June 8th, 2021

Once we had completed our sampling at our Florida Keys site, we had another important task to do: we had to pick up the other Principal Investigator for our cruise, Dr. Craig Young! He has been quarantining in the Florida Keys for the past week and we had to make a quick pit-stop on our way to our next site. After a short transit to move closer to shore, we were within range of a small boat delivering our chief scientist. As the director of and a professor at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology (OIMB), Dr. Young was reconnected with his undergraduate and graduate students from his lab on board. His expertise on deep sea invertebrates has been eagerly awaited to assist in identification and developmental biology.

In the morning after a very wet and bumpy 7-mile transfer, Craig came aboard from a small orange boat to welcoming scientists and crew! After allowing Craig a chance to change into some dry clothes and gather his belongings, we held a science meeting to loop Craig in about life at sea. We summarized our shifts schedules, who’s in charge of various tasks and data organization, science plans, and how the cruise has been going for everyone, science and otherwise.

Craig is a professor of biology at the University of Oregon and the director of Oregon Institute of Marine Biology, a marine laboratory on the rugged Oregon Coast. Craig began working on larval invertebrates in graduate school and has been obsessed with these babies ever since.  Also, in graduate school, he was given the opportunity to make several submersible dives in a fjord in British Columbia.  He discovered three new species of sea squirts (ascidians) on his first dive in 1980 and was hooked!  Eventually, he found a way to combine his diverse interests by pioneering the field of deep-sea larval ecology and embryology in his lab on the east coast of Florida.  Using eight different submersibles and six different ROV’s, his lab has investigated deep-sea reproductive processes throughout the world for more than 40 years. Craig was one of the scientists who initially recognized the usefulness of a precision larval collector devise that could operate near the sea floor.  He worked as a science advisor to the WHOI engineers who designed and built the SyPRID sampler that we are using on this cruise. 

On a personal level, Craig and his wife Robyn (married 45 years) live in a house in the forest with a cockatoo, an Indian ring-neck parrot, a lop-eared bunny and a badly behaved bernedoodle puppy. They have four children and three grandchildren.  Craig also has more than 60 academic progeny (graduate students and postdocs) that include Shawn Arellano, our co-chief scientist.

June 7th, 2021

After two days of transit, rounding the Florida peninsula and coming out of the Atlantic, we arrived at the Florida Keys around 11:30 am. In studying larval dispersal between our Gulf of Mexico and western Atlantic sites, the presence of our target species in these water columns would solidify the possibility of larval transport between sites. This channel is the shallowest area the larvae would need to cross, being the ultimate hurdle in their journey between cold seeps.

The waves seemed to be just as excited as we were to be in the Keys. When we arrived, the weather was not cooperating, and the waves were high. We hesitated to deploy Sentry to conduct a SyPRID plankton tow and we attempted to wait out the weather to no avail. Instead we decided to pursue alternate methods and use a more typical plankton tow. Deployed at 200m deep, we retrieved it around 3pm and the scientists were ready to explore this exciting sample. How full of exciting larvae this sample was! We found many larvae types unseen the rest of the cruise including, plutei (sea urchins and brittle stars), asteroid and ophiuroid juveniles (small sea stars and brittle stars), brachiolaria (sea stars) and auricularia (sea cucumbers), cydippids (comb jellies), and a pilidium (nemerteans).  

Hi Everyone,

My name is Mitchell Hebner. I am originally from Albuquerque, NM, and a first year Graduate student at Western Washington University. I am working with Shawn Arellano on a project involving vertical migration modeling of deep-sea snail larvae. I did my undergrad at the University of Oregon, and that is how I got involved in the SALT project.

During the last few terms of my undergrad, I volunteered in Craig Young’s lab at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology, the University of Oregon’s satellite campus on the Oregon coast. It was here that I finally got some hands-on experience working with organisms in my preferred field of study – marine biology. Craig was gracious enough to allow some undergrads the chance to embark on a research cruise around the end of February to the middle of March 2020. I had just finished all my undergraduate classes in December 2019, and this opportunity to attend a research cruise was too great to decline, so I jumped at the chance to do deep-sea research out in the field. The cruise was aboard the R/V Atlantis and it was the experience of a lifetime.

The Atlantis was my personal maiden voyage into the realm of deep-sea biology, and the time I spent on board was wonderous. There was always work and things to do, but it really did not feel like work because it was so much fun. It was on this cruise too, that I met Shawn Arellano for the first time. She would end up becoming my advisor. The time spent on the Atlantis was laying the groundwork for my current experience aboard the R/V Thomas G. Thompson.

All of us, some old and new friends, have come full circle – one COVID pandemic later – we are back at sea on the R/V Thomas G. Thompson, picking up the sample collectors and things we left on the bottom of the ocean a little more than a year ago. The tube collectors and other things we set down at various cold seep sites in the Gulf of Mexico and Western Atlantic Ocean with the HOV Alvin submarine, are returning to the surface and the lab here on the Thompson with the help of ROV Jason. As part of the science party, I am processing and collecting samples for various projects including my own here on this cruise, and it feels good to be back out in the field doing science.

June 6th, 2021

Today is a full transit day with a day of catching up and enjoying the sun for our science crew. This is the perfect opportunity to take time to highlight one of the incredible vehicles we are using on board for science: Sentry.

Sentry is an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) that’s a member of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) National Deep Submergence Facility (NDSF). Sentry first launched in 2006 and can dive as deep as 4,500 meters. This vehicle works completely independently once deployed from the vessel, following a predetermined mission, and consistently communicates with the Sentry team on board. We have attached the SyPRID (Sentry Precision Robotic Impellor-Driven) sampler that allows Sentry to control discrete plankton collections at target sites. These samplers funnel water, collecting larvae within a mesh net and consolidating at the end of the tube into a container for us to sort though, as we’ve talked about many times!

Sentry does not always work with SyPRID. Sentry is most commonly used for seafloor mapping and sonar projects all over the ocean. For example, Sentry has worked nearby to Washington, mapping seafloor features on the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate using its onboard multibeam sonar.

June 5^th, 2020

Today was the beginning of our long transit to the Florida Keys where we will be picking up the other PI (Principal Investigator) for the cruise, Dr. Craig Young from the University of Oregon. This transit is 57 hours meaning no Jason or Sentry dives for the next two days and the science party can catch up on science and sleep. Because of this, many of our team slept in today, and had a more casual approach to the workday after finishing Sentry sorting early in the morning. However, we did have a hefty list of science tasks to be done: sort tube traps, measure and dissect mussels, create highlight video clips, process carbonate rock for sponges, sort Tuffys, and animal maintenance.

As Blake Ridge was one of our deeper sites, 2160 meters, we had a new species of mussel to work with, Bathymodiolus heckerae. The three types of mussels we are collecting and processing on this cruise are Gigantitus childressi, Bathymodiolus brooksi, and Bathymodiolus heckerae. Each of these mussels are found at different depths: 400-2200 meters, 1080 – 3300 meters, and 2200-3300 meters respectively. In processing these mussels, first shell measurements of length, width, and height are taken for each individual. The shells are given to Ian Grace of NC State for geochemical analysis, and the body tissue is preserved in formalin for reproductive studies. Seen here is Caitlin Plowman (UO) dissecting B. heckerae in our dissection lab on board.

Hi everyone. My name is Caitlin Plowman. I am a PhD Candidate with Dr. Craig Young at the University of Oregon’s marine lab, the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology. I also did my bachelors and masters degrees at UO. My research focuses on the reproduction of invertebrates (animals without back bones) that live in the deep-sea. I have been fortunate enough to be on many research expeditions and absolutely love being at sea! On this research cruise, I am collecting mussel samples for my dissertation work and helping to ensure samples for our lab’s portion of the grant are collected and properly preserved. So far, I have earned the nicknames Chemical Queen because I prep and use most of our fixatives, and Mussel Serial Killer since I ask for mussel collections and then dissect them all.

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!

Hello! My name is Fiona, I am an undergraduate REU student at Western Washington University. Though I have spent time on boats before (sailboats are my favorite, from college racing dinghies to hundred-foot schooners) this is my first research cruise and my biggest boat. This cruise has been long-awaited, as I actually applied for the REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) over a year ago, before covid came and brought travel to a halt. Now, even with masks and quarantine, I am very happy to have the unique experience of being aboard. Back home in Washington I study snow algae in the Kodner lab at WWU. I enjoy good hikes, animals of all shapes and sizes, art, and gardening.

During this cruise I normally spend slower days lounging on deck as much as possible – standing outside long enough, you can often spot dolphins or, now that we’re in warmer weather, flying fish – but the past few days have been extremely humid. Also, I had my own work to do. As an undergraduate at Western Washington University, I am still taking a couple of classes while onboard. Our data allowance (400 mb/day) has thankfully been enough to let me keep up with recorded lectures and assignments since my classes are still online. I was able to kick back in the library to do some readings and take a final exam for Developmental Biology of Plants. The quarter is wrapping up, and I am thankful that the transit to our next site will be long enough to give me time to finish our homework.

The crew also treated us today with a tour of the bridge. The Thomas G Thompson has a high tech navigational system, a feature that is particularly helpful on a research ship. In addition to standard shipboard equipment like  sonar and AIS, the ship contains an autopilot system which can be used to automatically hold position on precise coordinates while Jason, Sentry, or the CTD casts are in operation. While on the bridge we were also encouraged to take turns sitting in the captain’s chair and look out on the ocean, to receive the full experience, we were also granted some binoculars! Like the science team has been doing, there are also watch rotations among the captain, mates, and crew to make sure everything is running smoothly. The bridge tour really made us appreciate all the technology, resources, and most importantly the people that make this research possible. It also provided insight as to why it’s so noisy in our sleeping quarters when we are at a site. The bow thrusters that maintain our position are working hard, but are right next to where we sleep.

Later in the day the science team had a late night. Sentry resurfaced around 23:00 (11 pm) and as we are searching for larvae, we have to sort the samples as soon as possible. This means we don’t sleep until we’re done! Pictured here is the teamwork between Tessa Beaver (WWU), Sean (Sentry), Casey Barnard (UO) and Lauren Rice (UO) lifting and rinsing down the “plankzookas” of Sentry’s SyPRID to retrieve the plankton samples. Once the collection tank is retrieved and poured into a bucket, the samples are whisked away for processing.

With Sentry safely on board the RV Thompson, Jason gets ready to dive down to the site. Typically Jason and Sentry are not in the water at the same time to avoid entanglement with Jason’s cable tether to the ship and ensures no collisions are possible. These are expensive machines and need to stay in prime condition to ensure all our science goals can be met. Tomorrow we will work with Jason samples and redeploy Sentry for one more collection before leaving Blake Ridge.

June 2nd, 2021

Today began with a continuation of the Jason dive that began yesterday. After 21 hours searching for the lost mooring on the ocean floor, we were unable to locate where it ended up. Being in the Gulf Stream, the current was quite strong and could have influenced the movement of our target. To search for it, we did parallel transects 20 meters apart surrounding our “best guess” location. Eventually we had to give up the search and start transiting to our next site: Blake Ridge. Unfortunate we weren’t able to find the mooring, but we did our best and have to continue with the main goals of the cruise. I (Liam) had my first and second 4-8 (AM and PM) shifts in the Jason van, where I spent my time logging events onto SeaLogger. While it was a great experience, it was rather boring and included lots of the same thing: ocean floor and blue water. Nevertheless, it was awesome to see how they operated Jason first-hand! Giving the undergraduates a chance to work shifts in Jason was amazing and felt like a science fiction movie with the amount of screens and data coming in regularly.

Hi all! My name is Liam Patrick. I am an undergraduate student from California State University Monterey Bay joining WWU/the Arellano lab as an REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) student. I have one more semester left at CSUMB, super close to majoring with a B.S. in Marine Science. After that, I have no idea!

I was born in Scottsdale, AZ, but raised in Anacortes, WA (also home to WWU’s Shannon Point Marine Center). In my free time, I am an avid beachcomber, dinghy sailor, and sailing instructor. I enjoy SCUBA diving as much as possible and I’m planning on being certified for advanced SCUBA through my college this next semester (super excited). Other than that, I spend my time hiking or playing video games with friends, especially during quarantine!

The opportunity to join this cruise rose out of the WWU REU program at SPMC. While I know almost nothing about larvae, I saw the cruise as an amazing opportunity to learn and experience life on a research cruise. Currently, I am assisting others when I can and taking part in various graduate projects. Once we start into the Gulf of Mexico, I will be focusing more on helping Mitch’s project with T. Naticoidea larvae, a deep-sea snail that can be found around hydrocarbon seeps at depths from 400-1700 meters. By helping with that, I hope to hone into my own research question concerning these larvae or something similar for my REU.

Later in the day, in preparation for one of our deeper sites, Blake Ridge – 2160 meters deep, the science team and anyone else who felt inclined, made cups! This is a staple on any deep sea research cruise. Styrofoam cups are drawn on with every color of Sharpie that shrink when brought to the ocean floor and back. The cups are placed in a mesh bag and attached to Jason, where the increasing pressure causes the cups to compress, and when returned to the surface retain the artwork on a miniature cup. We shared stories about who we are making cups for and what the artwork represents, had a lot of laughs, and became closer as a group. We also discovered there are quite a few artists in our group! Some of our cups boasted familiar characters like our submersibles Sentry and Jason, others highlighted marine animals and our seep sites.  Now we are all eager for the Blake Ridge dive to see how they all turn out! Here’s a pictured of our cups displayed, each one so unique!

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.

May 31^st, 2021

Happy days! The weather cleared up enough for us to deploy Sentry today. The chiclet with bazookas was successfully deployed and we performed a short dive to quickly get a sample and be on our way. Once the sample was back on board, scientists eagerly rushed back to the scopes to explore the mysterious microworld just outside our portholes. Bowls swirled, scopes zoomed in an out, short dance parties were held, ice trays were filled, and larvae were sorted. All of this to assess different morphotypes of larvae to understand larval distribution within the water column. We finished this collection relatively quick, pleased with the lack of shrimp in these samples. We found a crab zoea, a shrimp zoea, a doliolarian, and some nectochaetes.

After sorting, the scientists got a well-deserved break with a 13-hour transit to the next site. Before our next science stop at Blake Ridge we are recovering some oceanographic moorings. These moorings are part of the PEACH Project under multiple institutions that collect data for storm analysis using ADCPs (Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers). Some of these moorings were lost at sea, they were supposed to surface on their own, and now we are retrieving them from the bottom of the ocean. There are two moorings at separate sites on our way, so we will spend tomorrow trying to find them and get them on board.

Hi, my name is Dexter Davis, and I’m a senior undergraduate from Western Washington University studying marine science and minoring in mathematics. I am also the one that has been writing these blog posts! I work for Dr. Shawn Arellano as an undergraduate research assistant and I’m incredibly excited to be back at sea. I was privileged to be on the RV Atlantis cruise with Alvin last spring, and looking forward to working with Sentry and Jason on this one. I’ll be graduating on June 12 while at sea, which I think is a spectacular way to end my undergraduate career. Post-graduation I’m hoping to work as a research assistant or a lab technician, to explore and hone my interests in marine science before returning to school for a master’s degree. I currently have interests in deep sea research and exploration, fisheries science, climate science, as well as species interactions. The ocean is so vast and full of things to discover, it creates a career full of excitement and unique experiences and I’m excited to get out into the marine science world.

May 30th, 2021

Hoping to sleep through rough waves, we awoke to another stormy day and learned a new term: W.O.W, Waiting on Weather. As we have our submersibles on board, when the boat is rocking too much, we want to wait so there’s no extra strain on gear or potential for collisions with the vessel. Because of this, we were unable to launch Sentry today to get plankton samples and will try again in the morning.

Some of us were unbothered and continued working, while others could only stomach short periods of time under the microscope or even just being awake. Everything becomes more difficult as the waves slosh; your balance is lost as you traverse the corridors, anxiety of falling in the shower increases (there’s actually a bar in the shower to hold on to!), keeping the microscope focused becomes harder, and you become disorientated. This is life at sea, and observing the horizon going above and below the boat won’t be a one-time experience, but a surreal one. 

Hi, my name is Laura Murray and I’m a graduate student from Western Washington University. I received my bachelor’s in science studying microbiology at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. I am continuing my microbiology degree under Dr. Craig Moyer studying the microbiology of hydrothermal vent chimneys, where little microbes live in the distinctive pillars at vent sites. I was  inspired to pursue microbiology after watching the movie Contagion and see how microbes affect our lives. I moved to Washington after my sister enrolled at Western and I perused the graduate programs.