Category: SALT: Seep Animal Larval Transport

Rolling in the Deep, Goodbye Cold Seeps

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June 18th and 19th, 2021

Some of us stayed up all night, wanting to spend as much time together as possible before returning to our homes. For some this was routine on the night shift, for others, we tried to stay up as long as we could. Staying up was worth it to reminisce on the memories we’ve built on the past month, and see a beautiful sunrise to close out our expedition at sea. We all packed out backpacks and suitcases, cleared out our berthing rooms and swapped out linens, and gathered in the lab. Here we talked about future plans to meet up back home, hopes to see each other on the next cruise, and wished everyone the best in any path they pursue.

Together, we packed up all the science we needed to quickly ship including live organisms and thermally sensitive samples and creates piles near the door. First came the moving truck where we stocked our mail and made sure our science would get home safely. Then, the shuttles arrived, and we all waited on the deck of the ship, a waving goodbye party to our fellow shipmates. Eagar to get home and return to our own beds and lives, we departed the ship, but we knew we’d miss conducting science at sea together. Not all of us left as once however, some of us were flying out on the 18th, and the rest of us flew out on the 19th. For those that stayed behind, we had one more night aboard the ship to hang out and say farewell to the crew and ship.

Interview with the Scientists

How are our scientists feeling now that they’re back home?

“Definitely happy to be on dry land!! Loving the fresh tree smell!” -Laura Murray

“Glad to be in my own bed, but I miss the people and the science!” -Avery Calhoun

“Miss the people and work, but I think I miss the sound of bow thrusters going while I’m trying to sleep the most!” -Liam Patrick

“Enjoying the green but missing the 360 ocean and amazing sunsets” -Sinja Rist

“I literally cannot stop thinking about spending time out on the bow, the laughs, being on the ship with everyone!” -Carmen Sanchez-Reddick

“I thought I was over the dock rock but then I fell over tying my shoe yesterday and started to miss people and the boat all over again.” -Casey Barnard

“Enjoying the comforts of home, miss driving with Jason” -Ian Grace

“I had forgotten that the seasons kept changing without me, it’s suddenly warm and green in Washington. Miss the sunsets, dolphins, and people, among other things.” -Fiona McBride

“Happy to be home and sleeping, but missing sunsets on the bow” -Lauren Rice

After first contact with land, stressful connecting flights, and changing time zones, we all managed to return to our home states. With the TGT behind us, the ship will continue traveling at sea, down through the Panama Canal, and up the western US to return to its home in Seattle, WA. With the Arellano lab back in Washington, we began our late night journey back to the Anacortes and Bellingham areas, where we can rest before unpacking and getting ready to analyze our science! We’re so grateful to be part of an inter-institution project and really enjoyed working with other amazing scientists each with unique perspectives. Contributing to deep sea research and building strong connections on board has been a dream come true.

With that being said, I hope you all enjoyed the blog! If you want to continue following along with our projects visit the project’s main page here: https://sites.google.com/ncsu.edu/salt  or follow our Instagram: @larvallab and Twitter: @LarvalLab

Thank you to:

The Thomas G. Thompson and crew for aiding us in our data collection.

All the scientists in the science party and on the submersible teams for working so hard throughout this cruise.

Western Washington University, University of Oregon, North Carolina State University for supporting our students and faculty in participating in this cruise.

University of Washington School of Oceanography for coordinating COVID-safety and communications.

Marine Biological Laboratory for providing quarantine housing pre-cruise.

NSF for funding this project.

Readers for your interest in our work!

 

If you are curious about me, you can follow me on Instagram: @djdavis123 or Twitter: @dexterity_no.

See you next time!

We’ll Be Home Shore-tly

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June 17th, 2021

All good things must come to an end, and today marks the last day of our research cruise. Early this morning we recovered Sentry for the last time and began our transit to Gulfport, Mississippi, where we are departing the Thomas G. Thompson. It has been such a privilege to work with both the ROV Jason and the AUV Sentry throughout this past month. Without their help we wouldn’t have been to conduct such incredible science to answer our research questions about cold seep larval dispersal. While working with Sentry, we would bring up water samples and sort through them to identify different larval types. In total, we found 232 different types of larvae, and found 1,885 total larval individuals with the SyPRID sampler. To collect these larvae, we sieved through the equivalent of 30 seconds of water gushing over the Niagara Falls in total. Our collections would happen right above the seafloor, and then a midwater depth both onsite and offsite. While we sorted through these samples, Sinja Rist would take pictures of the larvae we found and determine whether or not the individual was part of a new morphotype. In this picture you can see we would print out the larval types and put them around the microscopes for reference. We ended up having a beautiful gallery of Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico larvae that we found during this cruise.

With our Sentry samples completed, we shifted our focus to finishing the samples collected by Jason. We dissected and preserved our final mussels. We sorted our final biobox samples, larval tube trap samples, and Technicap samples. Just like that we had come to an end of our science at sea. Having the opportunity to work closely with such exotic species and conduct deep sea research has been incredible. As students we’ve learned so much about the scientific process in practice. We developed our lab and field skills, we experienced the importance of scientific collaboration, and we were able to work with career scientists and engineers while building a community. To commemorate this impactful month at sea we took a group photo on the bow of the TGT.

With the rest of the night ahead of us, we began packing up all our equipment and making arrangements for shipping our gear along with specimens returning to our home labs. While we were involved in a complex Tetris game to get everything to fit in boxes, our minds were reflecting on the experiences we gathered while at sea. In the name of science we all worked incredibly hard in the past month, forgoing adequate sleep, having limited contact with the outside world or our loved ones, and missing events and milestones in our own lives. In return we gathered so much data, built strong relationships, acquired applicable marine science skills, worked with high-end submersibles, and saw things many don’t get to see in their lives. This was such a unique and impactful experience. If I’m saying it a lot, it’s because it’s true!

We made sure to take time to appreciate the final sunset on board, and we were also lucky enough to get a tour from one of the engineers on board to see behind the scenes of the ship. For a vessel that spends months at sea at a time, the ship has all the systems necessary for smooth sailing. As we went through the engine room we were shown the various systems that make life at sea possible. But first we had to put earplugs in because it’s extremely loud inside! In the engine rooms we observed the cooling systems that allow us to survive the heat of the Gulf. We were shown the reverse osmosis machine that converts seawater into available freshwater. We got to see the large engines that allow for our dynamic positioning to hover above site. We also saw the Z-drive that powers the propellers on the back of the ship. At the end we got to see the control room, where all the power in the ship is diverted. There’s enough power on this vessel to run a small town! During this tour we also learned some cool trivia! This vessel can travel at maximum 16.7 knots and can hold 280,000 gallons of fuel! Tomorrow we begin flying home, but it was a great way to end our time with the Thomas G. Thompson by exploring how this ship made everything possible!

Don’t Abandon Your Canyon Companions

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June 16th, 2021

Today begins the end of the cruise. After spending three and a half weeks at sea, we returned to our final site, Mississippi Canyon. We launched our final Jason dive around 8 in the morning, after scrambling to finish cups to shrink. We placed our final deployments in Jason’s basket and saluted Jason as it was picked up by the winch and released into the water. At 1074 meters deep, Mississippi Canyon represents our midwater site compared to the shallow trifecta sites, and the deep Florida Escarpment site.

When we reached the bottom, we were met with a deserted landscape. It felt like an alien planet. With mud volcanoes and small canyons, the occasional fish or patch of bacterial mat, it was an unfamiliar habitat. We trekked through this wet desert scanning for our target mussels, with this site containing two different kinds: Bathymodiolus childressi and Bathymodiolus brooksi. We want to collect both kinds to understand the differences between the species. They look fairly similar, while brooksi has a chalkier texture and a bump on the umbo (the hinge of the mussel), so we had to look carefully. While we searched for mussels, Dr. Young set up an early Father’s Day present by preparing a Zoom with his dad to livestream the main science camera we use during our dives. Deep-sea habitats are bizarre, and we try to share the exploration with those we can, like this blog attempts to.

Here’s a video that Avery Calhoun created on the last research cruise highlighting the Mississippi Canyon site:

During the dive we did struggle to find our mussels, these deep-sea sites aren’t entirely understood or predictable. Luckily, we knew of another potential location from another deep-sea cruise and headed that way after scanning our original site. We traveled northwest and eventually found a large mussel bed where we collected our specimens, finding both of the target species, and deployed our equipment. After completing those objectives, we had the task of recovering our equipment from the last cruise, which was a ways away. On the last cruise the dive was cut short due to weather and the equipment was not an optimal location. On the way back we stumbled across a natural wonder, a brine river! We’ve seen a few brine pools, and a lot of brine puddles, but this river of brine extended across our whole view from the van. After crossing the salty stream, we picked up our equipment and resurfaced. With Jason back on deck, and with heavy hearts, we began sorting our samples for the last time.

As our time comes to an end in the Gulf, it’s been interesting to see a new perspective on human activity. When we look around, we are surrounded by oil rigs. With the oil that is seeping out at our research sites, the number of rigs was not surprising. However, as we move from site to site, there’s always a few oil rigs on the horizon. At night they come alive, and the horizon is dotted with these small cities on the water. Even the open ocean is still bustling with activity.

Tonight, we deploy Sentry for the last time. As we sort through the final samples, sort the last mussels, and take our final morphotype pictures, we’re getting ready to start packing up and heading home.

Jason and Jill Went Up the Hill to Fetch a Pail of Worms

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June 15th, 2021

We started early today, with Jason diving down around midnight. The dive began similar to our past ones, starting with science objectives. We had our usual deployments and recoveries of tube traps, tilt meters, and sipuncollector. After completing those objectives, we moved on to collecting our mussels. At these mussel patches you could see oil droplets floating through the water like small little pearls occasionally. At these cold seep sites, along with methane, natural oil flows into the overlying water. Around 3am, the scientists had the opportunity to interact with some deep-sea wildlife. While traveling across the seafloor, the Jason watch team came across a giant isopod, of the Bathynomus genus. Jason slowly approached the bug and extended an arm. Here’s a short video of the isopod running off, it wasn’t interested in hanging around with us.

Here’s a video that Avery Calhoun put together on the last cruise highlighting the Bush Hill site:

 

Once Jason resurfaced around 8am, we had the chance for discovery. During the dive we came across some tubeworms that were covered in white sponges. Dr. Young mentioned an interest in a species of worm that lives on the sponges that live on the tubeworms. The deep-sea seems to have many of these worm-sandwich epibiotic relationships, just like the sabellids on the Acesta on the tubeworms described earlier. This worm species had been described but didn’t have specimens, however. With the tubeworms in our bioboxes, the team was tasked with searching the sponges for these elusive worms. We whisked them away to the microscope table where we removed the sponge and began searching. Dr. Young described them as the same color as the sponge, so we had to search for distinctive textures and worm-like shapes. Confused eyes turned into a big surprise as the two Western REU students, Fiona McBride and Liam Patrick found a few of them! These individuals are going to be preserved and used for further study, potentially they could end up in a museum! They may not be the most charismatic creatures, but finding a novel species is worth the excitement. This is why deep-sea research is so fascinating, these places haven’t been studied extensively and new discoveries are common. Even while searching through these sponges we found some bathymodiolin mussel larvae, which was not expected. Finding them on the sponges indicates the larvae can swim at least as high as the tubeworms, aiding in answering our research questions about larval dispersal.

The Bathymodiolus excitement continued later into the night by finding many live larvae while sorting through the slurp samples. The live mussel larvae have a small foot that sticks out and they crawl around with, but also some of these babies were swimming! We are interested in finding these swimming veligers because they haven’t developed their methane-consuming bacteria symbionts yet and can use them for microbiome and morphometric analyses.

With another sunset, we ended the day by beginning or transit to our last site, Mississippi Canyon, which we detoured earlier in the cruise. We can’t believe we’re almost done!

Blink and You’ll Miss the Green, Pink was All That was Seen

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June 14th, 2021

The days are beginning to feel similar at these sights. Again, we started the day with a short dive with Jason down to the seafloor. On this dive we completed the video transects of the brine pool sight and recovered Lauren’s trees and trampolines. We also deployed the Technicap carousel, a collector that opens a new tube every month to collect larvae.

In the early morning we also had a Sentry recovery, right before Jason went in the water. After sorting for morphotypes over the past three weeks, we’ve gotten fairly good at identifying different larval types in our samples. We can correctly identify gastropods (snails) over pteropods, and bivalves over ostracods. While these imposters are still all over the samples, we were getting fed up with another organism; the nauplius. Nauplii are the larval form of copepods (or barnacles), the crustaceans that make up the majority of individuals in our samples. These tick-looking larvae are not ones we are looking for, but we have been finding them all over the SyPRID samples. To cope with this, we came up with a little nursery rhyme:

“Fatty fatty nauplii

Swimming in a row

Clogging up the SyPRID Sample

From the plankton tow”

Later in the day, the scientists got to work sorting through the sieved water and sediment from the bioboxes on the Jason dive yesterday. While the samples were dense with black, oily, sediment, we had a welcomed surprise. Usually whenever we find a pink Bathymodiolus shell, the team is ecstatic, and the finder calls it out with glee. That’s how sorting these samples began. Each of us would take a sample from our container, immediately find one of these pink treasures, and shout it out. Then we began seeing a few more, until looking more closely. We were finding Bathymodiolus shells everywhere! Using these larval shells for isotope analysis requires a good amount, but we had found over 100 within 30 minutes! What takes us hours on other sites, we had completed in record time here. This makes our job easier and can put a higher priority in searching for live larvae for pictures, videos, and preservation.

Once Jason was back on board, we left Brine Pool and moved to the last site in our trifecta: Bush Hill. The site is faithfully named for being a large hill with tubeworm bushes on it. When we arrived, Sentry was expertly deployed yet again, to get the first of our two SyPRID samples at each site.

We ended the day with a beautiful sunset outside. Many of us have been working so hard that some of us have only seen a few, or no sunsets from the entire cruise! The different sleeps schedules also play a role here, with some people typically sleeping while the sun goes to bed itself. While the sun was setting, we were told about a legend at sea called the Green Flash. Apparently, when the sun hits the horizon on open ocean, there is a flash of green visible to those who watch. We all watched closely, hoping to observe this phenomenon, hardly blinking as the horizon met with the sun. But the green light didn’t appear, not at the horizon, nor at the end of the dock. Regardless, it was a beautiful sunset.

Briny Tales and Tiny Snails

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June 13th, 2021

The morning began by returning to the tubeworm gardens. This short dive is to deploy and recover Lauren’s trees and trampolines. Due to the size of the equipment we can’t put all our instruments in one basket and need to dive twice. Carefully, Jason has to hover around the deployment sites, avoiding crushing tube worms and stirring up the sediment too much. Time was of the essence however, so we couldn’t spend too long on the seafloor. With the science deployed we quickly resurfaced, and immediately left GC-234 to head to our next site: Brine pool.

What’s a brine pool? It’s a pool of very dense, salty, water at the seafloor. These form throughout the Gulf of Mexico. Our brine pool was formed through salt intrusions called salt diapirs. The diapirs are buoyant and a lower density than the overlying sediment, which forces them through the bottom. Essentially these diapirs dissolve in the water and create these hypersaline pools. The brine pool we are studying is unique to others in that there is a ring of mussels surrounding the pool like a beach. Mussel beach. This break in the seafloor from the diapir is also allowing methane gasses (and oil) to seep into the surrounding water that provide the basis of this methanotrophic community. The brine pool is 120 PSU, with the density high enough that our deep-sea submersibles float on top, and most organisms can’t survive inside. This video is a great introduction to what our site looks like, created by Avery Calhoun on the spring cruise last year.

Tonight, we had a night recovery of Jason. Both Sentry and Jason and their teams work hard around the clock, with the scientists always ready to support. While unloading the ROV and gathering our samples, we all became familiar with the fact of nighttime in the Gulf in June is still very warm. In heat and less light than we’re used to, the scientists were still cracking jokes while we extracted and sieved the water from our bioboxes. We’ve been together for over three weeks and had our limited interactions during quarantine. We’ve become a close group of friends that are supportive, keep the moral up, and are excited to conduct science at sea.

Once we arrived at brine pool, Jason was quickly put back into the water for our first brine pool dive. On top of our usual habits of collecting mussels and carbonate rocks, recovering and deploying tube traps, sipuncollectors, and tilt meters, we were interested in snails! At this site we find snails called Thalassonerita naticoidea (previously Bathynerita naticoidea) living amongst the mussels and even laying egg cases on the mussel shells. While diving we also visited another site called snail mound, where these snails are abundant, and conducted a partial video transect of both sites. Within the Jason van, we have a sonar system called BlueView and here’s a photo that shows the entire brine pool on that radar screen!

Here’s another awesome video that Avery Calhoun put together on the last cruise, showing the famous brine pool site! There was even a Blue Planet episode on this very brine pool!

Green Eggs and Clam

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June 12th, 2021

Today we arrived at the first of our trifecta of sites, Green Canyon (GC-234). GC-234 is a special site for our cruise objectives as it does not actually have any mussels! Instead, we were greeted by a large abundance of tube worm bushes. Tube worms, also known as Lamellabrachia luymesi, are unique to our Gulf of Mexico sites. These tube worms are one of the dominant habitat-forming species found at cold seeps sites in the Gulf, the other habitat-forming species being the mussel species.

Picture showing an overview of all our sites. The far left point (Brine Pool) is where our trifecta: GC-234, Brine Pool, Bush Hill, are all located.

Another aspect of this site that’s fascinating is the epibiotic interactions. Epibiotic means things living on other things, like barnacles on a whale. At this site we have a cascading epibiotic relationship with the tubeworms. On top of these tubeworms live a clam called Acesta oophaga, or the egg-eating clam. These clams have a specialized shell that fits over the opening of a tubeworm in order to eat their eggs when they spawn. On top of these clams live another organism, a type of worm called a sabellid worm. These worms bore into the shells of the clams and filter the water flowing around them. One of the graduate students from the University of Oregon on our cruise, Lauren Rice, is interested in these epibiotic interactions. In this picture here, you can see the circular feeding crown of the sabellid worms, on the yellow clams, on the tubeworms with their red heads poking out.

Once ready, Jason began its descent. After passing through nearly 600 meters of deep blue water, with the occasional ctenophore or shrimp floating by, we saw the silty seafloor. A maze of a tubeworm garden appeared before us. The first challenge at every site is locating where our science equipment was deployed on the last cruise. We always save the coordinates of our sites, but they don’t always line up. We scanned the bottom, swerving over and around small and large bushes, searching for our distinctive instruments. Thankfully, we found the target site right next to one of the largest tube worm bushes, larger than Jason. Under the shadow of the worms, we picked up our equipment, placed it within Jason’s basket, and returned to the surface.

Pictured taken by Dr. Craig Young with Johnson Sea-Link 2.

Once back on the surface, Sentry was deployed to collect a new plankton sample for us with SyPRID. Tomorrow we will be doing another quick Jason dive to deploy and recover Lauren’s tables and trampolines. Check out this video that Avery Calhoun put together of this site on the last cruise that highlights these crazy tubeworm bushes, but also some beautiful Gorgonian corals with ophiuroids!

Momentary Intermission On Mississippi Canyon Mission

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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! 

Science Bombardment at Florida Escarpment

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June 10th, 2021

Today was a highly anticipated day. Not only did we arrive at our next seep site after days of travel (plus a few stops to pick up plankton and then to pick up our chief scientist, Craig), but this is the deepest site on our itinerary. At 3300 m deep, Florida Escarpment sits at the base of a sheer underwater cliff. The unique sites We deployed Jason just after midnight. After a two-hour descent down the cliff, we reached a treasure trove of a site. Florida Escarpment contains Bathymodiolus mussels galore, a target species for many of us in the science party, as well as tube worms, sponges, and bacterial mats, spread out over a site which surprised us with its extent. We filled the slurp and the bio boxes full and spent several hours after exploring the site and recording video. At the site were a few indicators of human presence: some trash, which is disappointingly common at the seafloor, and some small collectors left by other science parties. We passed over some ballast weights left at the bottom from an Alvin dive when the vehicle prepared to surface.

When Jason surfaced around 3 in the afternoon, it was all hands on deck to sort and store samples. Mussels and tube worms were brought into the cold rooms in seawater, the sipuncollector and larval traps were recovered, and remaining sediment in slurp chambers and bio boxes were sieved and stored for the long process of larvae sorting. Laura, a WWU master’s student studying hydrothermal vent bacteria, was presented with her own bacterial mat sample for sequencing. During the chaos of unloading Jason, the TGT crew also assisted in deployed Sentry on its second Florida Escarpment dive for yet more larval samples.

Meet a Scientist on Board

Hello blog-goers! My name is Avery Calhoun, a PhD student in Craig Young’s lab at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology (OIMB), University of Oregon. My background lies in mapping, habitat modeling, and community ecology. I studied Marine Science at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB), and I am excited that the Arellano lab brought along Liam, a current student at CSUMB. It has been great to catch up with him and get updates on my favorite professors (hi Gerick and Alison)! My project in the Gulf of Mexico focuses on species associations and habitat modeling for organisms at methane seep sites with the goal of determining physical conditions that may contribute to distribution of larvae. While I am gathering information for my dissertation, I am also working closely with the Sentry AUV and Jason ROV teams to prepare coordinates for our dive sites and surveys. The Sentry team shares a lab space with our science team which has promoted great networking and social interactions; I look forward to working with them throughout my career! Fun fact: I’ve caught and released 2 stray stowaway birds from our lab this trip.

The rest of the day was spent sorting larvae under microscopes and dissecting bivalves. Both operations take lots of time, so the science party has been keeping busy. This site had a lot of samples, finding ourselves with 18 containers of slurp and biobox sediment to sort through. We hope to have all of our samples processed by the time we reach our next site where we can do it all over again.

The Florida Escarpment site is one of our more charismatic sites, with fascinating topography and communities. Here’s a video that Avery Calhoun put together on the Alvin cruise last spring from the footage at this site!

Started from the Bottom (3300m) Now We’re Here

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June 9th, 2021

Today we arrived on our first Gulf of Mexico site, Florida Escarpment. To round out our transit activities before getting back into science, we had a special celebration at sea! Two members of our science team, Casey Barnard (UO) and Dexter Davis (WWU), are graduating during this research cruise! While both graduations are being delivered online this year, the crew on board wanted to host an unforgettable celebration. Dexter had brought his cap and gown, and diploma placard for photos, but the science crew wanted to amplify the experience. Caitlin and Avery had the great idea to use leftover deep-sea mussel shells to craft a graduation lei signifying the deep-sea research we are conducting. A fun twist on the traditional cords and flowers typically worn for graduations. The ultimate addition came from the Jason team, excited to get involved, and be the one to hand our graduates their diplomas.

The ceremony itself was glorious. The double feature began with walking the “aisle” next to the Jason  control van, with “Pomp and Circumstance” playing from a portable speaker. Each graduate walked up to their mentors Dr. Shawn Arellano and Dr. Craig Young while being introduced. After an affirming handshake, solidifying the years of hard work, our graduates approached Jason. The deep-sea vehicle held the diploma with an outstretched limb, beckoning the graduates to accept their degrees. Stopping for photos, the graduates thanked Jason, shook its hand, and joined the audience of supporting crew and science members. This was truly a unique and unforgettable experience for everyone on board, and incredibly meaningful for the graduating scientists. Afterwards the cooks even made celebration cupcakes! Here’s a couple shots from the ceremony!

“Way to Go – Congrats Dexter & Casey”

Meet a Scientist on Board

Dr. Shawn Arellano is an Assistant Professor at Western Washington University in the Biology Department and the Marine and Coastal Sciences Program. She has been based out of WWU’s Shannon Point Marine Center (SPMC) since 2012, but she has been working to understand the lives, movements, and behaviors of the larvae of deep-sea animals since graduate school (at OIMB in the lab of co-Chief Scientist Dr. Craig Young!). In her career, Shawn has been on more than 20 research cruises, had 24 dives in 4 different deep-sea submersibles (20 dives in the Johnson Sea-Links I & II, 1 dive in DSV Pisces V, and 3 dives in DSV Alvin), and has been out working with AUV Sentry and ROV Jason 3 times. She says that one of the best parts about working at Western and SPMC has been introducing budding scientists to research, larvae, and the deep-sea. In fact, Shawn has been able to bring 7 undergraduates and 4 graduate students from WWU on her deep-sea research cruises with her in the past two years.

 

Fun fact—Shawn has been working with both Dexter Davis (our WWU graduate) and Tessa Beaver (Shawn’s MS student) since just before they started their freshman year in 2017, when they spent two weeks at SPMC for a field course that Shawn taught.

Fun fact 2—Mitch Hebner (Shawn’s other MS student) was an undergrad in Craig Young’s lab before coming to Shawn’s lab for an MS.

Fun fact 3—Shawn is from Kansas and was introduced to marine science for the first time as a confused 5th-year college student when she decided to give a marine science internship a try. That internship was at the Shannon Point Marine Center. Her mentor during that internship? Dr. Brian Bingham—Craig Young’s first PhD student! You might say there is a bit of larval exchange between SPMC and OIMB!

Amidst the celebration for our scientists, there was still science to be done! In the morning Sentry was launched at 7:30 am and was recovered around 8:00 pm. Following soon after, Jason left to explore the escarpment at 10:45 pm, with an hour and half descending time. We’re hoping for a long dive tomorrow to complete our research tasks but also to explore these unique cold seeps further. Of course, we also made many more cups to go down on this site, as the deepest site will shrink them the most! It’s been a day filled with excitement, with joy in the air.