June 11th, 2021
With Florida Escarpment off our stern we started course for our next site: Mississippi Canyon. We had a change of plans however, with a tropical storm developing in the Gulf heading for our most important sites. To avoid losing access to our sites, we took a detour and are heading for GC-234 first and attempting to return later in the cruise to Mississippi Canyon. We should be arriving at the site around 0800 tomorrow morning. Moving from site to site aboard the TGT gives our team time to catch up on our projects, and this round of transit was no exception. Our previous ROV Jason dive from the Florida Escarpment gave us plenty to do all day and all night. To help stay on track, we have a whiteboard to-do list posted in the main lab, where we check off tasks as they are completed. There is no greater feeling than checking off a box that has taken hours to complete.
Our next three sites (Green Canyon, Bush Hill, and Brine Pool) are where many of our graduate students are focusing their research. Today, Young Lab PhD student Lauren Rice constructed her two different types of settlement arrays (pictured here) which will be deployed at the bottom of the ocean for a few months at these sites and recovered in Autumn. These arrays will help determine the variety of epibiotic organisms that like to settle around methane seeps and their preferred locals. The single-tier settlement arrays are referred to by the Alvin Crew as “trampolines” even though they do not bounce (unfortunately). They are a single height above the sea floor with a variety of substrates including rocks, clam shells, mussel shells, and tube worm tubes. These arrays are placed next to healthy bushes of tube worms which are very abundant around methane seeps in the Gulf. We will also be gathering settlement arrays that Lauren placed at these three sites in February of 2020 to see what has settled where.
Meet a Scientist on Board
Hi! My name is Ian Grace. I am a PhD student in Dr. David Eggleston’s marine ecology and conservation lab at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. I worked in the same lab during undergrad and spent two years analyzing DSV Alvin Framegrabber footage to quantify habitat composition and species diversity and abundance at deep-sea methane seeps in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) and West Atlantic Margin (WAM). I returned to NC State in late 2019 to begin my graduate program. I am investigating if variance in elemental composition of mussel larval shells is sensitive to region, depth, or time, and if results can infer patterns of larval behavior such as demersal drift and vertical migration among methane seep sites in the GOM and WAM- many of which I studied in early undergrad. For instance, if larval shells collected from two groups of sites have significantly different average elemental composition, it may mean that populations at these sites recruit from different larval pools or that those larvae are locally retained and therefore are less likely to disperse to distant sites. Being at sea certainly makes me miss my hobbies- beyond spending time on my research, I enjoy kayaking, composing music, travel photography, and playing disc golf.
Feel free to follow me on Instagram (@ianjgrace) where I post cool research and travel pictures, videos, and blurbs!
The past 24 hours have been focused on sorting through slurp and biobox samples. This process included sifting through sieved sediment and specifically sampled sites with the slurp vacuum. This step is crucial yet extremely tedious to hand pick through particles searching for treasures of target specimens under the microscopes. There are many important things that the scientists have to continually maintain during this process including: keeping organisms on ice, organizing our creatures, facilitating the jams, and taking snack breaks. We are typically sorting all night so it’s important to keep up morale. At the end our sorted critters are consolidated and distributed for various projects and typically photographed and/ or preserved for later. It’s all worth it in the end to answer our scientific questions, and seeing some fascinating organisms. Here’s a picture from our consolidating process where all the ophiuroid (brittle stars) juveniles looked like a bunch of stars in the night sky!
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