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A friend writes: >Here's another interesting thing I learned: >Did you know that a fish in a tank can embolize?? The aquarium has to >have some kind of special set up since they have filters and water >holding tanks on different floors than the displays. What can happen >is that water in a deep holding tank on a floor below the display can >get air saturated in it, and then when the water goes into the >display the bubbles come out of soultion. BUT if the fish takes the >water from the inlet into it's system, then the bubbles may not come >out of solution until the gaseous mixture has already been absorbed >so that the bubbles form in their blood!!!!!! >(That is at least how I understood what he was telling me, there may >be a part in there that I didn't quite understand, but I'm pretty >sure that is the gist of what he said.) The same thing is known to happen to chinook salmon when hydroelectric damns provide a spill way for salmon spawning. The damns wanted to provide something besides a turbine shunt, which kills many of the fish, so they elected to allow water to spill over the damn at certain overflow sites during the spawning season. The extra extra-gassious saturated water can cause problems for the fish when they rise from the depths below the damn. Red Dolphin Terrorist Paratrooper Commandos dropping in to a sea near you! Recently animal rights activist Rick O'feldman stages a hunger strike in Isreal to protest the recent sale of several dolphins by the Russian government to an aquarium there. He claims the dolphins where KGB trained to parachute out of military airplanes and kill divers with explosive weapons worn on their snouts. While I seriously doubt this is true, if by some warped russian military mind it was acutally carried out, I can only imagine how they might have specially modified paratrooping equipment and the airplane. Perhaps one day we might see the declassified, smuggled footage of a dolphin 'jump' on America's funniest russian military videos. Just a thought. And on a more serious note. Dr. Fermin Lopez, a Honduran emergency medical missian clinic physician put a Suunto dive computer on some of the untrained Miskito indian lobster divers who are currently being crippled and killed by their unsafe scuba diving behavior. A typical profile for a morning to afternoon lobster hunt included three dives. The first was to 198 feet depth for forty three minutes, the second to 100 feet for eighty nine minutes, and thee third was at 103 fsw for twenty minutes. The hunter then took a lunch break. He used six full tanks, and made absolutly no decompression stops, nor did he ascend slower than one foot per minute. After lunch he used six more tanks with the essentially the same dive profile. By our decompression medical standards he should be dead. Researchers studying the indians believe they may have evolved a resistance to the bends from the multiple generations living of the sea by diving. The resistance is believed to be due to a blood protein that protects them from the immediate symptoms of DCS. They still, however, suffer from the long term effects. The indians are also known to drink and snort coke in order to overcome their DCS symptoms; in order to ingore the pain and keep on working. They are mostly illiterate and poor and have absolutly no knowledge of diving physics. They believe that their pain and suffering is due to mermaids seeing them and cursing them while they are diving. A macabre thought: perhaps in the future we will have an anti-DCS pill we can take, thanks to research on these unfortunate exploited lobster divers. Mark. A man likes marvelous things: So he invents them and is astonished. Edgar Watson, '29
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