Current Events

June 1st, 2021

Today the science party is getting a much-deserved break from the hustle and bustle of 24-hour operations with both AUV Sentry and ROV Jason! After arriving on site late last night, ROV Jason was deployed in hopes of recovering a lost oceanographic monitoring mooring that failed to surface several months ago. The first  mooring was successfully recovered and brought on deck early this morning. Unfortunately, we also brought up a shark that had been laying on the mooring. Here’s a picture of how we found it, a shark hotspot! Now, we are transiting to another site to try and recover a second mooring that also failed to surface. It is unclear whether we will be able to find it, as several storm systems have come through this area and may have buried it under meters of sediment. Fingers crossed that we could find and recover it later tonight!

In other news, the ship has finally entered the Gulf Stream and the water is blue-er than many of us have ever seen. There is lots of free-floating Sargassum (a type of seaweed) with plenty of tiny critters that are likely hitching a ride on the surface currents. Not to mention, the weather is treating us very well! After a day spent finishing up science objectives from the most recent site, you can find us lounging in the sun, reading books, and enjoying ship life … our group is quite content.

Hi I’m Tess! I’m a master’s student in Dr. Shawn Arellano’s deep sea larval lab. I grew up in Olympia, WA, and fell in love with the ocean as a little kid on my family’s boat exploring the Salish Sea. After completing an Associate’s of Biology at Pierce College, I transferred to Western Washington University and got a Bachelor’s in Biology with Marine Emphasis. I did various projects as an undergrad, ranging from the reproductive ecology of nudibranchs to maintaining long-term water quality datasets in freshwater systems. When I graduated, I was given the opportunity to begin my Master’s in Dr. Arellano’s lab studying critters of the deep and their planktonic babies. Since then, I have been able to explore some of my passions in bioinformatics and DNA sequence analysis and have built a project around those skills. I am studying how the microbial composition of the cold-seep mussel, Gigantidas childressi, changes during key life-history transitions in both diet and habitat.

            This is my third time going to sea for science! My first research cruise was in March of 2020 on the R/V Atlantis working with DSV Alvin (a human operated submersible!), a second cruise in October-November 2020 was focused on collecting deep-sea larvae with AUV Sentry. I am especially excited for this cruise because I will be collecting many of the samples needed for my thesis with ROV Jason and Sentry.