How Scuba Diving Strengthened My Veganism
By: Nathan Allen
Tags: Scuba Diving, Vegan, Outdoors, Science, Fish

Running out of air

I started training for SCUBA certification last year, in a pool. The first few skills you learn, like treading water, evacuating your mask of water, and taking your suit on and off, are easy tricks to teach in a pool. But to become certified, you have to pass some skill sets in open water. I’d be completing training off the coast of Belize.

Almost immediately upon arrival at Lighthouse Reef atoll (a group of islands 50 miles off the coast of Belize), we jumped into the salty water to start the first of four open water dives. Over the course of the next few days, I learned how to use underwater sign language, how to pass off an oxygen source to my dive buddy, how to maintain underwater buoyancy, and how to do a safety stop.

The most memorable thing I learned is how scary being 30 meters below the surface of the water is for a land animal like myself and, conversely, how scary it must be for a fish to be taken up on a boat or onto land.

After being pulled from the water, most fish never experience their version of that endless atmosphere, the ocean, ever again.

On all dives, you are supposed to monitor the level of oxygen in your tank — makes sense right? Well, on one particular dive, I was monitoring it and everything seemed normal. You usually start a dive with approximately 3000 psi of oxygen. After about 20 minutes, I glanced at my dive gauge and it read just over 500 psi. I should have had more than double that, and everyone else on my dive did.

So what did I do? Panic, of course.

Breathing air is easy to take for granted. When you have enough of what you need to survive, you don’t really worry. For me, air has never been restricted.

In that moment, it was. Instead of an entire atmosphere, I had but a fraction of a fraction. The atmosphere was in a metal tank strapped to my back, and it was running out quick.

Being a person out of air felt like what it must feel like for a fish out of water. It was terrible. In the end, I did not run out of air. We were able to do our safety stop, and then rose to the surface where we switched to snorkels and breathed in what I then realized was an almost endless expanse of air. I was safe.

Photo: Pia via Pexels

I didn’t stop thinking about how it made me feel. I didn’t stop thinking about how so many fish, after being pulled from the water, never experience their version of that endless atmosphere, the ocean, ever again. Fish cannot check to see how much air they have left. All they can do is flop around before dying of asphyxiation under the glare of their bipedal cousin.

The Science of Breathing

A lot of the story has been conjecture: me putting myself into the fins of a fish. However, I did not actually know if I was feeling anything comparable to how a fish felt out of water. And maybe we humans will never know for sure, but here’s some ideas.

First off, humans…

When you take in a breath of air, what happens? Well, first the air passes through your mouth or nose, and down your windpipe. Then, the air is split into two groups that flow into the two different lungs via these nifty little tubes called bronchi. These bronchi then divide even more into thousands of bronchioles which terminate in these little sacs of air called alveoli. These alveoli are where blood in small capillaries pick up oxygen and ships it throughout the body for energy production. This is inhalation.

The opposite of this whole process that gets rid of carbon dioxide created on the back end of energy production is called exhalation.

Remember when you were a kid and you would dive underwater and hold your breath in a bathtub or pool? That funny lightheaded feeling that you would get is partly due to a restriction on breathing. When you are not breathing in, you are also probably not breathing out. When this happens, two bad things start to occur: hypoxia and carbon dioxide poisoning. Basically, you are not getting enough oxygen and you are holding onto too much carbon dioxide. In serious cases this causes unconsciousness, respiratory failure, circulatory arrest, and death.

How do fish breathe?

Like mammals, fish must take in oxygen and get rid of carbon dioxide; they do this a little differently, though. Since they are grabbing oxygen dissolved in water, fish have to take in water through their mouths — and lots of it! The water enters their mouths and then flows across their gills, organs like our own lungs, where diffusion takes places. Diffusion is the process by which this precious oxygen jumps from a high oxygen environment (water) to a low oxygen environment (the fish blood). For this to happen, fish have this cool adaptation called “countercurrent oxygen exchange,” which just means that the water and blood flow in opposite directions.

It is important to flag here that this is just an overview, as different species of fish can do some pretty remarkable things when it comes to breathing (have y’all heard of the snake head?).

As I mentioned, bad stuff starts to occur when people are robbed of their breathe for even a relatively short amount of time. So what is the word on fish deprived of water?

Fish out of water

Research shows that air exposure has a pretty sizable effect on fish breathing, in some instances completely stopping it. With air-breathers excluded, air exposure causes ailments like: oxygen deprivation, toxic carbon dioxide buildup, gill filament breakdown, capillary collapse, and a lowered heart rate.

What’s more, and perhaps not initially obvious, is that struggle (or extended exercise without recovery) makes these problems worse. Prior to being brought out of the water, fish are often caught on hooks or in nets and try hard to get themselves free. This causes exhaustion. Then they’re pulled out of their natural breathing environment.

Fish trying to recover their breath after being exhausted with a hook in the lip is like you running a 100 meter sprint only to be forced into a tank of water at the finish line.

How scuba diving strengthened my resolve

Fish are definitely not people, but they are not rocks or chairs. Fish feel something. This ability for animals to feel a subjective “something” is not the reason I went vegan, but it is the reason I have stayed vegan. I cannot justify eating animals that are likely capable of feeling pain.

The fishness of a fish is not worth ruining for a fish stick, no more than the pigness of a pig is worth destroying for a pork chop.

And remember folx, resemblance is not sameness; fish pain is not human pain. Likewise, my mom and dad are similar, but are completely not the same. Still, they both mean a lot to me.

When I began to rationalize it like that, it was easier to see how the reason I had remained vegan for cows, pigs, chickens, etc. was the same reason that I was now adding fish, in some meaningful way, to that list. The fishness of a fish is not worth ruining for a fish stick, no more than the pigness of a pig is worth destroying for a pork chop.

In his article about fish pain, Ferris Jabr writes, “genuinely pitying a fish seems to require an Olympian feat of empathy.” This is an incredibly common sentiment that is rarely ever interrogated. Fish, people claim, are too different from us. They are slimy. They have fins. They have big eyes. They smell funky.

What is often missed is that this is exactly right! Fish are so different when compared to us bipeds with gangly arms, protruding smellers, and pesky fingers. That does not mean, however, that we may treat fish as we like as if they do not feel anything.

It does not take the strength of an Olympian to see fish as feeling, sentient animals, it only takes a little introspection. When I was afraid of running out of air 30 meters down in the ocean, I was that fish struggling and afraid on the deck of a boat.