• Question: What is the most dangerous experiment you have ever done? What happened in it did anything go wrong?

    Asked by alexgabriel26 to Ed, Hayley, Jason, Sophie on 21 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Sophie Holles

      Sophie Holles answered on 21 Mar 2013:

      Hmm the most dangerous thing experiment I’ve ever done is probably collecting fish samples on a research cruise where we were mapping the species that were present in a remote group of French Polynesian islands for the first time. There were 5 of us diving collecting fish and we were being circled by 5 sharks. My catch net kept getting tangled and I got separated from the group a couple of times! Thankfully the leader of the research station was there protecting us by hitting the sharks just hard enough to keep them away with his needle spear.

    • Photo: Hayley Evers-King

      Hayley Evers-King answered on 21 Mar 2013:

      I think the most dangerous thing I’ve done was deploy these ‘wire walking’ robots in the sea. Doesn’t sound to dangerous at first, but getting them in and out of the water was not easy. They were attached to long wires with a big weight at the bottom, we had to pull out this out of the water and on to our small boat in rocky seas. The dangerous bit was making sure we didn’t get tangled in the strong steel wires – if you dropped the weight back in to the sea with you tangled in the wire you could be dragged in to the sea!

      Luckily we were all very careful and nothing worse happened than a few heavy things getting dropped on peoples toes! They were very cool instruments that went up and down the wires driven by wave action, so they didn’t need power to move! They measured the temperature and saltiness of the sea as well as how much algae (fish food!) was growing in the water.

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