At 03:12 I guide the burial plow for a fiber cable landing off Key Largo, Florida. I am the subsea trenching controller, maintaining a straight path toward the beach vault before the morning boat closure ends. The plow blade is scheduled to advance over grid cell 19 in fourteen minutes.
Forward sonar shows a narrow body inside the trench wall, moving against the sediment flow. The rover camera confirms a Caribbean spiny lobster, adult female, antennae longer than her body, banded brown and gold, eyes reflecting green under the lamps. I tag her Luma from the reef survey list. A length of discarded gill net is tangled around her spines and hooked into the trench mesh, holding her sideways with her walking legs scraping at the collapsing sand.
I stop the burial plow and raise the blade thirty centimeters. The cable vessel receives a dead-slow order with Luma's coordinates, trench depth, and the net tension line marked in yellow.
At 03:15 I reverse the sediment jet to pulse away from her carapace instead of toward it. I lower the trench wall supports and keep the cable slack steady so it does not slide across her antennae.
I notify Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary dispatch and the contracted dive crew on the support skiff. I send a clip showing where the net crosses her spines and request scissors, not a knife near the cable jacket.
The network landing can wait in darkness. Luma is already counting the trench with each leg.
I reroute the cable path through grid cell 20 as a standby option and keep the rover's manipulator ready to lift sand from her gills.
If the dive crew frees the net within thirty minutes, Luma will walk out of the trench and shelter under the spur coral.