May 29th, 2021 – post by Casey Barnard (UO) and Fiona McBride (WWU)
Today we arrived at our next site Chincoteague around midnight on Saturday. Soon after arrival, ROV Jason was deployed. This site is around 1km in depth and takes around an hour for Jason to descend and another hour to ascend. The total amount of time Jason spent in the water was 12 hours. Pictured here are the boxes of goodies Jason brought back to the surface at 04:30 PM. If you look closely you can find a box filled with mussels and a box filled with larval traps! These “bio boxes” have Bungee cords that keep them closed during descent and ascent to make sure we don’t lose anything. The Jason divers are experts in using the robotic arms to make the smallest movements including stretching these cords over the boxes. In the evening a CTD was deployed for water samples at various depths.
In the meantime, the weather has not been in our favor since arriving here, with swells up to 12ft rocking the boat and lighting all around us. Those who could stand the rocking helped sort larvae, measure mussels, and filter water from the Baltimore Canyon site. We finished our processing around the turn of the day and most of us went to bed to wait out the storm and process Chincoteague’s samples the coming morning. It’s best to recover and conduct science when we’re at 100%.
Meet a Scientist On Board
Hi my name is Casey Barnard and I am a senior undergraduate from the University of Oregon helping out the folks in Craig Young’s lab. I will be graduating while onboard on June 14th with a Bachelor of Science degree in Marine Biology. This summer I will be the TA for the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology’s Invertebrate Zoology course. And then shortly after summer ends, I will be moving across the country for graduate school at the University of North Carolina Wilmington starting my master’s degree in Coastal and Ocean Management.
I have spent most of my time aboard looking into microscopes and helping out wherever is needed. This is my first cruise, and it was going pretty well until we hit these rougher waters around Chincoteague. My biggest accomplishment so far was when I sat at a microscope sorting larva for around 16 hours straight (with some food breaks). Everyone onboard the TGT including the scientists, the Sentry Crew, the Jason Crew, and the ship crew are all so friendly that even when the weather is bad moral stays high!
Animals not under the microscope
The ship’s passenger list is growing! We now have at least five stow-away birds sheltering onboard the Thompson. They most likely were on the ship before we left port, but now they’re along for the ride! Though we enjoy their company we don’t necessarily want them in our lab space. Pictured here is one of two instances (so far) in which Avery has caught birds belowdeck and brought them outside. We’ve started naming our friends and this is Gertrude the Wanderer.
Now we’ve got a busy day ahead of us, with the second dive of our Atlantic sites completed, and what feels like we’ve only just completed the Baltimore Canyon samples, it’s back to the microscopes! These long hours are crucial to finding the larvae hidden in the sediment and we have to sort through every last drop (literally!). Hoping for calmer seas tomorrow so we can concentrate harder on finding larvae instead of not being sick!