May 27th, 2021
While staying busy sorting through Sentry samples for larval morphotypes, today we encountered unexpected delays in our science. Gearing up for our first Jason dive (Jason is our remote operated submersible on board) was cut short when problems arose with the winch that moves Jason from the ship into the water, and we can’t visit our site at Baltimore Canyon until the issue is found and resolved. Diving with Jason is essential for this project; retrieving scientific instruments from last year’s spring cruise, collecting new mussels and carbonate rocks, as well as deploying new scientific equipment all requires Jason and associated machinery to be functioning properly.
Data Collection Behind the Scenes
During this cruise we are attempting to collect many larvae and larval shells to answer the questions about cold seep larval dispersal. One way we are collecting these samples is through the use of these tubes traps! Seen here are Avery Calhoun, Lauren Rice, and Caitlin Plowman (graduate and PhD students from UO) filling the falcon tubes in each arm of the trap with a formalin preservative.
How this trap works is by slowly releasing this chemical into the water above the trap, and any larvae swimming past will die and sink into the trap, collecting them all at the bottom of the tube until the trap is collected. These rubber straps stretched over the tubes are to ensure the traps do not lose the solution on the journey down to the site in Jason, with a galvanic release that will dissolve under 24 hours in saltwater subsequently allowing the solution to escape. Another interesting feature is the yellow monkey’s fist knot that is attached to the trap. This will float above the trap and will allow Jason’s arms to easily grab and move the trap around!
Meet a Scientist On Board
Hey everyone! My name is Michael Gray, and I am a student under Dr. Roy He at North Carolina State University. With this cruise, I will be completely a double major with a B.S. in Physics and a B.S. in Marine Science with a concentration in Physics. In the fall I’ll be continuing at NCSU in pursuit of an M.S. in Physical Oceanography.
Usually, I tend to focus on tracking Nor’easter storms and trying to determine what makes them tick, but this cruise has taken that on its head and spun it around quite a few times! While I do perform some physically oriented tasks such as processing data from tilt meter (devices that use their orientation in the water to determine the speed and direction of a current) and casting CTDs (measures conductivity, temperature, and depth), I have been taken to the extremes of my comfort zone to sorting larvae?!
I definitely have no idea what I’m doing, but I’d say I’m blending in well enough (not at all). Today, however, was a pretty slow day. We deployed Sentry around 12:30pm and another delay in Jason being deployed meant a lot of sitting around and waiting for Sentry to return with more samples to sort.
Hopefully the problem with Jason can be fixed and it can be deployed at least once per site, otherwise a lot of the projects being conducted by Grad and PhD students aboard will fall vastly short of target samples. Until then, we’ll just be hitting a lot of late-night sorting montages!
We hope that this issue will be found soon and we will be able to start collecting data from our site, 400 meters deep! With the brunt of our sampling coming from our sites, everyone is antsy to get in the water, but also so we can move to our next site.
