Going Deep into the Unexplored Caves of Bosnia

the cave we are exploring is called villene which can be translated as fairy cave we have two good reasons to survey this cave the first one is purely the benefit of exploration it is rare to find the opportunity to explore new places where few or no humans have gone and which remain unknown to science the second reason is because of our suspicion that this cave might be polluted already you see there is a large power plant and open-air culprit upstream on the other side of the mountain in gachko this plant is planning further expansions which doesn't necessarily seem the smartest move so our goal here is to support local activists by putting together an impact assessment on the pollution levels to understand the condition of this system welcome back to our cave exploration vlog where today here in bosnia we are making ready for our first day of actual cave exploring our first day of action for this expedition we have gathered a team of experts from a variety of fields to get a thorough analysis of the cave dusan and petra will be diving into the wellspring of the cave to survey its biodiversity and map the underwater section marco dado and branco are the spellologists on the team and will be helping set up the gear for the divers as well as mapping and exploring the dry parts of the cave branco is a local legend among cave divers and speleologists he has been exploring caves for more than 25 years and even has a species named after him then we have mate and roman who will be surveying the dry parts of the cave and also the creek to understand the local biodiversity and whether there is potential to identify a new species and finally there is me and thiago my brother and also one of the biologists from mossy earth who decided to fund this expedition to get to this cave we traveled by train to croatia and then joined the team in driving down into bosnia for this trip i want to show you how things really were on the ground and how a real scientific expedition goes so we let the camera roll a lot and yeah we hope you enjoy this extra information and so the river goes one one part of the river comes like this and one comes from like here a little this is the this original liver musha so we found out how to get to the big uh sinkhole so he says that it's no problem that it's like very easy to find it i'm good that he was able to provide that yeah yeah i mean people here are really nice i mean they are a little bit scared still from the war but you can understand that it's a remote area and of course you know you need to take care of yourself but this part looks also interesting look that yeah there's a bit of yeah so also there could be it's a big chance there is something there as well it's usually this kind of cut-off cast means there is some water that was previously coming there yes so we're walking to the cave now i'm here with uh busan leading the way there and uh yeah i have the the tanks on my back here and yeah it's a just a little bit of a walk and we'll start exploring soon oh so we will set up the line see how we are with our with our air if our air is okay we will start mapping i will do the mapping and lucian on the way back will try to film or collect as much animals as you can most of the exploration explorations in croatia i do because the caves are unexplored but always when you find time to find a really new one and start something from the start from describe it's really it's pretty special [Music] uh we came quickly to 40 meters depth and it continues the visibility is one meter okay that's not easy he couldn't see left or right or anything we lost a lot of time just going with the line to one part of the rock and then to another part to figure out where does the passage go what is the direction we should go because you don't see it was more silty than we expected so it was quite it was it's not it's not sealed it's not sealed it's i think it's some bacteria that seem yeah yeah we didn't when we breathed we didn't get any more silt or mud maybe just a little bit minimum yeah yeah it's like immediately when we came the visibility is just better it's just bad in general in general and it reminds me of 1k that i dived in auburn goyak where we had these big big suspended things in the water that reflect your light and you can't see anything and in goya bacteria i found uh amphipods i think nifargos maybe tiflogamaros and troglocaris there are a lot of them a lot a lot no no dragons only only one fish but i'm sure the next guy will be much better so from our first dive we have established that something strange is happening here given what we know about this cave's morphology we expect it to have a pristine underwater habitat down there but that is not what we found we only found cave shrimp which poses some interesting questions you see cave shrimp are relatively high up in the food chain of caves as such we would have expected other species to also exist down there such as cave fish and the enigmatic all so essentially what we found could be the remnants of a once thriving cave ecosystem but how do we go about proving this to help solve this mystery we need to look at the surrounding area the cave is connected to a small creek which means that we could also find some clues about the ecosystem there so roman thiago and mate set out to survey the area they are collecting all sorts of specimens in the hopes of finding another piece of this puzzle this is the contact between the underground habitats and the surface habitats and on the such contact we can find some cave animals to collect the specimens they will catch them with a net and also use a technique called electro fishing where they send a small electric current into a small part of the creek that very briefly stuns the fish and allows for observation oh success so pretty isn't it yeah you know so you know this is usually when it feels threatens it does this ink and reflects when it shows uh its belly yeah but it also covers its uh eyes so that's amazing you don't i don't see you i don't exist bye man they also found some k shrimp outside which proves that the ecosystems are indeed connected roman later did some early stage analysis on some of the cave shrimp specimens and he thinks that one of them has the potential to be a new species but only time and further analysis will prove this so let's not get excited just yet then mate also has one more card up his sleeve edna so we collected we collected the water from the cave and right now we are filtering the water so we are taking around three liters of the sample and actually uh we are searching for environmental dna so it's the dna that is present in the in the environment in the water but uh we are targeting one certain fragment of dna that is specific to to the ohm and and this endemic fish specie that we are looking for so after we go back to zagreb we will extract dna from from this filter and we will perform qpcr reaction to see whether there is amplification or not if there is that confirms that uh both om and uh and the fish are present here in in this case system that's a different way to uh yeah explore these places yeah yeah so you then you don't have to actually see the species you you are targeting it indirectly so it's much easier than go inside the cave and dive in the second cave roman also found a large amount of biodiversity in fact fetches or you know what they produce but this is in fact the organic matter which is deeply needed in the cave systems because here is no food so this is basis the dead one is basis to grow for bacterials or fungi uh for some other uh small animals and that this is start of the pyramid you know after that concentrators which eat them and so on so this is the some kind of biosynonyms and we call it guano guanobiotinosis he even looked for some specimens using uv light which makes for some really cool shots branco tado and marco also had a look at the sinkhole where the water from the creek goes but the cave there runs deep and this seems to be beyond the scope of our expedition this time as it would require a multi-day effort inside the cave just to get to the starting point of the dive so yeah maybe next time at the end of our second day we joined dado to map all the dry parts of the cave because any good expedition needs to produce some good maps he uses some complex gadgets i have never heard of i use this measurement tool it's leica but it's it has some improvements so with one shot i will take a distance measure uh inclination and also azimuth and on this program i can then do uh drawing of the okay so this blue is measurements with this tube and other things i do freehand back with doosan and petra the second dive delivered much the same results as the first one a low visibility baron ecosystem to complete the work petra mapped the underwater part of the cave this expedition has produced a lot of value and a lot of things are being generated from these three days doosan and his team will complete the impact assessment of the underwater ecosystem to be used by the bosnian activists petra will put together maps of the underwater section and dotto maps of the dry caves roman and mate surveyed the biodiversity of the creek and mate also collected edna to try and detect the all as these results come in we will be adding them to our page at mossy.earth to complete the documents for this expedition as for me i left thiago in bosnia to do some rock climbing and headed back to croatia with the team now i'm sitting on the train out of zagreb at 1am and reflecting on the expedition it is something unique and truly special to be involved in exploring unknown places and while mossier's focus remains on direct action rewilding projects i do think there is a place for this in our future in a recent team discussion we talked about having a small percentage of our impact budget dedicated to research and exploration as it often is the basis from which we can plan direct interventions it is a bit like a normal company's r d department trying to find new opportunities i'd love to hear your opinion in the comments do you feel this type of ground zero projects are worth it is the rationale clear to you or do you have any questions on how it all works please let me know until next time [Music] cheers

Channel: Mossy Earth

Views: 9,117

Keywords: exploration, cave exploration, bosnia, new species

Id: 9R8YJcyO0LA

Length: 15min 38sec (938 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 07 2021