitats destroyed by pollution or implement sustainable practices for construction and engineering firms that work near waterways.

ANZSCO ID: 234313

Knowledge, skills and attributes           

• hold an honours degree majoring in freshwater / marine ecology and / or environmental science - post-graduate qualifications would likley be an advantage,

• have some industy experience (in consulting, industry, academia or with government)

• have a high degree of competency in the field (4WD and / or boating / diving experience an advantage),

• be able to demonstrate critical thinking and clear, concise writing,

• be of mature outlook and well presented,

• be reliable, practical and a great 'team player',

• be committed to growing their career through 'lifelong learning',

Marine Ecologist at work
(Source: Marine Insight)

Duties and Tasks

Marine ecologists gather and analyze data. Initial research may include consulting scientific journals, attending marine ecology conferences, and reading research papers. They may also conduct field research, which can involve the development of sampling methodologies and dives into marine environments to gather samples, observe animal behavior, or tag creatures to monitor migratory patterns. Data can also be collected in a laboratory setting from previously gathered samples.

After analyzing their collected data, marine ecologists compose reports, which can be published, used for product development, or submitted to regulatory agencies. They may also lecture or participate in public discussions related to their research.

Marine ecologists often perform fundraising activities, such as writing research proposals and grant applications. Professors and senior researchers also manage the work of research assistants and laboratory technicians.

• contributing to project planning and implementation

• undertaking field preparation, field team leadership, and field survey and data collection

• undertaking laboratory work: sorting, enumeration, identification, sample preparation,

• data management, statistical analysis and presentation

• GIS

• on-line / library research

• report drafting

• client and collaborator liaison

Working conditions

You may spend up to 50% of your time in the field.

Tools and technologies

Ecologists use acoustic technologies to discover information about the sea floor and the animals on it. Acoustic technologies use a sound source and receiver and essentially operate the same way dolphins use clicking noises to locate fish. The sound waves sent out by the source travel through the water and bounce off objects such as fish or the sea floor. The sound waves then travel back to the receiver, revealing information about the shape and hardness of the object.

Education and training/entrance requirements

Marine ecologists may find entry-level positions with just a bachelor's degree, but a graduate degree is necessary for independent research positions. Relevant fields of study include biology, oceanography, environmental studies, and natural resource management. Geography, chemistry, physics, and statistics courses can help round out a marine ecology education. Some field research positions may also require scuba diving certification and/or a boating license.

Completion of a bachelor's degree program may qualify individuals for entry-level positions, such as research assistants or laboratory technicians; however, career opportunities increase for graduates who pursue an advanced degree. Faculty positions at universities and senior research and development positions typically require a doctoral degree. Working as a marine ecology professor requires a doctorate.

Employment Opportunities

Geoscience Australia's ecological research addresses Commonwealth and state and territory government priorities related to the appropriate management of Australia's marine resources. This includes characterising the sea floor to inform environmental assessments before activity by the oil and gas industry, as well as identifying potential impacts or important communities relevant to monitoring our marine estate. Ecological data also acts as a 'common currency' between Geoscience Australia and scientists and stakeholders outside the geoscience community, allowing geoscientific results to be linked to marine biodiversity.

Geoscience Australia uses marine acoustic technologies to map the sea floor and to identify habitats such as rocky reefs which are typically home to different forms of marine life. This information is then used to choose locations from which to collect sediments, rocks, or biological samples. Acoustic methods can even be used to directly detect animals that build large reefs such as corals, molluscs and sponges. These capabilities ensure that Geoscience Australia provides accurate and topical information, contributing to the effective management of Australia's marine estate.

What Is It Like To Be a Marine Ecologist? (US - July 2020)
https://youtu.be/lueMMDS07ow

A scientific diver collects samples and carries out underwater analyses for scientific exploration and environmental assessments.

Scientific diving at work can be described as any diving operation undertaken in support of science. In Australia, scientific diving is classified as occupational diving, which is defined as diving performed in the course of employment, such as a part of a business, as a service, or for profit for the purpose of professional scientific research, natural resource management or scientific research as an educational activity. Such diving operations are conducted by a wide range of organisations including Universities, government agencies, consultancy companies, and NGOs, to name a few.

Usually scientific divers are scientists first and divers second. Most are marine biologists and geologists but may come from a range of disciplines such as archaeology, underwater engineering and scientific journalism. Scientific divers use SCUBA as a way to study their science and collect data. Some projects may accommodate divers without a science degree to assist with research, however in these situations, a degree or post-graduate degree from another discipline is usually still needed.

If you are a scientist (or want to become one) and have a passion for underwater conservation, life on coral reefs or the polar ice caps, an interest in the effects of climate change on marine biology, or are fascinated by the migration of whale sharks, then science diving may be for you!

ANZSCO ID: 399911

Scientific Diver
(Source: ADAS)

Tasks Performed on the Job
  
All branches of science that are researched on land are also investigated under the sea including biology, botany, geology, physiology, chemistry, and many others. As a result, scientific diving tasks are widely varied, and may include almost anything. Common tasks include underwater photography, underwater videography, specimen collection or in-situ measurement, underwater survey (free-swimming or transect based), benthic coring, and equipment deployment and maintenance.

Underwater Photography
Used to better illustrate an event or process or for more detailed analysis. This is often done using high resolution underwater digital SLR still photography.

Specimen Collection or In-situ Measurement
Divers are often used over surface-based collection methods (e.g. trawls) to minimise the environment impact of collection, to allow for the most humane collection methods such as using anesthetics underwater to allow specimens to be captured and measured etc, and, at times, to measure in-situ to avoid destroying the specimen through retrieval to the surface.

Static Underwater Video
Underwater video is used to construct longer term analyses of events. The equipment can either store the images self-contained or transmits the images to the surface through umbilicals. The use of time-lapse can prolong the operation; infra-red cameras can record both at night and day. Correct positioning of the cameras by divers is often an essential component of the study. Divers can also maintain the equipment underwater meaning that the apparatus does not have to come to the surface each time.

Underwater Survey
Diver-based underwater surveys are often used to quantify biological communities or single species over defined areas.

Video Mosaicing
It is often very difficult to obtain broad scale visualisations of areas of sea bed. If the water is dark then a lot of illumination is required. Waters may be turbid and so obtaining a broad scale photograph is almost impossible. Video mosaicing employs digital video cameras on a sliding apparatus constructed underwater to maintain attitude and height above the seabed. The camera is moved over the area to be visualised and either continual or individual images taken. The processing of the images takes a percentage of each image and digitally overlays it on to the previous image. Even though the resolution of a single frame of video footage may not be high, once fully mosaiced, the researcher will obtain a high resolution image of a wide area, irrespective of the water clarity or lighting.

Benthic Coring
Benthic cores contain a lot of information about the receiving environment and the impacts on it. Sometimes the cores are taken for pollutant analysis, sometimes to assess the biological community within the benthos, and at other times in order to make physio-chemical measurements on the cores post-collection. The advantages of using divers to core by hand is that they can be precise on where the cores are taken from and the level of disturbance is less than if some form of surface deployed corer was used.

The longevity of coral reef development and the processes that go into that development make coral reefs ideal sources for proxy studies of the long-term climatic record. The length of core is correlated to the time record and analysis of changes within the core can determine indirectly the climatic conditions at that point. Divers are used to drill into coral heads in order to minimise disturbance and guarantee the quality of the core.

Did You Know? CSIRO scientists are finding life in Australia’s cold-water ocean depths that few humans ever see. Type “Aurogrogia tasmaniensis” – a new species of soft coral found off Tasmania – into a search engine and you are unlikely to yield many results. But for CSIRO’s researchers from our Oceans and Atmosphere team in Hobart, discovering this species embodies the possibilities of science to illuminate life in the deep-sea. The Biodiversity, Imagery, Annotation and Automation (BIAA) team research the benthic zone, the region at the bottom of the sea and the life it supports. While much of their work relies on imagery from cameras that can be “flown” above the sea floor by pilots onboard a ship and withstand crushing amounts of water pressure, it is grounded in taxonomy, the oldest discipline in biology. The importance of deep sea imagery CSIRO surveys launched from Hobart, many with researchers from museums, government and other institutions onboard, have been finding new species for decades. “Imagery makes it possible to capture species seldom collected because they are rare or prone to damage by physical sampling,” Candice Untiedt from CSIRO’s BIAA team, said. “For instance, after Aurogrogia tasmaniensis coral was observed in images, and compared with samples collected in the region, the images and specimens were used by CSIRO taxonomist Dr Phil Alderslade and colleagues in the USA and Brazil to describe the species.” The coral is endemic to the region around Tasmania’s seamounts and the prized type specimens, on which the species is based, are lodged at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart. “Our research has significantly increased our understanding of octocorals, which are commonly called soft corals,” Untiedt said. “Through our foundational taxonomic work over the last 30 years, we have increased the known number of octocorals around Australia from 160 to over 700 species, most of which are new to science and found from shallow shelf to deep abyssal depths. How are new species discovered? In late 2018, far from the tropics most Australians envision when they think of coral, CSIRO researchers aboard the RV Investigator took part in a survey of submerged mountains off Tasmania. The expedition with Parks Australia and the Australian Government’s National Environmental Science Program Marine Biodiversity Hub traversed Tasmania’s seamounts, which include extinct volcanoes. Using a sophisticated underwater camera system developed by CSIRO, researchers collected video and images of more than 250km of seabed. More than 70,000 images captured information from the seabed, revealing rich benthic communities of marine invertebrates. It was a fresh and refined look at the region’s habitats and diversity, 10 years after the first extensive survey. “Analysis of the imagery found many cold-water coral reefs, forming large structures commonly 950m to 1,350m below the surface,” Franzis Althaus, a benthic ecologist, explained. “The reefs were made up of single species, Solenosmilia variabilis, which support a wide variety of soft corals, sponges, echinoderms and other invertebrates. They are defined as Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems.” The seamounts have been impacted by deep-sea bottom trawl fishery. Some of the seamounts are still open to fishing but most have been protected for 10 years and are enclosed in offshore marine parks. Importantly, Australian Marine Parks off southern Tasmania, especially the Huon Marine Park, protect a large fraction of the total regional pool of seamounts, including many with light or no signs of impact. “Using Image data gives us insights into these areas. Collecting visual samples from the field enables us to quantify and map habitats, invertebrate and fish communities,” Althaus said. “By collecting, annotating and archiving images, we have the opportunity to build up a record over time that can be pulled up and compared to imagery in the future. “This is invaluable for monitoring changes in the environment and changes due to, for example, climate change. It will also assist with ongoing management.” Combining samples and images has resulted in the naming of the species, Aurogrogia tasmaniensis The role of taxonomy As scientists rely more on imagery-based underwater surveys, species can be identified more accurately by targeting and co-locating the collection of specimens for taxonomic analysis. Taxonomic information is crucial for ecologists to understand and manage ecosystems. Science has been classifying living species for more than 250 years, but an estimated 91 per cent of marine species remain undescribed. “Specimens are sent to national museums where expert taxonomists identify existing species or describe new ones,” Kylie Maguire from the BIAA team said. “Identifying species hinges on taxonomists, museums and their rigour as a bedrock of knowledge of deep-sea biodiversity and the distribution of species around Australia. “It demonstrates the importance of taxonomy as a foundation for monitoring changes in response to climate change and physical disturbance from human-induced impacts.” In other words, for Australians to understand and conserve the deep-sea riches they only see in pictures, they first need to know what is there. Mighty machine learning CSIRO’s towed camera system enable scientists to record images and video from areas of the ocean that are difficult to access. The camera can venture to depths of up to 4000 m. The BIAA team is increasingly tackling the mammoth task of data processing beyond the ability of any human using machine learning. This makes data analysis quicker and more efficient. The key is to train the machine learning tools correctly. So far, the results are encouraging. “We recently repurposed a dataset for a machine learning exercise to detect coral reef substrate, a proxy for Vulnerable Marine Ecosystem habitat,” Maguire said. “We are very happy with the results and are now looking into object detection for selected deep-sea species.” As machines shoulder more of the load of detecting Australia’s underwater species, CSIRO’s BIAA researchers are determined to keep expanding what is known of the deep-sea void. (Source: CSIRO)

Equipment Deployment and Maintenance
Often divers are employed in support of science simply to deploy, maintain and/or retrieve monitoring equipment underwater. By attaching the equipment to permanent or long-term moorings using divers means that the whole mooring does not have to be lifted each time. If a large surface vessel is required for this lifting process then it can be expensive. Continual deployment and recovery of moorings can impact the sea floor in vulnerable areas.

Responsibilities and Challenges
As with any occupational diving operation, the responsibilities of a scientific diver might range from being the Coordinator in charge of a diver team and managing all tasks that this involves through to acting as one of the diving members of the team, and fulfilling all WHS and dive team responsibilities inherent in that role; while getting the job done in such a way that the data collected is as accurate as possible.

Conditions under which scientific diving might occur can range from under ice in the Arctic or Antarctic, to tropical coral reefs, and from conditions of zero visibility through blue water diving in the open sea.

Any scientific diver must be sufficiently skilled and experienced to allow them to focus on the work being done in whatever environment they are working with accurate collection of data, and safe performance of any other required tasks being of primary concern.

Highlights and Rewards
Science diving can take you to a wide variety of locations worldwide. Water covers a huge portion of the world’s surface, leading to plenty of underwater realms to explore. You may study , or the ice caps in Antarctica, or the coral reefs of Honduras. You may watch the mating patterns of seahorses or study rocks and sediment near a tectonic plate. The options are plentiful.

Scientific divers will almost always be involved in research that contributes to a greater understanding of our world, and for many, this is what makes the job so inspiring. Of course, there is always the fact that scientific divers are able to spend much of their work time diving which is also often seen as a bonus!

How do I Become a Scientific Diver?
Universities in Australia to study at are:
the University of Tasmania and
the University of Queensland.

Did You Know? Dr Jan Watson [1927 - 2021] OAM was one of Australia's first Scientific Divers and a Marine Biologist. To view a local copy of Museums Victoria: "Jan Watson: diving into the unknown", click here [9 pages] (Source: The Courier) In the early 1960s, she taught herself to SCUBA dive and quickly developed a passion for the sport and the marine environment. Dr Watson became one of the first marine biologists in southern Australia to take up SCUBA diving and underwater photography to document her scientific interests, going on to become a world authority on the taxonomy and ecology of hydroids (marine invertebrates). The 93-year-old [2020] only recently gave up diving, after a career spanning several dozen published papers and the discovery more than 100 new species. “I stopped two years ago because my legs were giving out on me,” Dr Watson told the Independent. Her love of “finding new things” drove her to study marine biology, she said. Resources Federation University Geelong Independent

 

Related Jobs or Working with these Jobs

Botanist	Coastal Engineer	Diver	Environmental Scientist Ecologist
Fisher	Fisheries Officer	Meteorologist	Oceanographer
Park Ranger	Photographer	Waste Water Operator

 

Job Cluster - Diving

Materials sourced from
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