FAU graduate student Priscilla Winder is looking for sea sponges that will help her fight cancer ­­­— more than half a mile deep in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida. Crammed in a small four-seat submarine, she looks through an acrylic bubble down at the arrangement of sponges on the ocean floor. Her research depends on this submersible machine, and if FAU retires it, she will be left with nothing.

Due to university-wide budget cuts, the Harbor Branch Oceanic Institute at FAU, located in Fort Pierce, is being cut by approximately $1 million for the new fiscal year. Its submersibles the Johnson-Sea-Link I and II are currently at high risk of being cut altogether.
“We’re trying to see if we can get [FAU] to change their minds,” says Winder. “We have no backup plans. We don’t have anything else that will help us do the collecting for our research.”

Unfortunately for Winder, due to the cost of each dive — about $30,000 — these tiny subs only has 50 days left of dive time supported by government funding. And when that funding ends, so will the dives to the ocean.

The submersibles, which were built in the early ’70s, have made over 8,600 dives in the ocean. Throughout the years, their uses have ranged from collecting samples from the sea floor to video-documenting research for marine science.
“We’ve been all over the world,” explains Don Liberatore, chief submersible pilot at Harbor Branch. “We were involved in the recovery of the space shuttle Challenger, the Civil War ironclad [warship] the USS Monitor, and we were the first U.S. flag research vessel to visit Cuba.”

The dives in the ocean have also never been limited to just researchers and scientists.
Students have been able to board the R/V Seward Johnson, a large ship that is responsible for carrying the submersibles out to the ocean. On numerous occasions, students have also been able to make a spot for themselves in the Johnson-Sea-Links.
“Being down there gives you a much better appreciation,” says Winder, who’s been in the submersibles several times since 2002. “It’s really neat to get to see the beginning part of the research, because maybe whatever I collect might help humankind at some point.”

Not only does Harbor Branch face the possible retirement of the submersibles, but according to Liberatore and the Save our Subs online petition, FAU has also decided to sell the R/V Seward Johnson despite a $22.5 million grant that was given to the Harbor Branch’s department of research at FAU, as well as the University of North Carolina, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in May 2009.
“I wouldn’t consider that source reliable,” says Jan Petri, director of business development at Harbor Branch, about the Save our Subs Web site and petition, which are not officially affiliated with Harbor Branch or FAU. “There’s no requirement from NOAA that says that we have to have the R/V Seward Johnson.”

Still, the research department continues its attempts to save the submarines. Their online petition has been signed by over 2,100 people to date, and it doesn’t look like it will stop.

Esther Guzman, an assistant research professor at Harbor Branch, is one of the many who signed the petition in hopes that it would help save the submersibles in some way.
“It would be such a waste if the only reason [FAU] got rid of the submersibles was because of money problems,” says Guzman. “My biggest fear is that once we lose the submersibles, there’s no getting them back.”

To learn more about Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute at FAU, visit www.hboi.edu.
To read the Save our Subs petition, visit saveoursubs.com.

Click here for a gallery of the submersibles at the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute