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BOWLS Cruise Blog
Days 11 & 12
July 1, 2014
48° 17' N 124° 09' W
After an intensive few days of multiple coring, we are now heading up the Strait of Juan de Fuca for San Juan Island Friday Harbor Labs. Our international team of scientists had the multiple corer humming! We collected 12/12 multiple successful multiple cores (96 tubes) full of mud and wonderful deep-sea mud dwellers across a wide expanse of the ocean in 2.5 days. King Neptune, with is waves and winds, rarely lets us sample the denizens of the deep so efficiently. The cruise has been quite successful, although Neptune did retain two of our precious bone-wood landers at the seafloor, and tore off our trawl net before we could collect any large seafloor invertebrates such as starfish and brittle stars. Sampling the deep sea is always challenging, and usually rewarding.
Day 10
July 1, 2014
47° 40' N 125° 28' W
Today was beautiful – sunny, a calm sea, and snow-capped mountains faintly visible in the distance. We have been out of sight of land for most of this cruise.
With the lander operations complete, we have turned our attention to multi-coring as described in the earlier blogs. Today we visited two different stations and did 3 sets of multi-cores at each; all but two cores worked (going 46/48 if pretty good). With mud collected at different depths, we will get an idea of whom was in the sediment around the landers. Fortunately, processing the mud goes fairly quickly. Once the corer is on deck, we take the tubes off and put them on an extruder. This allows us to push the mud up the tube, out the top and sample it in a very controlled and precise way. Importantly, not all mud is the same. It turns out that most sediment-dwelling organisms live in the top few centimeters (this is even more true in the deep sea or below 1000m). Of course to keep the ship neat, all of the mud processing happens on the back deck.
Day 9
June 30, 2014
Benthic scientists love mud!
With our landers successfully recovered, all work into the cold van done and bone and wood animals preserved, we have started sediment sampling of background deep-sea with a megacorer at our 2600 m northern BOWL station. The megacorer is a piece of equipment with by eight acrylic tubes that is deployed on the bottom to sample surface sediments (up to about 40 cm). The tubes filled with sediment are then brought back to the ship almost intact, which is really good for a number of faunal, microbial and geochemical analyses. Sediment from megacorer tubes are processed much faster by our 13 member team than compared to the long time of faunal picking and bone and wood weighting carried in each of our landers. It is also quite confortable to work on deck in a beatiful sunny Monday! I guess we all feel that it is great to have mud on board!
Day 8
June 29, 2014
It is great to be back on the R/V Oceanus. I had the pleasure of being a part of the trip fourteen months ago that deployed the landers that we're picking up on this cruise. Back then I had never seen a live Osedax specimen, only their DNA sequences which I was working on. Due to the specialized nature and rarity of the habitat of Osedax, I worked on them for a year and a half before I ever saw one alive --- in Antarctica! Here I have gotten to see even more live, and large, Osedax.
Osedax is one of the two main focuses of the Bone and Wood Landers project. Osedax are highly specialized members of Siboglinidae (within the segmented annelids worms like earthworms), whose members include giant tubeworms found on hydrothermal vents and hydrocarbon seeps. Most members of Siboglinidae absorb inorganic chemicals from the environment, like hydrogen sulfide or methane, and transport these chemicals to bacteria that live inside them. The bacteria then break these chemicals down and use them to create nutrients for the worm. The worm gets food and the bacteria get a safe place to live.
Day 7
June 28, 2014
45° 51' N 125° 09.300' W
The first week of our voyage is coming to an end. It feels like just yesterday I was in Friday Harbor helping to frantically assemble landers, troubleshoot the design and deploy them in the field. Now, over a year later, we are back on the R/V Oceanus and have successfully recovered our final lander. By the sixth lander our team had developed a well-orchestrated sampling system and efficiently processed the entire lander in only a few short hours all with a buzz of excitement through the lab. Of course the sea lions plying curiously near the vessel helped to keep morale high! I was much more excited about the ocean sunfish (Mola mola) that we briefly saw at the surface. I can now scratch that off of my list of buzz are marine animals to spot in the wild.
Day 6
June 27, 2014
47° 30.20' N 125° 50.82' W
One of the key parts of our experiments is looking at the animals that live on whale bones in the deep-sea, but what makes them so special?
Whale bones are amazing biological structures, the result of millions of years of evolution, that help whales to survive throughout the world’s oceans. Many of the unique features of whale bones are aimed at combating negative buoyancy (sinking forces). Firstly, their bones are very porous and consist almost entirely of a honeycomb structure, with only a thin layer of compact bone. This means that there is less mineralized bone tissue to weigh them down. Secondly, the pore spaces of the honeycomb bones are filled with a very fatty bone marrow. Since these fats are less dense than water they also provide positive buoyancy. Both of adaptations have consequences for the animals that colonize whale skeletons when they die and sink to the seabed.
Day 5
June 26, 2014
45° 51.186' N 125° 09.300' W
After five days on the ship, I am finally settling in to life at sea. The hours are irregular and work days can be long, but that is a cheap price to pay for having the chance to collect animals few people have ever seen. We all share a small room with another person, and each room has a closet and sink. There is a shared laundry facility at the front of the ship that the scientists and crew take turns using depending on the day. It’s actually quite similar to a dorm, but the food is much better! Yesterday we had biscuits and gravy for breakfast, BBQ pork sandwiches for lunch, and rack of lamb for dinner. Soda, hot coffee and tea are always available to pick us up in the morning or help us power through a long day. Plus, there’s all the ice cream we can eat!
Microbiology
June 25, 2014
45° 51' N 125° 09' W
Coming from Germany with no experience about the Pacific Ocean, I was very excited to participate in the BOWLS cruise, having the chance to work on microbial processes in whalebones and wood substrate. Having dissected whales as a student (I was young and needed the money), I already had an idea of the rich flavor dead whales produce – and also on this cruise I would not be disappointed!
Just before the cruise I fell deeply in love with beef jerky. So I bought a decent stash for the two weeks at sea to come. But apparently, the cook’s stash of jerky was even greater than mine - heaven! Articulating a positive attitude to Germany, he nicknamed me „Schnitzel“. Hopefully, nobody else will pick it up. Instead, I like the way my US colleagues pronounce my name Stefan on the second syllable, as they make it sound very Italian.
Sampling Process
June 24, 2014
43° 52' N 127° 34' W
In the last 24 hours, we recovered the second of six Bone Wood Landers (BoWLs) successfully. This one (BoWL #5) was deployed further down the slope at 3000m. Once the lander was secured on deck, the work really begins! For the next five to eight hours, the scientists on board resemble an ant colony: scurrying around with purpose performing pre-assigned tasks but appearing chaotic to any onlookers.
First, the whale-bone and wood substrates are photographed on the lander to record how the experiment looked. Then they are removed from the lander as quickly as possible and placed into buckets of seawater, which have been chilling for hours previously in the cold van. This prevents degradation of the animal tissues and reduces the amount of stress being faced by animals, which we try to keep alive. All substrates are then taken to the cold van for additional processing. More photography of the bone and wood ensues, but this time in a well-lit lab and from all angles.
Day 2: 1330 hours
June 23, 2014
43° 52' N 127° 34' W
Today our goal is to recover from the excesses of yesterday, before we use the all-too rare opportunity provided by this cruise to do it again. Yesterday, we arrived over our first lander (1600 m below) after 5.5 hours at sea, then sent an acoustic signal that woke up the dormant electronics in the lander. Then a very specific sound pulse was sent to separate the weights of the lander from its floats, allowing the lander to rise to the surface where we waited. Procedures like this always sound to me like Science Fiction, with appropriate levels of suspense, unearthly sounds and a measure of Black Magic, but at the appointed time the lander surfaced and when the ship sailed along side, it was snagged and brought onboard. That makes it sound too easy – it took six guys, the heavy-lifting A-frame, calm seas and 30 minutes to wrestle the 1.5 m to a side triangular lander onboard the ship; all the while we were in nervous anticipation of what animals had colonized the wood and bone cradled by the lander inside all but opaque mesh bags.
Day 1: It begins
June 22, 2014
43° 54' N 125° 52' W
A team of 13 scientists left Newport Oregon Sunday morning on the R/V Oceanus to recover experimental landers placed on the seafloor 14 months before. The purpose of the work is to explore how deep-sea ecosystems function, how diverse these deep-sea regions are, and how they are genetically connected to each other. The landers are custom-made by the science team to carry, and return, several sets of substrate including wood, whale bone and control substrates.
Oceanographic research often includes international teams; a fact that could not be more true of this group which contains scientists from the USA, Brazil, England, Germany, Trinidad & Tobago, and the Bahamas. Of course the diversity of the group makes checking in on World Cup Soccer pretty lively! Craig Smith (Univ. or Hawai’i) is the Chief Scientist of the cruise made possible by a National Science Foundation Grant to himself and Ken Halanych (Auburn University).
Last Updated: 05/31/2016