The first color HD video of deep-ocean bioluminescence in Hawaiian bamboo corals faithfully shows the behaviors described by Oceanographer Sylvia Earle and others decades ago — until now never seen by anyone other than those who made the journey 380 meters (nearly a quarter of a mile) under the surface of the sea. DOER Marine collaborated with Canon USA to successfully capture the moving images in near complete darkness.

With an equivalent sensitivity of more than 4,000,000 ISO, Canon’s ME20F-SH camera is designed to shoot high-definition full-color video in extremely low light, such as hundreds of feet under the sea. Photo courtesy of Canon.

In 1979 Dr. Sylvia Earle made a record-setting dive to 1,250 feet off the coast of Oahu in Hawaii in the “Jim suit”. This is how she described the bamboo corals: “When I touched them, rings of light pulsed up and down between base and tip.”

Pisces submersible pilots Terry Kerby and Max Cremer along with deepwater coral scientist Frank Parrish have all also observed this phenomenon themselves. They have told the story verbally, but have never been able to capture it crisply and in color on video. Even with advanced silicone-intensified low-light cameras, images were always gray and indistinct.

Subsea Technologist Ian Griffith and I first saw the Canon ME20F-SH camera at a trade show in 2015. We immediately saw the potential it had for capturing bioluminescence at depth. DOER, the company I manage, had made the first ABS-class underwater camera housings for cine cameras and lenses, and we believed the ME20F-SH could utilize the same equipment. Calvin Anderson and Carl Peer from Canon USA worked to make a unit available to DOER for evaluation and testing.