Florida Scientist Who Spent 100 Days Underwater Discovered an Organism That Was Never Seen Before

The very idea of being locked in a box and tossed deep underwater could make someone claustrophobic, but that wasn't how Doctor Joseph Dituri (@drdeepsea) felt. Nicknamed “Doctor Deep Sea,” the Florida scientist spent a hundred days submerged beneath 22 feet of water, manacled inside a 100-square-foot lagoon lodge, where naked flames were forbidden due to the high water pressure. All he could eat was whatever his small microwave could cook for him. One month into the experiment, his team stumbled upon a living organism that had never been seen before.

“We found a single-cell ciliate, a single-celled organism that we believe is a brand new species to science. People have dived in this area thousands and thousands of times – it’s been here, we just didn’t look,” Dituri told The Independent. The specimen, he said, would be thoroughly examined by microbiologists to confirm that it’s a new species. Meanwhile, living at this cavernous depth allowed Dituri to enjoy a potpourri of bizarre encounters.

At this depth, as the water exerted pressure from the top, the air inside his cabin would get squeezed by the ocean’s weight, prompting him to breathe hard and urinate more frequently. Scrunched under the 6-foot-high ceiling, he had to duck or bend each time to squeeze his body into a 36-inch hole to go to the restroom. His cabin was sprawled with computers, notebooks, laboratory wires, a microscope, a college-dorm-sized refrigerator, a bunk bed, and a restroom. From time to time, otherworldly sea creatures peered at him from the glass window, including giant sharks.

Doctor Deep Sea is an Assistant Vice President at the University of South Florida, a PhD Researcher, and a former US Navy CDR Saturation Diver. Guinness World Records listed Dituri’s name for breaking the world record for living underwater in an environment without depressurization, from 1st March 2023 till 9th June 2023. For this duration, his home was the Julesâ Undersea Lodge, which is the “world’s only underwater hotel where scuba diving is the only way to get to your room,” according to their website.

“It was never about the record. It was about extending human tolerance for the underwater world and an isolated, confined, extreme environment,” Dituri told PBS. “And while breaking the world record is an exciting milestone, my mission doesn’t end here,” he added in an Instagram post shared on the 73rd day of his expedition. It wasn’t just a daring feat, but a full-fledged scientific project called “Project Neptune 100,” which was organized by the Marine Resources Development Foundation.

The objective of living in this subaquatic compound was to study the effects of hyperbaric pressure on the human body, in this case, Dituri’s. During his time down there, he conducted tens of thousands of blood, urine, saliva, pulmonary function tests, oxygen saturation, blood pressure, and all sorts of things. And even though he experienced a decline in muscle mass, bone density, and certain hormones, some experiments indicated positive results; one of them being better healing of wounds, ScienceAlert explained.

Another positive result of Dituri’s experiments was related to "reverse aging." In an interview with The Guardian, he shared that the atmospheric pressure in the underwater pod is 70% higher than that at the surface, and this could hold the key to reversing the aging process. “I’m not trying to claim that this is gonna keep you immortal. But we know that [exposure to increased pressure] increases stem cell proliferation. It increases telomere length, it also increases collagen, and collagen is the building block of every cell in your body,” Dituri told The Guardian.

A significant decline in stress levels was another major observation that emerged from this 100-day project. “So far, a preliminary example is that stress overall in my body has decreased. The inflammatory markers, every single one of them, have been cut by almost half. My height - I shrunk by about three-quarters of an inch, give or take. My cholesterol is down by 73 points,” the doctor told NPR.

But despite these marvelous discoveries, the doctor believes that there's so much more to be found in these depths. “Everything we need is here. We have the yin; we have the yang. We have the dark, we have the light. We have the disease; we have the cure. We just gotta go find it. That’s what we’re doing,” he told Popular Mechanics.