June 4th, 2021
What goes down must come up. Today began around 9 am when Jason returned from Blake Ridge with our collected samples. We recovered our sipunculan trap, tube traps, and tilt meter from last year’s cruise and deployed new traps that we’ll be recovering in the fall. Along with our recovered science instruments, our cups have returned! First, we completed our immediate tasks like emptying and siphoning the bioboxes, retrieving the niskin bottles that collect water samples, and putting specimens in the cold room. Then, we were able to see our shrunken artwork. As one of our deeper sites, we were all excited to send down these Styrofoam cups as they would shrink the most. To our pleasure, the cups were about half the size we sent them down! Even though we put paper in them before sending them down to ensure they wouldn’t fall into each other or shrink wonky, we had an amalgamation of resulting shapes. We had fun comparing cup structures and how our designs changed.
With the samples back on board, the scientists get back on the scopes. We had multiple bins of sieved biobox water to search through. With these boxes carrying carbonate rocks, mussels, and our science traps, it’s important to sort through the sieved samples to find any hiding larvae. The countless hours we spend searching through sediment under the microscopes is like a long game of those iSpy books, searching for hidden targets. In these samples we are particularly searching for gastropod and bivalve veligers and are especially excited when we find the pink Bathymodiolus larvae pictured here. The scientists erupt into cheer and we all take turns seeing them under the lucky scope. With other similar shapes or colors like foraminifera and ostracods in our samples, we get really psyched for successful findings.
Meet a Scientist on Board
Howdy, my name is Leo Zaklikowski, I grew up in Tiburon, California and went to the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology, where I graduated with a degree in marine biology in 2018. After graduating I did a study abroad program in Thailand and when I returned, I worked as a fisheries observer out of Coos Bay and Newport, Oregon. This is my first time being on a research cruise, but my fiancée was on the R/V Endeavor cruise in the fall and inspired me to experience science at sea. I love polychaete worms as they are my friends, and I am truly a rainbow four leaf clover in the coal mine.
Another way we are collecting data on this cruise is by doing a CTD cast at each location and depth where we deploy Sentry. CTD stands for conductivity, temperature, and depth, and is a tool that can help us understand the environment where we are finding larvae. The CTD (pictured to the left) is cast off the side of the boat and lowered on a winch to about 10 meters above bottom. On the way down, it takes a profile of the temperature, salinity, and several other parameters that allow us to choose interesting spots to take water samples from. On the way up, a scientist in the main lab is calling out various depths to the winch operator and firing the niskin bottles to collect discrete water samples.
Before we leave our site at Blake Ridge, we deployed Sentry one more time, with another late retrieval. Looks like the science team has another late night of sorting ahead of them!