I am a scientific diver, and I love doing it.  Not just for the adventure but really for the reason that it gives me a completely different appreciation of how things look under water. 

It is much easier for me to understand, sort of how organisms live together and how they work together if I can actually see them in their natural environment.  It’s very different to see them there than for instance to have a big bottom trawl bring up organisms and you look at a big pile of them, but they are all just jumbled together and you don’t know anymore how they were actually distributed; especially sort of in relation to each other, in relation to certain habitat features such as rocks or sediment or elevation under water or depressions in the sea floor you know, all these kind of things. 

So I think it gives us as researchers a different insight to be able to actually see how it is under  the water.