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This chapter contains sections titled: Risk Assessments Diving Project Plan Codes of Practice Control of Diving Operations Working Under Water Potential Diving Problems and Solutions Safety During Excavation Inter‐Tidal Site Safety Further Information

If you ask the average person to describe a scuba diver, you would probably receive comments such as strong, young, athletic, male, and a bit of a daredevil. However, recent research into the highest growth sector of diver training reveals women over 40 are signing on for dive training in unprecedented numbers. Dive service providers and tourist destination promoters may be missing opportunities to market effectively to attract this dynamic group, using a \"one size fits all\" approach and potentially losing sales opportunities for equipment, courses, dive travel, and more. This study examines the mature aged female diver, revealing new demographic data, information about their dive travel preferences, how much they spend on diving holidays, and other information useful to dive and tourism industry stakeholders. A web-based survey was used to study 111 female divers over age 40. The average age of participants was 51 to 55, and most had logged over 100 dives. The results depicted participants as a vibrant part of the diving community, with money to spend and the desire to travel. Safety in dive operations was identified as a priority as was small-group travel. Spending over $500 a day on international diving trips, they represent an untapped and lucrative market segment. This study aims to contribute new insight into this dynamic and motivated market segment. Findings will assist dive tourism service providers and destination marketers to better understand this segment, to create attractive products and services to tap into this lucrative market.

Introduction: The Bajo community possesses remarkable abilities and has been the focus of various studies. However, a comprehensive understanding of the complex factors influencing their diving capabilities remains incomplete. Objective: This study explores the extraordinary freediving abilities of the Bajo people in Wakatobi, Indonesia. Methodology: Using a qualitative case study approach. Data were collected through observations and interviews with 20 diverse informants. Thematic analysis was used to uncover key aspects of Bajo diving, including factors influencing performance (age, health, and genetics), specific techniques (a combination of freestyle/breaststroke strokes and varying body positions), typical dive duration (3-10 minutes) and depth (15-30 meters), training methods (observation, independent practice, and community guidance starting at a young age), and simple traditional equipment (wooden goggles and spears). Results: The results demonstrate a profound interaction between the marine environment and socio-cultural practices in shaping the extraordinary diving abilities of the Bajo people, highlighting their close relationship with the sea and providing valuable insights into the Bajo people’s adaptations to traditional diving. Discussion: This study emphasizes the significant influence of the marine environment and socio-cultural traditions on the exceptional diving abilities of the Bajo community, which distinguishes their traditional methods from modern diving practices and equipment. Conclusions: The diving culture of the Bajo community needs to be preserved while also providing health education regarding the risks associated with diving activities. This culture could be developed into a professional sport, potentially having a more substantial impact on the lives of the Bajo people.

To describe the incidence, severity, burden and sport specific characteristics of injuries reported in elite diving athletes. Descriptive epidemiology study. Medical attention and time-loss injuries from 63 (43 female, 20 male) Australian national diving programme athletes were prospectively collected over four seasons (September 2018–August 2022). Injury incidence rates and burden were calculated, standardised per 365 athlete days, and compared across groups using negative binomial generalised linear models. In total 421 injuries were reported (female = 292, male = 129) at an injury incidence rate of 2.36 (95 % confidence interval = 2.14–2.60) per 365 athlete days. Annual injury prevalence ranged from 70.0 to 85.1 %. Approximately two-thirds of injuries (67.2 %) resulted in a period of time-loss. The overall injury burden was 91 days of absence (95 % confidence interval = 81–102) per 365 athlete days. Stress fractures in springboard diving athletes incurred the largest mean days of time-loss compared to other injured tissue types. The majority of injuries were reported to occur during training (79.3 %) as opposed to competition (2.4 %), with more than half (55.3 %) of all reported injuries occurring during pool training sessions. Water entry (30.4 %) or take-off (27.8 %) were the most frequently reported mechanism of injury. Annual injury prevalence reported in competitive Australian diving athletes was found to be high. Contrary to existing literature, competitive diving injuries were reported to occur within the daily training environment, with few injuries occurring during competition. Notable injury differences between springboard and platform athletes were observed.

Zebrafish (Danio rerio) are widely accepted as a multidisciplinary vertebrate model for neurobehavioral and clinical studies, and more recently have become established as a model for exercise physiology and behavior. Individual differences in activity level (e.g. exploration) have been characterized in zebrafish, however, how different levels of exploration correspond to differences in motivation to engage in swimming behavior has not yet been explored. We screened individual zebrafish in two tests of exploration: the open field and novel tank diving tests. The fish were then exposed to a tank in which they could choose to enter a compartment with a flow of water (as a means of testing voluntary motivation to exercise). After a 2-day habituation period, behavioral observations were conducted. We used correlative analyses to investigate the robustness of the different exploration tests. Due to the complexity of dependent behavioral variables, we used machine learning to determine the personality variables that were best at predicting swimming behavior. Our results show that contrary to our predictions, the correlation between novel tank diving test variables and open field test variables was relatively weak. Novel tank diving variables were more correlated with themselves than open field variables were to each other. Males exhibited stronger relationships between behavioral variables than did females. In terms of swimming behavior, fish that spent more time in the swimming zone spent more time actively swimming, however, swimming behavior was inconsistent across the time of the study. All relationships between swimming variables and exploration tests were relatively weak, though novel tank diving test variables had stronger correlations. Machine learning showed that three novel tank diving variables (entries top/bottom, movement rate, average top entry duration) and one open field variable (proportion of time spent frozen) were the best predictors of swimming behavior, demonstrating that the novel tank diving test is a powerful tool to investigate exploration. Increased knowledge about how individual differences in exploration may play a role in swimming behavior in zebrafish is fundamental to their utility as a model of exercise physiology and behavior.

Disability inclusion in diving tourism is a relevant topic of study, considering the documented benefits to disabled communities, the growing demand for inclusive diving tourism opportunities globally, and the limited information on the status quo. This qualitative study assessed the perspectives on disability inclusion in diving tourism among 28 diving industry members (who were not disabled divers) and one representative (who was a disabled diver) from the largest disabled diving organisation in South Africa, which is an important diving destination internationally. Benefits, challenges, involvement, and specific perspectives in inclusive diving tourism were captured through thematic analysis of participants’ narratives. The results confirmed the multidimensional benefits of diving to disabled people and highlighted barriers to inclusive diving tourism related to logistics, knowledge, awareness and attitude of the industry, marketing, and collaboration between stakeholders. This study drew useful recommendations to enhance disability inclusion in diving tourism and exploit its potential for the development of this industry.

At-sea behaviour of seabirds have received significant attention in ecology over the last decades as it is a key process in the ecology and fate of these populations. It is also, through the position of top predator that these species often occupy, a relevant and integrative indicator of the dynamics of the marine ecosystems they rely on. Seabird trajectories are recorded through the deployment of GPS, and a variety of statistical approaches have been tested to infer probable behaviours from these location data. Recently, deep learning tools have shown promising results for the segmentation and classification of animal behaviour from trajectory data. Yet, these approaches have not been widely used and investigation is still needed to identify optimal network architecture and to demonstrate their generalization properties. From a database of about 300 foraging trajectories derived from GPS data deployed simultaneously with pressure sensors for the identification of dives, this work has benchmarked deep neural network architectures trained in a supervised manner for the prediction of dives from trajectory data. It first confirms that deep learning allows better dive prediction than usual methods such as Hidden Markov Models. It also demonstrates the generalization properties of the trained networks for inferring dives distribution for seabirds from other colonies and ecosystems. In particular, convolutional networks trained on Peruvian boobies from a specific colony show great ability to predict dives of boobies from other colonies and from distinct ecosystems. We further investigate accross-species generalization using a transfer learning strategy known as ‘fine-tuning’. Starting from a convolutional network pre-trained on Guanay cormorant data reduced by two the size of the dataset needed to accurately predict dives in a tropical booby from Brazil. We believe that the networks trained in this study will provide relevant starting point for future fine-tuning works for seabird trajectory segmentation.

This part of the series of papers presents the use of the diving complex after modernisation, diving operations in 2007 and 2010–2011, training for saturation divers organised outside the Naval Academy, and the first saturation dives carried out exclusively by a team of Polish divers and technical staff.

The use of sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO3) supplementation to improve repeated high-intensity performance is recommended; however, most swimming performance studies examine time trial efforts rather than repeated swims with interspersed recovery that are more indicative of training sessions. The aim of this study, therefore, was to investigate the effects of 0.3 g.kg−1 BM NaHCO3 supplementation on sprint interval swimming (8 × 50 m) in regionally trained swimmers. Fourteen regionally competitive male swimmers (body mass (BM): 73 ± 8 kg) volunteered for this double-blind, randomised, crossover designed study. Each participant was asked to swim 8 × 50 m (front crawl) at a maximum intensity from a diving block, interspersed with 50 m active recovery swimming. After one familiarisation trial, this was repeated on two separate occasions whereby participants ingested either 0.3 g.kg−1 BM NaHCO3 or 0.05 g.kg−1 BM sodium chloride (placebo) in solution 60 min prior to exercise. Whilst there were no differences in time to complete between sprints 1–4 (p > 0.05), improvements were observed in sprint 5 (p = 0.011; ES = 0.26), 6 (p = 0.014; ES = 0.39), 7 (p = 0.005; ES = 0.60), and 8 (p = 0.004; ES = 0.79). Following NaHCO3 supplementation, pH was greater at 60 min (p < 0.001; ES = 3.09), whilst HCO3− was greater at 60 min (p < 0.001; ES = 3.23) and post-exercise (p = 0.016; ES = 0.53) compared to placebo. These findings suggest NaHCO3 supplementation can improve the latter stages of sprint interval swimming performance, which is likely due to the augmentation of pH and HCO3− prior to exercise and the subsequent increase in buffering capacity during exercise.