UNDERWATER STAY STUDENTS,

TEACHER MEET RESEARCHER AT JULES’ LODGE

ZACK WOLTANSKI

www.keysweekly.com

Coral Shores seniors Maggie Lavoie and Bella DiGiorgio, as well as their marine science teacher, Beth Rosenow, had an experience of a lifetime on April 12. Thirty feet underwater, the three learned from a scientist seeking to discover the mysteries of the ocean.

The two students, who will be succeeded by two other marine science students in the following week, have been invited to dive down to Jules’ Undersea Lodge in Key Largo for a 24-hour stay. The famous underwater hotel, which offers rooms to lucky scuba divers, is more than just a tourist destination. It is currently host to one of the most ambitious local science experiments in years, wherein a marine scientist seeks to live for 100 days in an underwater laboratory.

Joseph Dituri, an ex-Navy diver and a professor at the University of South Florida, was inspired to conceptualize Project Neptune after a call from filmmaker James Cameron’s dive team –following their Mariana Trench mission on the Deepsea Challenger – alerted him to their discoveries in the deepest parts of the ocean. In their findings, they discovered a sea louse whose DNA sample matched up as a partial cure for Alzheimer’s. Thrilled by their discovery, Dituri pursued his interest in marine research with renewed rigor.

“Everything we need is right here on this planet,” said Dituri. “We have the cures, we just have to find them.”

The idea for Project Neptune 100, the name for Dituri’s three-and-a-half month experiment in underwater living, coalesced after a series of similar research projects. He set his sights on Jules’ Undersea Lodge, a common hotspot for scientific research, relatively early on in his planning. In Project Neptune 5 several years back, he joined a team of four other researchers to study there for a week.

Inspired by talk of a manned mission to Mars, he decided that, in a 100day stay, he would try to gain valuable insights in the science of isolation and extreme environments through constant psychological and physiological testing, as well as try to better understand how the human body reacts to high-pressure environments.

Throughout his stay, he will complete more than a dozen psychological and psychosocial tests, as well as