In addition, photos which are badly exposed can to some extent be salvaged by converting them to greyscale and then ramping up the contrast (black and white is much more forgiving of high contrast than colour). The image below is of a plaice. I had taken some close ups of its face when it decided to swim away into the gloom. I grabbed a shot as it did so, knowing that the pic would be underexposed given the settings I was using; but when you photograph fish, there's rarely time to adjust exposure!
As expected, the image was very underexposed but converting to black and white allowed me to push the exposure much more than colour would have allowed and without the same degree of image degradation you would get doing the same to a colour image. The result, below, is that a photo which I would normally probably have deleted has lived to fight another day in the image library. Not the best photo in the world but fine for documentary/reference purposes.
The main reason, however, I rarely use black and white for underwater photos is that I want to show off the fantastic colours of the marine environment. Granted, plaice are not the most colourful fish (in fact they can be hard to see as their mottled markings blend into the background), but they do have some nice orange spots which you can see a bit of in the picture below.
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