ALES at Stony Brook

3 December - Back in NY

2011-12-06T11:18:00.000-08:00

Sunset as we travel through the Straits of Magellan on our way back to Punta Arenas, Chile

So our cruise has finally ended. The past few days were a whirlwind of packing, labelling, copying photos from everybody that we've been living with for the past month and preparing to re-enter society. It's always strange getting off the ship and being able to 1) walk more than 300 feet in any direction and 2) see new people that you haven't been trapped with on the ship for the past month.

All our gear is packed up and ready for shipment north!

Many of us flew back to the States the day after we got back so our time on shore was a rush of last minute souvenir shopping, a delicious cruise dinner (Thanks Chief Sci Ann!), and mentally preparing for 24-30 hours of air travel back home.

Manhattan on our left as we fly into JFK.

All in all, it was a very fun trip. Stay tuned here as we'll try to post some results as we begin working up and processing the data.

My plane's shadow on the salt marshes of Jamaica Bay as we come in for our landing.

Joe

p.s. There are always surprises awaiting us when we get back home. Like my two month old refrigerator dying while I was gone. I decided not to post any pictures of the contents on the blog. Thanks Frigidaire!

29 November 2011 ADELIES AND GENTOOS AND CHINNIES…OH MY!

2011-11-30T14:46:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we left Palmer Station and started our journey home. On our way out from Anvers Island, we travelled through the ice under the bright, shining sun. Many of the ice rafts had penguins and crabeater seals on them and we watched them scurry about as the boat loomed down on them (you’ve already heard about this in more detail from Little Melissa!)

We had one last stop to make before we could leave the Southern Ocean: King George Island. There is a temporary field camp there, Copacabana, where the researchers study the colonies of three different penguin species: Adelies, Gentoos and Chinstraps. We went ashore to collect their garbage, work on their communication capabilities and pick up one of the researchers who is on her way home. Lucky for us, we had about an hour of free time on the island to explore. There were penguins EVERYWHERE. You literally had to look down where you were walking so you didn’t step on them…it was amazing! Here are a few pictures of the MANY penguins that we saw:

Penguins penguins everywhere! A huge colony of Gentoo penguins, with some Adelie penguins (and probably a few Chinstrap penguins) in the background.

A closeup of some Gentoo penguins.

The small boat takes the first load of garbage back to the LM Gould while we stay ashore to take some photos…YAY!

All three penguin species nesting in the same area. Back row, from left to right: an Adelie Penguin, a Chinstrap Penguin and a Gentoo Penguin.

Katie, Joe and Big Melissa stop to take a photo…what a great background!

Peter Wiebe, one of my first mentors in the field of zooplankton ecology when I started working at WHOI…what a great experience it has been to sail with him!

We are currently on day 2 of our Drake Passage crossing and the weather is still pretty good. The winds are kicking up a bit right now (gusting around 42 knots) but by the time it gets really bad this evening, we should be almost out of the Drake. Then it is about a day and a half transit to Punta Arenas, Chile. I am looking forward to enjoying one last meal in P.A. with everyone onboard before we all fly out on December 2nd. But more about the cruise party later. 

Signing off for now…
Big Melissa

November 28, 2011 Northbound

2011-11-28T16:04:00.000-08:00

After an amazing stay at Palmer Station, we left yesterday around 10 in the morning with a few extra passengers in tow. As we left, the folks at Palmer gathered at the shore and jumped into the water for a traditional Palmer Station style goodbye to the people who’d left on the Gould.

Even though it was somewhat overcast, it was fairly warm out, there was very little wind, and as usual, the scenery around Palmer was great. There wasn’t as much ice on the water as there was when we first arrived at the station 3 weeks ago, but there was still enough to provide crabeater seals and penguins ample space for relaxation above water and plenty of photo opportunities.

The islands and the ice leaving Palmer.

An Adelie penguin sitting on a piece of ice.

Five crabeater seals relaxing together on the ice.

We spent the remainder of the rest of the day packing our labs and securing them for the transit across the Drake, which could very well be a bit of a bumpy ride. Today we’re making our final stop before Punta Arenas at a small field station called Copacabana to offload some supplies and pick up another passenger. Anyone aboard who wants to go to shore will be taking a zodiac ride out from the ship and helping haul garbage from the station. More on that tomorrow.

Melissa M (a.k.a. Little Melissa, a.k.a. Munchkin, a.k.a. Muffin)

27 November Palmer Station Round II

2011-11-27T18:58:00.000-08:00

Our second stop at Palmer Station was much more pleasant than the first. Last time it was extremely windy; this time there was barely any wind and it was almost 40 degrees for some of the day! We spent part of the morning packing, but then spent the afternoon exploring and testing out our legs!

LMG docked at Palmer as viewed from Torgeson Island! Photo by K. Wurtzell

First, most of the science crew scaled the glacier in the backyard of the station. How strange to walk more than 200ft in any direction (let alone uphill)! It felt great to get some exercise and the view was well worth the walk.

Then, we embarked upon an adventure to Torgeson Island, which is a five minute zodiac ride from Palmer. I was very excited to visit the island, especially because it houses an Adelie penguin colony!! There were penguins everywhere! Elephant Seals were on the island too.

We were especially lucky to be there because the penguins were laying eggs. Many of the penguins had an egg, some had two!

A Penguin and his / her egg (The male and female take turns sitting on the egg). Photo by K.Wurtzell

One of my favorite things to observe were the male penguins bringing their mates small pebbles. If the female approved of the egg, it would be added to the nest, if not, the male would walk away with it and come back with another one! ). Photo by K.Wurtzell

There were Skuas flying around the island. Skuas will steal the penguins eggs to eat – didn’t seem like the Adelies liked having them around! Photo by K.Wurtzell

The island was also inhabited by Elephant Seals. They were huge!! Most of them didn’t move the entire time we were there. Photo by K.Wurtzell

Overall, it was an amazing day! After our penguin adventure we were invited to eat dinner at Palmer Station. It was Make-Your-Own Pizza night! Delicious!! Then we all went up to the bar and celebrated the end of the cruise with some darts, pool, and dancing. Great end to a great day!

We are currently on our way back to Punta Arenas, Chile, but will first be stopping at Copacabana field camp tomorrow!

-Katie

26 November – Flandres Bay

2011-11-27T13:22:00.000-08:00

: The halo of light around the sun is caused by ice crystals in the clouds. Interestingly, one of my colleagues at Stony Brook (Prof. Daniel Knopf) just gave a seminar that discussed these features (he's an atmospheric chemist) right before I left NY for this cruise.

I live in Flanders, NY (a small hamlet on the east end of Long Island) which is why I particularly enjoyed our sampling location for our final day of science on this trip which is Flandres Bay, the southernmost bay along the Gerlache Strait. (and no, that's not a typo, it's Flandres).

Calm conditions are ideal for small boating, as well as making some very pretty pictures with the mountains and glaciers reflected in the water.

I've had the opporunity to conduct scientific surveys in this area 3 times in the past 18 months. Working with researchers at Duke University, we were here in May and June of last year (2010), then last year on our cruise, we were able to spend a day in the bay in December of 2010. So yesterday's survey was another data point (November 2011) in studying this unique environment.

If you look closely at the edge of this piece of ice, you can see tracks made by a penguin (or two).

We encountered a lot of brash ice and small icebergs on our way from the offshore station to the shallower bay, so when we arrived here we did a CTD cast and then launched two small boats. One (with me and members of my team in it) was conducting acoustic echosounder surveys in the waters of the bay which are too shallow for the large boat to work in. We lucked out with phenomenally great weather – no wind, sunny skies (too sunny for a few folks who got pretty bad sunburns), and an amazing amount of scenery including icebergs, bergy bits, growlers, and other ice formations, some wildlife (a few penguins, a seal or two, and the other boat saw a minke whale!) in an otherworldly environment.

Our home for the past month, the Laurence M. Gould.

While we drove around “mowing the lawn”, the other boat was sampling small, juvenile krill that were hanging around in the water next to (and underneath) pieces of ice. These animals were E. superba that were maybe a centimeter (~ 1/2 inch) in length. Our acoustic surveys generally consist of parallel tracks spaced evenly apart (that's why we say we're 'mowing the lawn') – in our small boat in these conditions our tracks aren't quite parallel as we head mostly in a straight line but we drive around pieces of ice rather than push through them as we don't want ice to go under the zodiac and damage our prop or echosounder.

: One of our crack team of acousticians, Scout Watson, makes sure that our echosounder is working properly and collecting information about krill patches as we survey the waters of Flandres Bay.

This would be an example of some ice floes that we would like to avoid as pushing our way through some of this would take a long long time.

It's not just the ice above the surface that we have to worry about! The submerged portion of the ice pieces can be just as dangerous to our gear. Luckily on a day like today, the water is clear enough that you can see the underwater portions of the ice and avoid them pretty easily.

Everybody in the science party got a chance to go out in the boat today, and some of us (myself, Paola, and Chelsea) were out for about 9 hours in total. It made for a very long day, but very rewarding as well. One of my secondary objectives on this trip was to visit Flandres Bay and return to a place that I call “Krill City” which was a spot nearshore on the southern edge of the bay where we found an enormous bottom layer of krill back in June 2010. Last time I was here, there was virtually no krill in the water column (according to our echosounder), but this year I saw a pretty good amount of krill swarms so that may be a sign that this is going to be a good year for krill – and possibly explain why it might not have been a great year for salps since we had such a difficult time finding them this year.

Here are some more pics from today:

A trio of penguins (pretty sure they were Gentoos) rests on the edge of a large piece of ice. Occasionally you can see them move from the water to the ice which they do by “jumping”/”flying” out of the water and landing on the ice – sometimes on their feet. It's pretty impressive to see happen.

This ice chunk had icicles on its edge.

At one point, we had the LMG head in front of us to help clear a path in the ice for us which made our travel a bit quicker. We were able to collect data while we followed them down the middle of the Bay.

The Gould was always close by, keeping an eye on us.

The other small boat was towing nets in the water to collect krill. When the zodiac's stopped occasionally, we would see individual krill pop up and appear underneath our boats. Maybe they thought our zodiacs were oddly colored pieces of ice. Small krill like hanging out underneath ice as there is algae (krill food) that grows on the bottom of some pieces of ice, and the rough surface of the ice bottom provides them nooks and crannies to hide from predators.

- Joe

25 November SUNRISE, SUNSET

2011-11-27T13:13:00.000-08:00

I will admit, if you had asked me two days ago when my next trip to Antarctica would be, I would have been hesitant to rush back down here. But the last 24 hours have completely made up for the past 24 days of bad weather and gray skies! I finally see now why people come to Antarctica!

It all started when the winds finally died down and we headed into back into the straits along the West Antarctica Peninsula. Up until 24 hours ago, the colors of the sky ranged from dark gray to light gray. But the sunset tonight painted the sky and snow-covered mountains in ribbons of red, yellow and purple. It was amazing.

The beautiful sunset at midnight.

The shades of pink and purple paint the sky and the mountain tops of Anvers Island.

Big Melissa, Katie and Joe pose for a picture on the bridge during sunset.

But the beauty didn’t stop there. During the late spring and summer here at 64°S, while the sun drops below the horizon for a couple hours, the skies never go fully dark. The sun set around midnight, but the skies still sparkled in the brilliant blues and turquoises of twilight. Around 2am, the sun began to poke back up over the horizon and filled the sky again with purples, pinks, reds, oranges and yellows. The colors danced across the sky, the water, the mountains and the icebergs floating next to the boat.

The AMAZING colors of the twilight sky as the sun began to poke back over the horizon.

As the sun began to rise, the blue and purples switched to reds and oranges.

A group of porpoising penguins in the distance.

As the sun continued to rise, the scenery became more and more breathtaking. We continued along the Gerlache Strait into Flanders Bay. As the boat forged forward through the ice, we encountered penguins sitting out on ice rafts and even a crabeater seal (many more pics to come)! We took the small boats out into the Bay to do some surveys and enjoyed our most beautiful day of the cruise!

Kari and Allen get the small boats ready for a day of surveys.

All in all, the scenery of today makes up for this cruise of ridiculously bad weather! It was great to have our last day of science be such a beautiful day. I now finally understand why people come to Antarctica!

Signing off for now…
Big Melissa

24 November Thanksgiving!

2011-11-24T21:24:00.000-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving from Antarctica, everyone! In case you were wondering, yes we’re celebrating too!

A wire turkey, made by MT Kelley

The cooks aboard the ship have been hard at work preparing a Thanksgiving dinner complete with all of the Thanksgiving essentials – turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, corn, etc.

The Thanksgiving lunch menu

The food tasted great and there was more than enough for everyone to have their fill. Personally, being a dessert girl, I felt it was necessary to sample not just one, but three of the five available desserts. I started with a Thanksgiving classic – pumpkin pie. The filling was made with real pumpkin straight from the squash and the crust was perfectly cooked. I then chased that with a bowl of ice cream which I washed down with some delicious apple cobbler and vanilla ice cream. Yum!

Delicious pumpkin pie and apple cobbler.

Immediately after lunch Thanksgiving we watched the Rugby World Cup between New Zealand and France. Not quite football, but it’s still a bunch of men running around with a ball and tackling each other, so the spirit was the same.
Unfortunately, because everyone is working on different shifts, there is rarely a time when everyone is up all at once, so just to make sure everyone gets their fill of Thanksgiving, we’re celebrating not once, but twice! First at lunch for the 12 – 12 crowd, then again at dinner for the 6 – 6 bunch. I’m also betting on leftovers at midrats. Hopefully there will still be some pie left by then, because once the lunchtime food coma sets in I’ll be sleeping soundly until my shift starts at midnight.

On another note, we’ve reached the final stretch of the cruise. Tomorrow will be our last day of science before returning to Palmer Station and then heading back to Punta Arenas. We’ll be heading to Flandres [Not a typo] Bay for our final stations where hopefully we’ll get some sunshine, calm waters, wildlife sightings, and photo opportunities during small boat ops.

Melissa M (a.k.a. Little Melissa, a.k.a. Munchkin, a.k.a. Muffin)

23 November What kind of penguin is that?

2011-11-24T21:21:00.000-08:00

What kind of penguin is that?
Over the past few days we have been seeing lots of penguins! There are four main types of penguins along the Western Antarctic Peninsula, where we have been sampling: Gentoo, Chinstrap, and Adelie.
Gentoo penguins (Pygiscekus papua) can easily be spotted by their slim orange-red beak. Another distinctive feature is a patch of white feathers behind the eye.

Here are some Gentoos we saw on last years cruise. They are “porpoising “ – they leap out of the water as they swim, much like porpoises, which allows them to breathe while swimming. Photo by K. Wurtzell

Adelie Penguins (Pygoscelis adelia) can be identified by their black face and white eye ring. They are smaller than Gentoos. There is an Adelie breeding colony right by Palmer Station.

An Adelie penguin on a small iceberg during last year's cruise. Photo by J. Warren.

We have seen mostly Chinstrap Penguins (Pygoscelis antarcticus) this year. They can be intensified by a thin black line that goes across their face, like the chinstrap of a helmet. Over the past few days there have been frequent groups of Chinstrap Penguins swimming by the LMG. Interesting fact - Chinstraps are known to enjoy a “room with a view” and will use their bill as an “ice-pick” to climb up ice! Cool!

Some Chinstrap Penguins swimming near the ship. I think they were just as curious of us as we were of them!

Everyone loves seeing the penguins! It’s important to remember that our research – studying the zooplankton community, ties into penguins also. Because krill are a major food source for all three of these penguin species, by understanding krill, we can indirectly learn about penguins, too!!

22 November – Shrinking Cups...

2011-11-24T07:05:00.000-08:00

Styrofoam cups are decorated before being placed on the MOCNESS which went down to 1500 m. See the effects of the pressure at this depth on our cups at the end of the blog. ET Kris drew the awesome cup on the left, your author (and practicing non-artist) drew the magnificent turkey on the cup on the right.

Yesterday contained one of the most unusual traditions aboard oceanographic research vessels (compared to any other kind of ship) which was the Cup-Cast. As you go down into the ocean, the pressure around you increases dramatically. At 10 m depth, an additional 1 atmosphere of pressure is pushing in on any object at that depth (the atmospheric pressure at the sea surface = 1 atmosphere – sometimes scientists do keep things simple and straightforward). However since water is much more dense than air, you get very rapid increases in pressure as you go deeper (1 atmosphere for every 10 meters you go down). This is why a lot of oceanographic instruments are placed inside pressure housings (metal cases that are designed to withstand the increased water pressure).

The ship's lounge is full of budding artists, colorfully decorating their souvenirs of the abyss.

If you have scuba dove (or even dived to the bottom of a swimming pool), you've experienced the increased pressure – most notably in your ear (which you can equalize by pinching your nose and trying to blow gently outward). The increased pressure of the water is trying to squeeze the air inside of you and the pressure difference between the air pockets within your body and the outside are what causes that discomfort.

Chief scientist Ann Bucklin decorates her cup – which I believe contained a drawing of a chaetoganth (a zooplankton).

But there's another interesting feature of the pressure of the ocean deep. If you take a normal styrofoam coffee or drink cup (which is composed of cells of foam that are air-filled), and send it down deep, the air gets compressed out of the cells and the entire cup shrinks.

More artists at work, MT Krista (left), MST Melissa P. (background), and non-MST Melissa M. (foreground) use markers to draw various designs on their cups.

So oftentimes on the deepest CTD cast or net tow of a cruise, all the folks on the boat will decorate cups that are placed in a mesh bag and attached to the instrument going down to the depths. And what comes up is a miniature version of what you designed. Not to spoil the surprise, but if you know somebody on this cruise, you may be getting a cup as a holiday gift in the next month...

And here are the post-cast cups. They shrank by about 80%. These were my cups so you can see why I'm a scientist and not an artist, although many of the other folks on the crew drew some really beautiful pictures on their cups.

On the science front, we've finally gotten several consecutive days of not-super-strong winds or rough seas, so we've been able to conduct our stations in a timely manner. This afternoon, I also did my second small boat survey which saw lots of aggregations of krill in the water column (including both patches of large adult krill, and smaller layers of juvenile krill). I wasn't the only one checking out these krill patches, as three humpback whales and a dozen or so Gentoo and Chinstrap penguins were in the area. The penguins were diving down and surfacing in a pattern consistent with feeding on the krill swarms below us!
Hope everyone has a good Thanksgiving Holiday!
Joe

21 November WHAT’S IN SEAWATER?

2011-11-21T17:45:00.000-08:00

“What’s in seawater?” I asked some folks in the lounge this evening (while watching our 3rd episode of the television series “Weeds” – I’m TOTALLY hooked!) The answers I got ranged from “dinosaur pee” and ”the world’s toilet” to ”pollution from our ship” and ”whale poo.” It has become apparent to me that perhaps it is time to have a quick lesson in what exactly IS in seawater and why are we out here studying it.

One aspect of the water we are interested in is its physical properties (such as its temperature, salinity and density). We study these properties with an instrument called a CTD (Conductivity Temperature Depth sensor). Both temperature and salinity (i.e. the salt content of the water) affect the water’s density. In most parts of the world’s ocean, temperature is the most important factor controlling the density of the water. However, the Southern Ocean is different. Here, the temperature doesn’t change much…its cold…often. The salinity, however, changes much more because of the melting of the seasonal sea ice. Therefore, the changes in how much freshwater is melting into the ocean from the ice change the density of the water here much more than the small seasonal changes in temperature.

Deploying the CTD and Niskin bottles in order to study what exactly is in this seawater the ship is sailing through.

A look at the vertical profile of the water column at one of our stations. This information is being sent live over a data wire from the CTD, so we can see in real time what the water looks like!

Another thing we study when looking at the water is its biological and chemical properties. In order to do this, we collect water from bottles (called Niskin bottles, named after Shale Niskin, who patented the bottle design in 1966) located around the CTD; we shut these bottles at various depths to collect water from the bottom of the ocean all the way to the surface. We then filter this water to look at these properties. The ALES lab is filtering water for chlorophyll. This is a pigment found in the phytoplankton (the ‘plant plankton’ of the ocean). By measuring the amount of chlorophyll, we can look at approximately how much phytoplankton (i.e. salp and krill food) is in the water. This is a useful piece of information for us!

Paola and Chelsea pause for a photo while collecting water from the Niskin bottles around the CTD. They will bring this water inside and filter it to look at the seawater’s various biological and chemical properties

The other science group on board, the Bucklin lab, is also filtering water for other clues about the environment here. I’ll hand this over now to Paola to talk about what her group is interested in finding out about the seawater:

In our hunt for salps, we are trying to understand their distribution patterns and the chemistry of the ocean holds lots of clues as to where we might find these gelatinous critters! The Bucklin lab is looking at both the nutrients and particulates in the seawater.

In the area of the Antarctic waters where we are working, concentrations of nutrients (nitrate and phosphate) are much higher than those found in other oceanic waters. They tend to be lowest at the surface and greatest in the warm deep waters.

Particulates, alternatively referred to as particulate organic matter (POM), are tiny particles of solid material present in the water column. Particulates within the water column come in a multiplicity of sizes and from a great variety of sources: dead phytoplankton cells, fragments from attached macroalgae, dead bacteria, dead protozoa, dead micro- and macro-zooplankton, crustacean exuvia, and fecal pellets, especially those from copepods, euphausiids, and salps.

Salps are indiscriminate filter feeders, utilizing an internal mucus net to capture particles as water is pumped through the body. Therefore, they are assumed to ingest all particulate matter (both living and dead) small enough to fit through their oral opening and large enough to be retained by the mucus net. This may include particles as small as 1 to 2 μm.

So, if we want to look at the big picture and understand the behavior or occurrence of salps in the Southern Ocean, the characterization of the chlorophyll by the Warren Team will help with understanding the prey (phytoplankton) distribution. The Bucklin side of the analysis will help with understanding under what nutrient and particulate concentrations we tend to find salps more frequently.

Paola concentrating on filtering the seawater for nutrients and particulates.

Well, that’s it for today’s lesson: “What’s in Seawater?” Hope you learned something!

Signing off for now…
Big Melissa and Paola Batta-Lona

November 20, 2011 The Epic Catch

2011-11-21T10:51:00.000-08:00

As you may have heard by this point, one of the primary objectives of our work out here is to differentiate the acoustical properties of krill and salps. We’re doing this so that in the future people will be able to more accurately estimate their populations by comparing their acoustical signatures to backscatter in the water column. For now, the only way to do this is to catch both krill and salps in our nets and perform experiments on them, which in our case entails titrating them to find their density relative to sea water.

Personally, I’m starting to think that this is a bad year for salps. Out of the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of krill that we have caught in our IKMT tows thus far, we have caught maybe 100 salps.
Last night we had high hopes for finding salps. Paola found that of the salps we’ve caught, most of them were in the upper levels of the water column and were caught in the wee hours of the morning, so we decided to do an extra tow while we transited to our next station.

When we pulled the net in we had the biggest catch of krill I’ve seen. SO MANY KRILL. The cod end was literally overflowing with them, and they were all compacted in together. My first thought when I saw it was that when we flipped it over it was going to look like the cranberry sauce that my dad eats at Thanksgiving that has retained the shape of the can after it’s been poured out.

Unfortunately, no one had a camera on them at the time to record the epic catch, but this can give you an idea of an average tow for us. In this case, it’s primarily adult E. superba, probably around 2” long, but we often get nets full of juveniles only as long as my thumbnail. Bear in mind, I’ve been told I have very small nails.

We filled something like eight buckets and sorted through whatever made it out of the compacted cod end alive to separate some animals out for titrations. Aside from a few krill, we found some cool amphipods that I was able to take pictures of under the microscope.

A neat amphipod that we found. From a distance the red ends of his legs look almost feathery

This guy was pretty big for an amphipod at maybe an inch long. In the microscope you can see how pretty this guy actually is. The same is true for most zooplankton. With the naked eye they just look like little bugs swimming around in the water, but when you look at them under a microscope you can see all of the intricate patterns and color variations that make them so visually interesting.

As far as salps go though, I believe we found two. I am beginning to think we’ll never get a respectable catch of those elusive gelatinous goo balls. Our next few stations are in more open water, so many aboard the ship (especially Paola) remain hopeful that they may prove to be the salp promised-land. Stay tuned!

Melissa M (a.k.a Little Melissa, a.k.a. Munchkin, a.k.a. Muffin)

19 November - Snackz on the LMG

2011-11-19T20:41:00.000-08:00

[Ed: The project PI neither condones or condemns the alternative spellings for snacks presented here in...]

Yesterday we had another day of unfortunate weather. The winds were sustained 35 – 40 knots with gusts up to 50 – too windy to do science! So, instead of writing about science, I will write about my second favorite thing about the LMG – snacks!

There are myriad of snacks available. Chocolate Chip Cookies (see my blog post from earlier this trip) will remain a favorite, but I have needed to expand my snack variety in fear of becoming bored of CCCs. Luckily there are plenty of options.

Espresso Machine!

We are all big fans of the espresso machine! What better way to make it through a 12 hour shift than caffeine?? The chunk of chocolate next to the machine is especially useful when making my personal favorite, mochas

Cereal!

There are many different types of cereal on board. Trix, granola, frosted mini-wheats, multi-grain cheerios – and my personal favorite, Lucky Charms!! I find the sugar to be a great addition to the caffeine. Here are Chelsea and I with our daily dose of luck

Cake! - The galley has produced some wonderful cakes!

This cake was for two crew members birthdays. Those are kiwi slices on the outside! The inside was chocolate cake! Yum! We also get cakes for no occasion in particular, one was vanilla cake with dulce de leche filling! Nom nom!

Candy!

It is the Chief Scientist’s job to keep us sugared up all day and Ann is doing a great job! Here is a our “Cookie Jar” which currently is stocked with snickers, chocolate cookies, delicious butterscotch candies, and more.

Snack Wall!

The “snack wall” is located in the galley and is always well stocked with snacks! There are Pringles (original and queso), hard candies, ramen, cookies, nuts, dried fruit, crackers, and more!

Condiments

Something I’ve noticed about ships is that there is always many different hot sauce options available. The LMG is no different. There are at least six different types of hot sauce on board. My favorite is Moore’s Buffalo Sauce

Mid-Rats!

My shift runs from noon-midnight, which means I occasionally eat Mid-Rats, the meal that is from 23:30 to 00:30. Mid-rats offers a variety of breakfast, lunch, and dinner foods, to accommodate people working irregular shifts. I enjoy it immensely – who doesn’t like eggs and bacon before heading off to sleep?

I hope you all have enjoyed my snack tour of the LMG. The weather has finally started to calm down; a high pressure system is passing through the area. Time for science (and working off all of the snacks!).

-Katie

18 November – Small Boating In Antarctica

2011-11-19T07:32:00.000-08:00

Another creature that's interested in zooplankton distributions in Antarctica was this baleen whale that we saw during our small boat survey yesterday.

Part of my research here in Antarctica is applying acoustic techniques (as described very nicely by Peter in the previous blog post) from a small research vessel (normally a 6 m long inflatable rubber boat). Some of you (particularly my mother) might question why one would do such a thing. Travel to Antarctica and then ride around in a tiny boat ?

But there are several reasons that the small boat survey platform is particularly useful down here. Occasionally, you may read in the news about a ship running aground in Antarctica (it happened last year with a tour ship not very far from where we are now). This often happens because the bathymetry (how deep the water is) in this area is not very well charted. There have been very few systematic mapping surveys of Antarctic waters, so boats tend to be wary (with good reason) of 1) going to places they haven't been safely before and 2) going near the islands or other shallow areas.

In addition, a 250+ ft long research vessel is a fairly loud boat, particularly underwater. The smaller research vessel that I use has a lot of advantages in studying zooplankton populations here, particularly close to shore. It has a very shallow draft (~ 1 m) so we can go very close to shore and work in very shallow water, it is very nimble, it is much quieter acoustically, and our echosounder is located about 1m below the surface so we can collect data in the near surface waters. Additionally, we can monitor krill predators that may be in the area and they are not (to our knowledge) avoiding our vessel.

So yesterday morning was the first calm day we've had on this trip, so we jumped on the opportunity to take the small boat out and conduct some survey work. It provided a nice opportunity to also use three different acoustic systems to study the same volume of water which can help us later on (after the cruise) in interpreting and comparing the data from the three acoustic systems with each other.

So myself and MTs Kelley and Krista went out for a ~ 3 hour cruise (somewhat reminiscent of Gilligan's Island, I know). There was some good size swell coming through, but once you're in the small boat and away from the large boat, it was not that noticeable.

We had several islands in the distance that would disappear and reappear as we rode up and down the wave crests during our U-shaped survey trackline (we covered about 20 km in the 3 hours). About 20 minutes into the survey, Kelley who was driving the zodiac mentioned “hey, is that a whale's footprint there ?”. A whale's footprint is a circular area of the ocean which is caused by the whale moving it's tail fluke either at the surface or just beneath the surface. Sure enough, there was one.

The calm, circular area of smooth water is the “whale's footprint.” Which means there's probably a whale around here somewhere.

A couple of minutes later, we spotted a splashing at the surface and saw a bit of a fin poking out of the water.

This is one half of the whale's tail fin (or fluke). Seeing this means the whale is on its side swimming close to or at the surface.

It was difficult to ID the whale as it was moving very quickly, popping up on one side of the boat, then a few minutes later on the other side. Occasionally you could see a white shape moving underwater near the boat which was the whale's belly (which was very white) as it swam belly-side up past our boat.

It may be tough to see, but the white shape submerged is the belly of the whale as it swims “upside down” in front of our research vessel.

We finally got some good photos of the whale and could estimate that it was about 20 ft in length (about the same size as our boat!) and from it's coloring, I'm pretty confident that it was a Minke whale. (the other possibility is the dwarf minke whale, but the pectoral fin coloring indicates it's a Minke.

At one point, the whale surfaced along our starboard side and swam along with us for a few seconds

In addition to seeing the minke whale, we also saw a few small groups of chinstrap penguins (no photos unfortunately) during our survey. I was somewhat surprised that we didn't see more animals that feed on krill as there was a lot of krill in the water according to our echosounders. The Minke whale may have been feeding as there was krill close to the surface (about 10 m deep) or it may have just been curious about the weird looking “whale” that was driving around next to it. It was a great day to be in the small boat and we were able to test out and use our equipment which worked well. Now we just need to have another good weather day to get back out there.

Joe
(note: that day is not likely to be anytime soon as once we got back on the LM Gould yesterday, the winds have been steady at 30-40 kts).

18 November – Wiebe and Warren together again...

2011-11-19T07:20:00.000-08:00

One of the best things about this cruise (from my perspective) is that one of the participants in the other project is Dr. Peter Wiebe from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Peter also happens to be one of my doctoral advisors from graduate school, where we spent a lot of time at sea in the Gulf of Maine using acoustics and nets to study zooplankton populations there. I haven't been to sea with Peter for about a decade, so it's been a very pleasant experience as Peter likes doing science, probably almost more than anything else. And his enthusiasm is difficult to avoid catching.

He wrote a very nice blog post (with some very minor edits from me) on Ann Bucklin's cruise blog (http://antarcticsalpgenomics.blogspot.com/ ) which I've copied below. Any of our readers should definitely check out their blog as their project is also investigating salps and other zooplankton, but using genetics as their research tool.

So here's what Peter wrote:

Antarctic Salp Genomics Blog
See: http://antarcticsalpgenomics.blogspot.com/
Posted by Peter Wiebe and Joe Warren - November 18, 2011

USING SOUND TO SEE INTO THE OCEAN

Land creatures - including us - are used to using our vision to detect the world around us. Ecologists walking in forests, meadows, grasslands, or deserts can immediately pick out the patterns of the life forms inhabiting the space and easily design sampling protocols to see the relationships to each other and their environment. Not so in the ocean environment. As we stand on the deck of a ship peering into the darkness of the sea surface, we can rarely visualize the animals and plants living just below the surface - much less those living in the depths of the ocean. Divers swimming in the shallow reaches of the ocean have limited visibility (only a few meters in coastal regions, up to 20-30 meters in very clear water), because seawater is a very poor medium for transmitting visible light. Light is absorbed, scattered, and reflected more in seawater than in air by orders of magnitude. This limitation affects even the remotely operated and autonomous vehicles with cameras and video systems that can roam the ocean depths, although this technology has given us images of the organisms living deep in the ocean and are leading to new insights about their spatial patterns and behavior on small spatial scales. So how is it possible to view the fascinating 3-dimensional ocean habitat and visualize the spatial arrangement and behaviors of marine organisms on larger spatial and temporal scales?

The transmission of sound at low and moderately high frequencies (1 Hz to 100 kHz) is much more efficient in the ocean than in air. Above 100 kHz, sound is more rapidly attenuated, largely because of absorption due to the salt (principally magnesium sulfate) in seawater. Despite this limitation, high-frequency sound in the 38 kHz to 500 kHz range is proving exceedingly useful for studies of zooplankton (our target organisms), because it can be used to detect the presence of animals 10's to 100's of meters away from the transducer producing the sound.

Figure 1. Echograms of 38 and 150 kHz acoustic data (Nov. 18, 2011). The vertical axis is depth (m); the horizontal axis is time. Intensity is shown by color (see color bar). The intense scattering shown on both echograms is probably krill patches. Image J.D. Warren

On this cruise, there are several acoustic systems being deployed to provide information about the distribution of zooplankton and larger organisms (such as fish) in the water column. The ship has a hull-mounted Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) with 38 and 150 kHz transducers, which is principally used for measuring current speed and direction with depth under the ship. This system depends on organisms in the water column to reflect sound and produce backscattering (i.e., the portion of the transmitted sound that is reflected off organisms back to the transducer receiver). This can be interpreted as current flow from Doppler shifts (i.e., shifts in the frequency of sound emitted by the transduers) in the returning echoes. Also recorded is the intensity of the sound returned as echoes off the organisms. As the ship steams along, the ADCP provides echograms of the backscattering intensity at two frequencies (Figure 1), providing a continuous indication of high and low concentrations of organisms below the surface.

Figure 2. A) The BioSonics towfish equipped with 38 and 120 kHz transducers being launched from the LM Gould (15 November 2011). B) The echogram display of the BioSonics frequencies. Photo and Image P.H. Wiebe

A second system is a dual frequency BioSonics echosounder with 38 and 120 kHz transducers mounted in a towed body (Figure 2). This system is being towed off the starboard quarter of the ship for two hours at the end of a station while heading for the next station when sea conditions are good.

Figure 3. A) Joe Warren and MPC Jullie Jackson discuss the zodiac setup; note the orange transducer module on the end of the stainless steel square tubing next to the engine - it will be moved to a down position underwater during the survey. B) The Zodiac is launched. C) Joe Warren climbs down into the zodiac. D) Kelley Watson, Krista Tyburski, and Joe Warren during a small-boat survey. Photos P.H. Wiebe

The third system is a Simrad echosounder that is battery powered and has transducers operating at 38 and 200 kHz. It is being used from a Zodiac small boat (Figure 3) to conduct surveys of krill distribution over small spatial scales in areas of interest, where our large vessel is unable to go due to water depth. At our Stn #16, all three echosounders were operated for the first time during this cruise. Conditions were ideal, with low winds and seas - except for a long-period swell running through the survey area.

To help interpret the acoustics data, the small boat survey was conducted along the towing path of the MOCNESS, which provided depth-specific collections of animals and environmental measurements (especially temperature and salinity) in the water column at the station. The combination of the MOCNESS and IKMT zooplankton samples and the acoustic data will provide a comprehensive picture of the vertical and horizontal distribution of zooplankton living in this Antarctic ecosystem and will allow evaluation of their status in the face of the rapid environmental changes now taking place here.

-- Peter H. Wiebe (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) and Joseph D. Warren (Stony Brook University)

17 November WHO’S THAT ZOOPLANKTER?

2011-11-17T18:17:00.000-08:00

In an effort to increase audience participation with our blogs, today’s posting is a game! We’ve told you a bit about two types of zooplankton that we are interested in studying out here: krill and salps. What you may not have realized is that our nets pull up a lot more animals than just the ones we want! In between stations, we’ve been trying to photograph some of these various specimens from our net tows.

Today’s game: Correctly identify each of the animals in the photos (to the lowest taxa possible.) The person with the most correct answers will win a souvenir from Antarctica!

So, brush off those ID books sitting on your shelves and get Google Images up and running…you’ve got some zooplankton to ID! Good luck!

P.S. Remember that all photos were all taken within the last week, so keep in mind that these are all ANTARCTIC species.

You can submit your answers via email to ales.lab.sbu@gmail.com (just put Zooplankton ID in the subject line) or you can post them in the comments section below.

Please submit your guesses by noon (east coast time) on monday, Nov 21st. We'll announce the winner(s) before thanksgiving!

Mystery zooplankton #1

Mystery zooplankton #2

Mystery zooplankton #3

Mystery zooplankton #4

Mystery zooplankton #5

Mystery zooplankton #6

Mystery zooplankton #7

Mystery zooplankton #8

Mystery zooplankton #9

Mystery zooplankton #10

November 16, 2011 Buh-buh-buh bird, bird, bird, the bird is the word

2011-11-16T19:27:00.000-08:00

I’ve lost track of how many days it’s been since we started our watch schedules and I had to shift my sleep schedule a whole 12 hours to work on the midnight to noon shift. The days started blending together and dates started getting confused almost immediately upon first waking up at 11pm to start the day. A lot seems to happen on the night shift though. Last night, for instance, we were swarmed by birds. We had a pretty good snow storm last night. By sunrise the decks were thoroughly covered in snow, and apparently birds like to sit in that snow because there were a couple dozen of them all hanging out on the back deck when I started my shift.

: A bunch of cape petrels, a couple prions, and a fulmar hanging out on the back deck.

The birds here aren’t really afraid of humans at all so you can walk right up to them and they won’t move much. They sort of just shuffle a bit to the side and squawk at you angrily. It was the highlight of my evening. Or day. Or morning. It’s hard to say at this point.

We even had birds come "indoors". He had flown into the aquarium room where Big Melissa, Paola, and Ann were attempting to sort through zooplankton that we had just caught, and gotten himself wedged in between a big storage type container and the wall. Well I couldn’t have that, so I encouraged him to leave the aquarium room, and he eventually returned back on the deck.

A prion in the aquarium room. He flew to the back of that black container there and got stuck between it and the wall before returning to the outdoors.

As the sun started to rise most of the birds flew away, but several were left up on the O1 deck, just chillin’ outside by the door. They eventually flew off though so I guess they were just taking a rest on the ship during the night.

Prions chilling by the door.

The O1 deck, covered in snow. The primary site of bird sitting.

Melissa M (a.k.a. Little Melissa, a.k.a Munchkin, a.k.a. Muffin)

15 November - Haikus

2011-11-15T15:16:00.001-08:00

Everything continues to go well down here – even the weather has begun to clear up! We did a station last night and another this morning – all in winds less than 25 knots which is quite a change from a few days ago. We have been discussing haikus during meals and I decided a fun blog entry would be to collect a big batch of haikus from the ship’s company and share them with you! As you will read, there are a few common themes – rough weather, the lack of salps (although since these were written we have found a few!!), and guitar hero, our favorite way to pass the time.

Enjoy!

Crabeater Seals glare
As the LMG plows through
Slumber disturbed
-Chelsea Stanley

The waves are crashing
I am rolling in my bed
Please, please let me sleep!
- Patty O'Malley

Station number twelve
Will you bring in the jackpot?
Getting tossed around
--Anonymous

Echoes
A loud ping goes out.
A whisper echo returns.
From deep-sea creatures.
-Peter Wiebe

Seabirds all around
Aggregating near the ship
Painted petrels fly
- Patty O'Malley

On the LMG
Melissas are a plenty
Who wants a name change?
-Melissa Paddock

Chocolate chip cookies
Are my favorite food at sea
Nom nom nom nom nom
-Katie

The seas are rough out
I saw my breakfast again
Oatmeal looks the same
-Anonymous

Standby for Weather
Antarctic Salps Hide From Us
Maybe Tomorrow
-Krista Tyburksi

Are salps elusive?
We will prove John Evans wrong
And catch these buggers.
-Ann Bucklin

Titration Drip Drip
In A Freezer Van On Deck
Cold Toes But Data
-Anonymous

One big leopard seal
Lies motionless on ice raft
One big yawn - he's tired
- Patty O'Malley

I K M T Away
Sweeping Through Chilly Water
Brings Gifts Of The Sea
-Anonymous

The krill are dancing
Bright pink and red with green guts
Unaware their fate
- Patty O'Malley

Crew Roster: Meliss
a Melissa Melissa
Three Is Too Many
-Anonymous

Where art though my salp ?
Rival of E. superba
Muscled band of goo.
-Anonymous

Elusive Animals
MOCNESS after salps.
But none caught in tows so far.
Salps wherein art thou?
-Peter Wiebe

I slurped a small salp
Oh! It made me dance about
Salty sea creature
-Anonymous

Snowflakes falling
Blanketing Palmer Station
The Leopard Seal Yawns
-Chelsea Stanley

Slippery wet decks
Good thing I wear my hardhat
True Antarctica!
-Anonymous

Slippery, Secret
Salps. Oh where are you hiding out?
Please. Come out. Come out.
-Kelley Watson

No one can find me
An MST in hiding
I need Ethanol
-Melissa Paddock

Moisturizing cream
O how I wish I had some
Moisturizing cream
-Anonymous

Antarctic Spring
Winds roar and seas build.
Petrels soaring effortlessly.
Skim mountainous waves.
-Peter Wiebe

A cruise of Science
Sitting in the swelling seas
Rock Band anyone?
-Melissa Paddock

Sitting At Station Twelve
Gould Teeters As Waves Pass By
Waiting For Science
-Anonymous

MOCNESS is a beast
Swallowing planktonic prey
Euphausiids beware!
-Chelsea Stanley

Wacky instruments
on LMG make ETs
burn many fuses
-Kris Merril

It's blowing 60
And those waves ain't so pretty
Silly Drake station
-Anonymous

Dear Guitar Hero
Helping ease the weather woes
We love to whammy
-Chelsea Stanley

Hope you liked them! Have a wonderful day!

-Katie

14 November – Data !

2011-11-14T13:55:00.000-08:00

While many of the blog posts so far have been about the inclement weather and seas we've experienced on this trip, we have been able to occupy several stations (roughly half of our initial cruise plan – which in my experience is par for the course here in the Southern Ocean, particularly in the Drake Passage which is a pretty rough area even for down here). I thought I'd take this post to talk about the purpose of our project here on the ship and discuss some of the data we're collecting.

One of the objectives of our group's project is to collect salps, a gelatinous zooplankton that can be found in many of the world oceans, but is particularly abundant (at times) here off Antarctica. Salps and krill can both be found in very large populations here, and often you'll either find lots of salps OR lots of krill as both salps and krill feed on the same food (phytoplankton). Krill are small crustaceans that are the base of the food web here in Antarctica. All the much larger animals that people associate with Antarctica (penguins, seals, whales) depend on krill (or animals that eat krill) as their food source. We know that when there aren't as many krill in the ocean (their populations vary from year to year), the larger animals don't do as well (in terms of reproduction or individual health).

These are Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) which is often the most abundant zooplankton in the ocean here in Antarctica. They are eaten by lots of different animals (including humans) so it is important for us to be able to measure how many krill there are in parts of Antarctica so we can understand how much food is available for the seals, penguins, flying seabirds, and whales that live here

One of the things that other scientists have studied is the relationship between the amount of winter sea ice here and the abundance (or not) of krill. When there is a lot of sea ice, then you often have lots of krill. When there isn't as much sea ice, then there tends to be more salps and less krill. This change in the dominant zooplankton in the ocean here will likely have an impact on all the other parts of the ecosystem (i.e. penguins, seals, flying seabirds, and whales) as we don't think any of these animals eat salps [although I don't think we know this for a fact. Salps are really delicate animals so trying to find them in the stomachs or scats of seals or penguins would be very difficult, whereas parts of krill can be found in both].

So we came down here to study the salps and see if there are environmental factors that can be related to the abundance and distribution of these animals. We want to see if we can use acoustic echosounders (an instrument that is, essentially, a very fancy fish-finder) which we use to measure aggregations of krill in the ocean, can also be used to study salps. And as part of that, we want to determine how much sound an individual salp (or any other zooplankton) will scatter, as we can use that along with echosounder data to estimate how many animals are in the ocean underneath our ship.

That may be kind of confusing, so I'll try to describe it a little more simply. We use acoustic instruments (like a boat's depth sounder or a submarine's SONAR system) to send short pulses of sound into the ocean, we then listen for the echoes of these “pings” and depending on how long it takes the echoes to come back, we know how far below the ship the scatterers are. We can produce colorful figures called echograms that show what's going on underneath us as we travel around.

These are two echograms from the ship's Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) which show what is happening underneath our boat. Time (or distance) is the horizontal axis, and depth is the vertical axis. Areas that produce more scattering are in yellows and reds, while blues represent water that is “empty”. The ADCP is primarily designed to measure current velocities, but since it is mounted on the hull of the ship, it is always running. We have a towfish with another acoustic system to use on this cruise, but so far it's been too rough to deploy. From this echogram, we can identify scattering patches that are probably krill aggregations in the upper part of the water column, although we can't be sure that's what they are from acoustics alone.

In order to identify what we see with the acoustic systems, we deploy net systems. On this trip we have a MOCNESS system and an IKMT net. Both have advantages and disadvantages to them in terms of ease of deployment and sampling efficiency; but they both collect samples of animals in the ocean so we can have a better idea of what's going on underneath us.

IKMT recovery caption: The IKMT net is brought back onboard the ship. The mouth opening of this net is about 5 ft x 5 ft. The metal fin at the bottom helps to keep the net going downward while it is towed. We also have a small flow-meter (little white propellor) which helps us measure how much water we have filtered through the net.

Once the net(s) have been deployed, we have to process their cod ends (cod ends are the buckets at the end of the net that hold the catch). Samples from the MOCNESS are split between the Bucklin and Warren groups on the ship. We preserve ours in formalin and back in NY we'll identify and count all the animals that we found. The Bucklin group preserves their animals differently so they can run genetic analyses on the animals they find. We've been able to do some deep tows with the MOCNESS this trip (most down to 1000 m, and one down to 2500 m – that's more than a mile beneath the ocean surface), but we have yet to catch a huge amount of anything.

One of the cod end catches from a deep MOCNESS tow. Seen here are shrimp, a deep-sea jellyfish, some small fish, and lots of smaller things.

We deploy the IKMT net to catch animals that are closer to the surface and we try to do the tows quickly enough that the animals are still alive when we get them on deck. We then put them in aquariums we have on the ship to keep them happy, and proceed to do experiments on the animals.

These are Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) a large (4-5 cm in length) crustacean that is often the most abundant animal in the ocean here. These animals are a major food source for whales, seals, flying seabirds, and penguins. Additionally, they are also commercially fished. You may see bottles of krill oil capsules in health food stores. Several companies fish krill down here, then process it and sell it as a dietary supplement. There are likely some issues with the location (and size) of the fishery here and whether or not the fishers are competing with the native animal populations for the same resource.

One of the experiments we do on the animals is to measure their density (the mass of the animal relative to its volume). This is important to know for us to properly interpret our acoustic data in that animals that are just a small bit more (or less) dense than their surrounding seawater (or other animals) will scatter different amounts of sound. So everytime we get live animals in our nets, two members of my team shut themselves inside a refridgerated shipping container we have chained to the deck of the ship and we make measurements of the density of individual animals relative to seawater. So far we've made these measurements on over 100 individual zooplankton, ranging from krill, to shellless snails, to larval fish, to amphipods (another type of crustacean), and even parts of jellyfish.

Some of the equipment that we use to measure animal density. We do these experiments inside a refrigerated van to try and keep the temperature of our seawater as close to the ambient temperature that the animals normally live in. Unfortunately, we humans aren't as acclimated to the cold as the krill and other zooplankton are. So we can only stay in the van for about 60-90 minutes at a time, before we have to leave and thaw ourselves out.

Here are some of the data we've collected so far on this trip. The different color/shapes of the symbols correspond to different types of animals. The vertical axis is the ratio of the animals density to that of seawater. Most of our animals are between 1-5% more dense than seawater. This information is used by us to more accurately estimate animal populations from acoustic echograms.

If you look at the graph above, you'll see that I have a category (red diamond) for salps. But that there are no data points in our graph for them. That's been our biggest challenge so far this trip. We haven't caught any salps so far. There are several possible reasons for this: salps are patchily distributed in the ocean so we may not have sampled in an area where they are; this cruise is a month earlier in the year than my cruise here last year (in December) so we may be too early to find salps; this could be a poor year for salps in terms of their health and reproduction; and it may just be too early in our cruise in that we haven't had enough stations yet. Nevertheless, with or without salps, we are collecting data down here (on other types of zooplankton) that will be useful in trying to better monitor and understand the Antarctic ecosystem.

Sorry that was so long-winded. We scientists tend to ramble on and on about our research. We will now return to our normal blog-content (i.e. cookies).

Joe

13 November - WHAT TO DO WHEN THERE IS NOTHING TO DO

2011-11-13T19:23:00.000-08:00

Today reminds me of a lyric from one of my favorite songs as a kid: “I am slowly going crazy…1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, switch.”

Here we are again, waiting for the winds to die down and the swell to relax so we can deploy our instruments. We’ve been standing down, waiting on the weather, for the last 24 hours or so. You might be wondering what we all do on the boat, while we are waiting to do our science. So, I went around the boat today and interviewed everyone from the Marine Technicians and Science Party to the Mates and Stewards on board and put together this compilation of what people do on the LM Gould when there is no work to be done: What to do when there is nothing to do.

Its really hard to capture the magnitude of the swells with our cameras but just to give you an idea, these pictures were taken in succession from the bridge of the ship. The horizon SHOULD be straight. As you can see, there is a lot of rockin’ and rollin’ going on out here.

The lounge is a favorite spot of science party members and crew members alike to hang out during down time. There are 3 large comfy leather couches and 5 matching lazy boy chairs to sprawl out on. There is a large flat-screen TV with a variety of movies and TV shows on DVD to watch. Today we had a bit of a TV-marathon and watched several episodes of 30 Rock and Modern Family back to back! There is also a Wii on the boat, complete with Guitar Hero and Joe brought his PlayStation with Rock Band, so these are both good for hours of mindless entertainment. And for those who like a quieter form of amusement, there is a pretty expansive library of books as well as a good stash of board games, cards and puzzles to keep people busy.

First Mate Scotty gets a turn at Guitar Hero.

My personal favorite thing to do to pass the time is eat (but everyone that knows me knows that…I’m Italian for goodness sake!) I am now working the night-shift so I miss lunch, but luckily there is a full spread put out from 11:30 pm-12:30 am (“mid-rats” or midnight rations) for those that work the night shift, so I never REALLY miss a meal! One of the many selections tonight was French toast with this amazing homemade applesauce…it was awesome! Also, I’ve discovered a new fruit on this cruise – the tangelo. It is a cross between a tangerine and a grapefruit and if you have never had one, you must change this immediately! They are delicious!

The tangelo – a cross between a tangerine and a grapefruit. Delightfully tangy and mildly bitter… Absolutely delicious! Please run out immediately to your local grocery store and try one…you will thank me!

Here are some of the other activities that made people’s lists: curling up with a good book, catching up on some sleep, going outside to watch the waves, dancing to some good music, eating chocolate chip cookies, studying for the GREs (not going to lie… I don’t envy you, Kelley), catching up on their ‘to-do’ list, doing laundry, gaining some perspective on life (very philosophical Alan), and, my favorite: First Mate Scott likes to eat a whole sleeve of cookies and then “weep because [he’s] fat.”

There are, of course, plenty of people doing work in their down time as well. Peter Wiebe can always be found sitting in front of his computer programming and Paola and I are usually entering data, printing out spreadsheets and labels and organizing things for the next station. I heard there was a riveting conversation after dinner tonight about the derivation of quadratic equations…sorry I missed that one!

One person who appears to be using her time wisely is our chief scientist, Ann Bucklin. Not only is she keeping busy with the day-to-day duties of being chief scientist and making sure that we are using our time out here as efficiently as possible, her group is writing a blog for high school science teachers, with the purpose of getting high school students interested in science and excited about we do. Ann tells me that she enjoys having the time to write stories about our adventures out here and convey why it is that she loves what she does. It helps to remind her, as well, why we are out here doing this… because we love it. It is nice to put things back into perspective.

So, fear not, all your land-lovers out there. The weather may be bad but we are making the most of it in our own ways. And when the winds finally die down and the sun finally shines again, we will go back to doing what we love…SCIENCE!

Signing off for now…

Melissa P. (aka Big Melissa and/or Patty O’Malley)

November 12 - Nasty weather = Clean socks

2011-11-12T19:01:00.000-08:00

Since we left Cape Shirreff we’ve been hitting stations along the northern side of the South Shetland Islands at the southern edge of the Drake. It’s been a little bumpy but all in all, not so bad. Yesterday we managed to take in a pretty good haul of krill at station 8, then we headed east to station 9. Conditions weren’t too bad last night, but the forecast looked rough for today and the swells were getting a bit bigger so we took it slow, planning on reaching station 9 around 6 in the morning. The barometric pressure dropped over the course of the night as the winds and swell height increased. Right now we’re looking at winds averaging between 30 and 40 kn and swells around 25 ft, so unfortunately we had to bypass the station and head northeast or risk seriously damaging our equipment. The weather is due to improve in the next 24 hours, so we should be able to get back to work fairly soon.

At the moment there isn’t much to do, so I’ve decided to fill my time by doing my first load of laundry since getting on the ship! The most exciting part of this for me is having clean socks to wear. I realized not long after arriving in Chile that I had forgotten to pack the majority of my socks. Thankfully, I got a few extra pairs in my ECW [Extreme Cold Weather] gear [Ed: We're provided with extra sets of gloves, socks, and other cold weather clothing for the duration of our project -- but we have to give it back at the end of the trip so that others can use it], but I’ve still had to ration my sock usage and rewear any pairs that passed the sniff test. Yesterday I reached a critical point in sock availability. Only one pair passed the sniff test. Not good. Those socks are currently on my feet, but the rest will soon be clean as a whistle and ready for another round. My feet can’t wait. Neither can my shoes.

The laundry room aboard the Gould. It comes fully stocked with detergent, soap, and anything else to fulfill your laundry needs.

[Ed: Sometimes if the seas are too rough, they'll even close the laundry room. That may happen in the next 48 hours.]

Melissa M. (a.k.a. Little Melissa, a.k.a. Munchkin)

11 November - Cape Sheriff Put-In: Finally!

2011-11-11T14:57:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we steamed back to Cape Shirreff to have another shot at bringing our resident seal and penguin biologists back to land. We had been anticipating a “weather window” (the weather is anticipated to get rough again today (Friday)) and wanted to take the opportunity to give it our best shot. Sure enough, the conditions were much nicer than when we tried a few days earlier. Much less of a swell and no fog!!

Unfortunately, the science party was unable to go to shore and help upload the zodiacs. This didn’t stop us from helping, though! We needed to move all of the food for the field camp for the next four months from the refrigerator and freezer and protect it from getting soaked with salt spray with plastic bags. I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of food – everything from apples and oranges, to artichokes and leeks; chicken and beef, to conger eel and duck! They even had a whole turkey – my guess is for Thanksgiving. It looks like our friends will be eating well for the next four months!

Joe, Kelley, and Paola helping sort the “freshies” – fresh fruits and vegetables to help consolidate space in the zodiac. Photo by Ann Bucklin

After about six hours of extremely hard and cold work by the MTs and ETs, we waved goodbye to the final zodiac and our new friends now at Cape Shirreff and are headed to our third science station!

The final zodiac leaving the LMG with Jullie, Alan, Mike, and the last of the supplies for Cape Shirreff. Photo by Melissa Patrician

The zodiac en route to Cape Shirreff. Photo by Melissa Patrician

- Katie

10 Nov – On Station !

2011-11-10T17:29:00.000-08:00

Yesterday afternoon, we had our first science station of the trip. We left Palmer Station in the early morning and were transiting back to Cape Shirreff to deploy the field team there, but on the way was one of our stations (#22 to be specific). Given that some of the gear we were using on this trip hasn't been deployed by members of the crew or the science team previously, we decided to do our first station here (at the northern end of the Gerlache Strait) in semi-protected waters which would help for our deployments to go smoothly.

Traveling through the Gerlache strait, we encounter many types of ice. In the background are the cliffs of a glacier (probably 80-100 feet high), with several large bergs in the foreground. The nearest piece of ice has dark lines/regions which are most likely rocks and dirt from the continent (or islands) around here, meaning this piece of ice used to be on land and as it moved slowly across the land, the ground beneath it gets incorportated (somewhat folded into) the ice itself

On the way to Station #22, we passed through some really spectacular scenery with mountains, glaciers, icebergs, bergy bits, growlers, brash ice [those names all mean something different with respect to the size or type of ice we see] and we even had some sunshine along the way. There was also a group of penguins porpoising (swimming near the surface and occasionally jumping out of the water – so they can fly! Just very very very short distances.).

If you look very carefully in front of the piece of ice in the photo, you can see a group of penguins (maybe 12-15 animals) travelling from left to right. Penguins often travel by porpoising (swimming near the surface and sometimes “flying” out of the water). These were pretty far away so it's difficult to tell what species they are, however these animals have orange feet and a black head with a white patch above their eye which makes them Gentoo penguins.

We made it to our station around 3pm in the afternoon and began to do our science. We have a set of standard instruments that we deploy at all stations: a CTD rosette and two types of nets, a MOCNESS and an IKMT. The CTD is an instrument that measures water properties as well as bottles that collect water samples for us to analyze on board the ship, it's lowered from the surface of the ocean to 1000 m depth (or the bottom – whichever comes first). From these data we can tell a lot of information about the physics and biology of the area.

The IKMT net is used to collect live organisms for us to do measurements on back on the ship. It's towed for a short time period as the zooplankton tend to get damaged by longer tows through the water column. The other net is a MOCNESS system and we happen to have its inventor (Dr. Peter Wiebe, from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and, full disclosure, one of my Ph.D. Advisors) onboard with us as part of Dr. Bucklin's science team. We'll have a blog post dedicated to the MOCNESS system as it's a really remarkable piece of equipment that not only collects animals, but also measures environmental information about the water where the animals were living.

All three of our systems were deployed (and recovered !) successfully. Although there were some hiccups. Right before we deployed the IKMT net, we noticed that there were two small tears in the mesh. That happens somewhat frequently given that the ship and net frame and various other things are sharp onboard the ship and the mesh (which has holes in it that are about a half a millimeter in it) is somewhat fragile. If you send down a net with rips in it, there are two major problems: 1) you might not get a representative tow since animals might be escaping through the holes and even more importantly 2) the small tears might become larger tears which could ruin the net. Marine Technician Kelley Watson and I spotted the two rips, so we got out the net repair kit which means the tow of us got to “patch” the nets with our sewing techniques. Luckily, Kelley (like all sailors) has excellent sail-making and repairing skills in addition to seamstress skills and I've had to repair nets several times in my scientific career. We got the holes patched up and deployed the net.

MT Kelley Watson (left) and myself (right) break out the needle and thread on the deck of the LMG to repair some small holes in the net before we deploy the IKMT. Fortunately, the seas were pretty calm during this repair, although it did start snowing during the MOCNESS deployment. Photo by Peter Wiebe.

We caught some interesting stuff in our nets tows, but I'm not sure anybody took any pictures last night as we were processing the samples (starting some experiments in our cold van, preserving zooplankton in jars which will be counted and analyzed back on shore after the cruise). But don't worry, we'll have get you some pics soon!

-Joe

09 November - And We’re Off…

2011-11-10T06:08:00.000-08:00

So, as you heard yesterday from Little Melissa, we spent the day at Palmer Station, waiting for the wind to die down enough to offload all of the equipment and supplies that we had brought them. The wind was howling all day yesterday with sustained winds around 40 and gusts up to 50+. Unfortunately, there was no glacier hiking for us! We took some great video of the winds, but we will have to wait until we get home to show that to you, as our bandwidth on the boat doesn’t allow us to upload or e-mail videos.

A photo of us girls as we took our first step onto the Antarctic continent. The buildings of Palmer Station are behind us (L to R: Melissa P. (science Melissa P., not MST Melissa P.), Katie, Chelsea, Melissa M.

Thumbs Up for SCIENCE! The whole science party (with the exception of Peter Wiebe, who is taking the picture) takes a quick picture in front of the LM Gould as we step onto Anvers Island. (L to R Back Row: Ann Bucklin, Chelsea, Melissa M. Katie, Joe Warren, Melissa P; Front Row: Paola).

Since this is my first trip to Palmer Station, I thought I’d give everyone at home a brief introduction to the station, through the eyes of a “newbie.” The station, which is located on Anvers Island, an island west of the Western Antarctic Peninsula, was established in the 1960s and was originally a U.S. Navy station. It is my understanding that civilian scientists did not start to occupy the station until the late 1970s or early 1980s. Currently, there are 38 people living at Palmer Station this spring. Twenty-three of those people are support staff. The support staff are the people who are responsible for all the day-to-day maintenance and operation of the station, from running heavy equipment and clearing snow to making sure that everyone has 3 hot meals a day; these are the people who make the station a working, habitable environment for the scientists to do their research. And then there are the scientists…there are researchers studying every part of the ecosystem down here, from microscopic phytoplankton to the seals and penguins that call this island home.

You need some heavy machinery to work in conditions like these. Take a look at those tires!

Palmer Station is comprised of a series of blue aluminum-sided trailer-like buildings and within the walls you will find the following amenities: a galley which serves up 3 hot meals a day (and plenty of snacks in between) for everyone living at the station, a lounge with comfy leather sofas, Lazy Boy chairs and blankets to curl up and watch one of the several hundred DVDs that line the walls of the lounge, a bar area with a pool table, a dart board and a popcorn machine, several hallways of berthing areas, washers and dryers, community bathrooms and showers (like at the gym), a sauna, an outdoor hot tub (which yes, I went in and yes, it was cold) and a station store, where you can purchase toiletries, souvenirs for your friends and family back home. Yesterday, I walked into the galley and was handed a lovely hot beverage while I sat and talked with several researchers; a game of cards transpired at the table next to me. It is a much more civilized community that you would probably expect to find on Antarctica.

And then of course there are, as you would imagine, a plethora of science labs with state-of-the-art equipment that allow the researchers here to do their amazing science. But you already knew about that part!

Well, finally around 6 am this morning, the winds died down to fewer than 25 knots and we were able to offload the rest of the equipment for Palmer Station and head out. We are currently traversing through the Gerlache Strait with the intent on starting our science stations this afternoon, weather permitting. Right now, however, the weather is amazing. There are beautiful blue skies and the sun is shining brightly on the white ice and snow of the mountains, glaciers and icebergs that surround us. It is truly breathtaking.

A beautiful view of the massive icebergs and glaciers in the Gerlache Strait. See, there is blue sky in Antarctica, between all these storms!

So, wish us luck that the weather stays beautiful and that we are able to start getting some science done. More about what we are actually doing out here in a later blog.

Signing off for now…

Melissa
(aka Big Melissa, aka Ancient Melissa, aka Beefy Melissa, aka Big-Haired Melissa, aka Patty O’Mally)

November 8 Ice, Ice, Baby

2011-11-08T14:20:00.000-08:00

We’re finally at Palmer Station! We arrived yesterday around 6 in the evening. The weather wasn’t great: it was snowing steadily and the wind was blowing around 30-40kn. We weren’t sure if we would be able to dock, but we made it! The ride down was smooth and full of brash ice. At times it looked like you could just step off the boat and walk on the ice.

Palmer station, ordinarily surrounded by water, currently surrounded by ice.

When we came down last year the area around Palmer was almost clear of ice and the only wildlife to be seen in the area was various species of birds, save for a couple humpbacks in the distance. This year there have been an abundance of seals resting on the ice and posing for pictures.

2 of dozens of crabeater seals that were resting on the ice as we plowed through to Palmer Station.

Even as I was writing this blog Chelsea came in and told me there were a couple of leopard seals out on the ice across from the station. 3 hours later they’re still there and it doesn’t look like they’ll be moving any time soon.

A leopard seal yawning. Pretty much the extent of his activity in the last several hours

Today is all about offloading cargo for the crew and potentially some glacier hiking for some, assuming they’re willing to brave the sustained 50kn winds and freezing rain (not on my personal agenda). We’ll have to do some preparations for starting science stations as well. As soon as the cargo has been moved off the ship we can turn on the cold van, where we’ll be performing titration experiments on krill, salps, chaetognaths, and possibly amphipods at -1°C, the purpose of which will be to determine the animals’ g-values, or their density relative to sea water. For now, the tentative plan is to leave Palmer whenever the weather allows us, steam to station 22, about 11 hours from Palmer, and then after some science head straight over to Cape Shirreff where, weather permitting, we’ll be able to drop off the Cape Shirreffers and their cargo.

Melissa M. (a.k.a. Little Melissa, a.k.a. Munchkin, a.k.a. Muffin)

Stand by for offload. Stand by for science. Standing by.

2011-11-07T12:28:00.000-08:00

While working in Antarctica has an immense number of benefits (interesting science, beautiful scenery, great people to sail with on the boat), it does have one major drawback – which is the weather. Our first task on this trip was to offload a team of fur seal and penguin researchers (led by Dr. Mike Goebel, from the Southwest Fisheries Science Center which is part of NOAA) at their field camp on Livingston Island. They'll spend the next 4 to 5 months conducting research there and the data the collect is extremely valuable as they've been studying the animal populations here for more than two decades. Time series like that can be very valuable in answering questions related to how the ecosystem here reacts to the changing environmental conditions so making sure we get their camp set up and ready to go for this year's work is an important job for us.

The field camp at Cape Shirreff as seen from the deck of our ship. The green buildings are the US field camp, while the white buildings are a Chilean field camp which will open a little bit later this year.

The Laurence M. Gould (our vessel) has to stage about a mile away from the camp due to a lot of varying bathymetry near the camp landing. Thus the researchers and all their supplies (equipment, food, etc) are transported by zodiacs (inflatable rubber boats about 20' long). Opening the camp is a long process (around 6 hours or so) involving everybody on the boat (whether its carrying gear from the beach to the camp, shoveling snow, holding the boat in the surf zone at the beach) and more than a dozen back-n-forth trips by the zodiac. Obviously, we need a nice weather window in order to accomplish this and unfortunately we haven't had that yet since we got here late in the evening on Nov 5th.

The weather report for the evening of 06 Nov. Windy!

We spent yesterday in stand by mode waiting for the weather to improve, but by the middle of the afternoon, the conditions had actually gotten worse. We had sustained 50 kt winds, the seas were quite large, and as Mike Goebel (who's worked at this camp for 21 field seasons) said “once the seas get spun up like this, they stay up for a while.” So the scientists on board met with our Chief Scientist (Ann Bucklin) and came up with a plan. We'd steam south and try to occupy one of our interior stations (which might be a bit more sheltered) and see if conditions were better as Station 22 is in a bit of lee from some islands at the northern end of the Gerlache Strait. Several of us got up around 530am this morning, went up to the bridge and met with the Captain and our Marine Projects Coordinator (Jullie) to discuss whether we would be able to do any science here. The seas were still pretty good size, but the wind was blowing a steady 30 kts which would mean if we tried to launch (and recover) our net systems, there's a good chance we'd tear or lose them. While we carry spares of most of our systems on board the vessel, there's no benefit to risking equipment this early in the cruise.

That land you see is the Antarctic continent ! The Gerlache Strait is a body of water that lies between the continent and several islands just off shore. If the weather is nice, this trip can be one of the most beautiful sights one can see in Antarctica. However, today it's mostly overcast, foggy, and rainy/snowy. Oh yeah, The air temperature is -1 C with a wind chill of ~ -20 C

So we are now heading to Palmer Station (originally our 2nd stop on this trip) to offload several people who are working at the station for the duration of our cruise (or longer). We'll be there for a full day as there is a lot of cargo that needs to be moved on and off the ship. We'll attempt to calibrate our acoustic systems (if the weather is decent) and set off in another day to head back up north towards Livingston Island and start doing science.

And what about Mike Goebel and his field team (Keven, McKenzie, Jay, Nicole) ? They are stuck aboard the ship until we can find a weather window where we can put them into their field camp. Hopefully after Palmer Station, we'll be able to drop them off and move their gear in better conditions. But in the meantime, they have all been deputized as Assistant Salp Scientists and may give us a hand with some of our sampling until we get them where they are supposed to be.

The bow of the Laurence M. Gould as it cuts through a field of brash ice. This ice isn't very thick but the mates do have to keep an ice out for larger pieces of ice (bergy bits, growlers, small bergs) and steer around them if possible. Sometimes this is easy and the ice clears out quickly.

We're currently steaming through the Gerlache Strait towards Palmer Station and the weather continues to be a mix of sun and fog and rain and snow. We hit our first stretch of brash ice this morning (we've seen a couple of icebergs so far but most have been far off) which means the new people on this trip will have several hundred pictures from this morning.

Keep your fingers crossed for some better seas and winds for us!

Joe

C is for Chocolate Chip Cookies!!!!!

2011-11-06T06:29:00.001-08:00

Yesterday we were unable to unload at Cape Shirreff due to sustained 30 knot winds and 8 to 12 foot seas. We will be trying again today, but yesterday there was not much to do except…EAT COOKIES.

You might be wondering why we keep mention these cookies and what’s so special about them. We wish we could send a cookie through the screen to share them with you, but unfortunately that technology hasn’t quite been developed yet. We’ll work on it.

Every morning, around lunchtime, the Chief Steward, Rameses, puts out a fresh bucket of chocolate chip cookies. The best time to eat them is right after lunch, when they are still warm. The chocolate chips are still melty; the dough is crispy on the outside; the inside is gooey – A little slice of heaven. They are also delicious any time of the day; we find it extremely difficult to walk by the cookie bin without reaching for yet another cookie. We asked Rameses what the secret ingredient was. We were hoping it was love, but we think it’s probably lard.

Thumbs up for chocolate chip cookies!!!!

We are currently working on building up our insulation layers, but our plan once we start scientific stations is to be constantly engaging our abdominal muscles while processing samples. And do squats while filtering chlorophyll. Melissa P. plans on doing lunges while flying the MOCNESS (Multiple Opening and Closing Environmental Sampling System) – Don’t tell Peter! :) So don’t worry, friends and family, we won’t need gym memberships for Christmas. We’ll be in ship-shape in no time (pun intended)!

The question remains: “Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?”

The Answer is, probably one of us… L:R – Little Melissa, Chelsea, Melissa P. and Katie. We all love cookies!!!

Hope you’re having a great weekend!

-Katie, Chelsea, Melissa P., and Little Melissa

05 November - Rollin’ With My Homies

2011-11-05T18:45:00.000-07:00

Today we continue our journey across the Drake Passage to Cape Shirreff and we are finally feeling like we are in the Drake!

Before leaving Punta Arenas, Chile, we all ventured to the statue in the town square of the great explorer Magellan. Legend has it, if you rub the statue’s toe you will have good luck on the crossing.

Magellans_toe.jpg. caption: Melissa P. imitating the great explorer Magellan as he navigated the waters later known as the Straits of Magellan. Note the gold tip on his toe from being rubbed for good luck on the crossing of the Drake Passage by so many sailors before us.

Well, it must have worked, because we are having a VERY nice crossing (compared to what I was expecting). But even with “nice” conditions, the winds are a sustained 20 knots and we have been experiencing 8-15’ swells. There have been a few casualties of equipment and chairs (I TOLD you to tie that down!) but so far, all science party members have walked away with nothing more than a few bruises (although the swells do make working at your computer or moving around the ship rather treacherous).

Melissa M. holds on tight (and fights back laughter) as a 15’ swell rocks the boat and knocks her chair right out from under her.

And most people appear to have medicated well because everyone was at dinner last night, even if for only a short period. I would call this a successful crossing indeed!

During our downtime from our own science mission, we have been helping fellow scientists collect data on our crossing of the Drake Passage. We have been doing XBTs (eXpendable BathyThermographs), XCTDs (eXpendable Conductivity-Temperature-Depth sensors) and collecting water in order to make measurements about the temperature and salinity of the water we are traveling through.

Katie demonstrates how fun it can be to deploy the XBTs (this picture was taken after her 3rd chocolate chip cookie of the day…more on these in a later blog).

This information gets sent to various scientists around the world and also gets posted on an international database, to be shared by all. We are a part of something big by helping others collect data in the passage!

If all goes as planned, we will complete our crossing of the Drake Passage sometime this morning and arrive at Cape Shirreff around noon (local time). Once there, we will offload the crew that will be doing fieldwork on penguins and seals on the island for the next four months, along with all their supplies. It will take several hours to offload all their equipment and “freshies” (fresh fruit, vegetables, milk and other perishables) and they will need everyone’s help to get through the task as quickly and efficiently as possible. I have been tasked as a “Sherpa,” which apparently means they will drop me off on the island and I will be lugging cargo from the zodiacs (small inflatable boats) to the field camp on large sleds across the snow…I am picturing something like the Iditarod, but with me as the sled dog!

Well, it’s time for our All Hands meeting about our busy day at Cape Shirreff, so I’ll wrap this up for now. Wish me luck in my Sherpa adventures!

Melissa P.

04 Nov 2011 – Special Blog post for students in MAR 353 (and anybody else who's interested)

2011-11-05T18:40:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd give the students in my Physical Oceanography Laboratory Course a little extra credit assignment to do before next week's lab. Answers can be submitted on hard copy or via blackboard, but are due before the start of lab next thursday (Nov 10th).

On the boat we get a couple different kinds of weather and satellite maps which we use to help us try to understand what the weather will be like during our trip. We also get a daily forecast sent to us for the general area by the Navy which is very handy and supplements the following maps.

Ice Coverage

This is a satellite image of ice cover from 01 Nov 2011.

Satellite maps of ice coverage are useful for us to determine how likely we will be to open the field camp and drop off the penguin and pinniped researchers. Land masses are filled in in blue. Ice coverage can be seen although in some cases it is difficult to determine what is ice vs. cloud cover vs. other reflectances in the images. Ice bergs appear as small (at this images scale) white dots/specks.

There are many different stages of ice (brash, grease, frazil, pancake, fast, first year, second year, etc) and these images often can't distinguish those types from one another. Our last night in Punta Arenas, we ate dinner next to a group of pilots from NASA who are flying radar and other instrumentation aerial surveys of ice cover and thickness on Antarctica (mostly ice on land, not sea ice). Their instruments can measure ice thickness, heat content, or other data types that help us to understand the movement of heat in this region.

Barometric Pressure Maps

We get model simulations from two different sources and despite the differences in technology (computer models vs. hand drawn isobars), they generally provide similar predictions of our weather.

This is a combination visible satellite and barometric pressure map (green lines) for today.

The Chilean Navy's maps relay on hand drawn isobars and contours. You can see from the map, they welcome reports of current conditions to help their forecasts as there are very few weather stations in this area to provide input data into predictive models.

Underway Meteorological Observations

: The ship has monitors in most labs (and state rooms) that display the current meteorological conditions. This (as well as deck cameras) is very useful information to have when getting ready for deck work on the ship as you have some idea of what it's like outside before you actually go outside. I've blacked out the wind speed and direction information in this image, but you can look at what the current air and sea surface temperatures are right now.

Questions for students

1. What is your prediction (based on the satellite image above) for the level and type of ice we'll encounter tomorrow when we get to the camp. We will be anchoring the boat NE of the Cape Shireff peninsula about 1.5 km from land. Provide an estimate of % of surface covered by ice and thickness (in cm) of the ice that we might find (guessing open water / no ice is also an option).

2. What would the presence of a 10 cm thick layer of ice over the surface of the water around this island mean in terms of the temperature and salinity profiles here ? That is, draw T and S vertical profiles for a spot just off of Cape Shireff (assume water depth is 200 m) for early austral spring (November) for the region with and without a layer of ice.

3. Our ship is currently located at 59.5 S and 62.5 W. Using the two above maps (and no other resources), provide a prediction of the following for today: wind direction (remember we're in the southern hemisphere) and rough guess at the speed and % cloud cover. And for tomorrow (05 Nov – noon – you can assume all times on the maps and for predictions are GMT), predict what the wind speed (qualitatively) and direction will be at Cape Shireff (roughly located at 62 S, 62 W). Provide an explanation for what your predictions are.

4. From the meteorological plot, do you think we are on the North or South side of the polar front (i.e. Antarctic Circumpolar Current) ? Provide an explanation of why you picked which side.

Are we there yet?

2011-11-05T18:34:00.000-07:00

Well, we’re still chugging along toward Cape Shirreff [on Livingston Island] and Palmer Station. Still a day to go before we get to Shirreff. There isn’t much to do except wait at this point, and try not to roll out of bed at night with the waves that started picking up more last night.

So here’s a tid-bit about life on the Gould for everyone reading. In case you didn’t know, the handles on the toilets aren’t like normal flush handles. They’re more like valves that you have to hold open while the toilet flushes, and if there’s one thing that I’ll remember about being on the Gould it’s that when you’re done on the toilet, MAKE SURE THE VALVE IS SHUT! They drill that one into your head from day one. You see, when the valve doesn’t close all the way, the water just keeps running and messes with the ship’s plumbing, so they have to turn the water OFF and barge into every bathroom on the ship until they find the source and close it, which isn’t fun for anyone. So remember kids, when you gotta go on the Gould, make sure to close the valve!

: Every toilet has a sign next to the valve as a reminder, so there isn’t much of an excuse for forgetting, but people still do!

Melissa M

Entering the Drake: Birds, birds, birds!

2011-11-05T18:30:00.000-07:00

It will take about four days for the ship to get from Punta Arenas, Chile, to Cape Sheriff, where we can start our zooplankton studies. Until then, all of the lab equipment is either put away or securely tied down so it doesn’t go flying around the lab when it starts to get rough. We have been working with the other salp team to get protocols and data sheets nailed down, eating lots of chocolate chip cookies, and doing lots of bird watching!

Melissa M. on the look out for birds, with dramatic topography in the background.

This afternoon, I spent a bit of time out on deck with both of the Melissa’s. We were just passing the Islas de Estados which provided a beautiful backdrop. We saw Pintado Petrels, Black-browed Albatross, Giant Petrels, Terns, and more. Here are some photos to help you share the experience:

Pintado Petrel, also known as a Cape or Painted Petrel. Looks like someone finger painted him!

Black-browed Albatross. Their wingspan can be up to 250cm! They feed mostly on fish and krill.

That’s all for today! This afternoon we will be starting XBT deployment survey of the Drake Passage. More about that tomorrow!

Katie

02 Nov 2011 - And we're off ! [or “She's a puker”]

2011-11-02T20:16:00.000-07:00

Our trip has begun! A nice view of a part of Punta Arenas, Chile as we begin our journey south.

We left the dock in Punta Arenas just before noon today (local time in PA and on the ship is one hour ahead of the US East coast) and have just left the somewhat protected waters of the Straits and are beginning our journey south hugging the eastern coast of Patagonia as we head towards Cape Horn and start our journey to Antarctica.

Sustained 30 kt winds can create a lot of surface chop and spray, but the straits are narrow enough that the waves can't grow very large so it was a gentle ride. Let's hope that continues.

The weather when we left was quite nice, very clear and sunny; although it did get a little breezy (30-35 kt winds with gusts up to 50 kts) this afternoon. We've spent the past 2 days unpacking all our equipment, setting up lots of our gear, and then tieing everything down securely to make sure it doesn't fall or break during the Drake Passage crossing [the Drake Passage is the area between South America and the Antarctic Peninsula].

Everybody gets a chance to put on their survival suit as part of the safety orientation. We sometimes call these “Gumby suits” as you are not too capable of fine-scale movements or motor control once you've got it on. These suits are designed to not only provide floatation for us if we went into the water, but they also provide protection from the cold (although we hope we never have to use them).

Today we had several meetings going over safety procedures in case of an emergency (knock on wood); deck orientation; science lab orientation; and the consumption of several chocolate chip cookies (ok, that wasn't really a meeting). The Chief Mate (Scott) during our safety orientation described our ship (the Laurence M. Gould) as “she's a puker” so I think most people are a little wary of how bumpy the next few days are going to be.

This trip's purpose is to have the science groups aboard collect data about salps, which are a very unique creature that most people have probably never seen, but is probably going to play an increasingly important role in the Antarctic ecosystem (that's part of our hypothesis-- we'll see if our data support this). We'll try to post a new blog entry roughly once a day – although that depends on the conditions and our science schedule. If you have questions for us, please post them in the comments or email them to ales.lab.sbu@gmail.com and we'll try our best to answer them.

We had a all-hands meeting after dinner tonight where each of the science groups on the boat (including some that are just riding down with us to their field site where they will spend the next 4-5 months!) gave brief overviews of the scientific questions and methods that we're going to be working on. It was a really interesting discussion as each group is studying a different aspect of the ocean ecosystem, but the one theme that was present in all our talks is that the Antarctic Peninsula is a region that is experiencing a lot of change both physically (i.e. temperature) but also ecologically (decreases in some animal populations, increases in other animal populations, geographic shifts in where you find these organisms). Antarctica is a beautiful place to work, but the real draw (for me at least) is that the scientific questions are so interesting here.

What a better place for a photo of our field team this year! Katie (left side, green hat), Melissa P. (right side, nearest), and Melissa M. (right side, next to the other Melissa) enjoy the luxurious comforts of the ship's life raft which we got into as part of the safety orientation.

We'll have more on this later, but our team from Stony Brook this year includes: Katie W.(a recent graduate of Cornell University), Melissa M. (a recent graduate of Stony Brook University), and Melissa P. (a 2nd year graduate student in my research lab). Katie W. and Melissa M. were part of the field team here last year, but this is Melissa P.'s first trip to the Southern Ocean. We'll be taking turns posting to the blog so you'll get to hear from all of us over the next month.

Our first day at sea ended with a really lovely sunset as start our trip to Antarctica. Hopefully there'll be a lot more pictures like this during the next month while we are at sea.

Sorry this is short, but it's late here and the boat is starting to move around a bit. A common reaction of our bodies to the motion of the sea (and ship) is to become sleepy. So it's time to hit the rack.

- Joe

31 October - Trick or Treat ?

2011-10-31T16:20:00.000-07:00

Melissa M (left) and Katie are excited to have landed in Punta Arenas. Both of them were participants in our first field season last year and despite that, have come back for more Salp-tastic adventures!

Sadly, there has been no trick or treating today here in Punta Arenas. But we have been finding lots of surprises as we unpack all our equipment on the ship and discover what we forgot to pack (could have used a few more sample jars); what things we brought too much of (not sure yet); and where my running shoes were for the past year (ok, that last one only applies to Joe).

Ostiones (scallops) a la parmesana was one of our dishes the other night for dinner. It's like French Onion soup, but with scallops instead of onions and a lot more cheese and cream. Yum!

There are two science groups on the cruise this year, both of which are studying salps. However we use different methods and instruments and are investigating different questions about these interesting organisms (don't worry, later posts will go into much much much more detail about the salps and the experiments). Yesterday and today (and part of tomorrow) were spent unpacking gear, setting up equipment, dividing up the lab space so we aren't bumping elbows with each other, and make sure our gear is secure for both the Drake Passage crossing (the 2-3 day trip from South America down to the Antarctic continent) as well as for when we're doing experiments during our cruise as the boat does tend to move about a fair bit.

This won't be confusing at all: Melissa (from the ship's crew), Melissa (Stony Brook grad student), and Melissa (recent Stony Brook graduate (undergrad)) are all sailing on this trip. We welcome nickname suggestions to differentiate the 3 Melissas in the blog comments! [and yes, that is Chuck Norris photo-bombing in the background]

When we're done for the day with work, we've been able to have some fantastic meals in the local restaurants of Punta Arenas. Lots of great seafood and other meals so far. We've also been able to eat lunch on the ship and I can report that our initial supply of chocolate chip cookies are fantastic!

29 October - En Route to Patagonia

2011-10-31T16:07:00.000-07:00

Joe's trip started with an LIRR ride.

Traveling from New York to Punta Arenas, Chile involves planes, trains (sometimes), and cars (sometimes) all in order to get to our boat! It's an odd bit of traveling as with layovers and multiple flights (usual route is NY to Miami to Santiago, Chile to Punta Arenas, Chile) we're travelling for more than 24 hours. I left Hampton Bays at 12:30pm on friday and arrived in Punta Arenas at 7pm saturday. And I had to adjust my watch a total of ONE HOUR!

This is not New England after the snowstorm, rather the Andes mountains as we flew south.

It's odd as you end up feeling exhausted but you're not really jet lagged as most of your travel is due south. Fortunately we all got out of NY before the snow storm arrived, but we did get to see some beautiful scenery flying over the Andes which divides Chile from Argentina. Lots of mountains, glaciers, glacier-fed lakes and luckily for us we had clear visibility so the final flights were really pretty.

A glacier feeds into a (very cold) lake in Patagonia. Unlike most places in the world, some of the glaciers in this region are actually increasing in size!

T-10 days. Yipes!

2011-10-19T13:57:00.000-07:00

The last (hopefully) set of lab equipment and supplies for our upcoming research cruise in Antarctica. It's too late to ship these down to the ship in Punta Arenas, so we'll be taking them on the airplane with us.

In just over a week, our field team will be assembling in Punta Arenas, Chile and begin to load our gear and supplies aboard the research vessel (Laurence M. Gould) for our 2nd year of field work for this project. Most of our gear and equipment was shipped down several months ago (from NY to CA where it got put on a boat that took it down to Chile), however there's always a fair amount of random gear that we either needed to use in the lab, on other projects, or forgot to pack originally!

The four of us participating in the project this year will start posting daily updates once we arrive in Chile so stay tuned for another exciting year of Salp adventures in the Southern Ocean.

-Joe

Prepping for Sea + A New Paper!

2011-08-03T08:49:00.000-07:00

Well, today promises to be a very busy one. We're loading up the boat, rigging our equipment, stocking up on provisions, etc.

But my collaborator Dr. Susan Parks (at Penn State) emailed me to let us know that our paper on right whale foraging behavior in Cape Cod Bay has just been published in the journal Biology Letters.

Right whales are an endangered species and our results indicate that they may be particularly susceptible to ship strikes when they are in this area because of where there prey (copepods) are located in the water column. And the right whales spend a lot of time eating so they'll be wherever their food is.

Working with charismatic megafauna also leads to the press being interested in our work so several news outlets and blogs already have stories about the paper. I think it's even been "tweeted"

Science News
Penn State's Press Release
Discovery News

Off to the dock,
Joe

West Coast ALES

2011-08-02T17:59:00.000-07:00

Latitude: 58o 19' N Longitude: 134o 25' WLocation: Downtown Juneau, Alaska

The ALES lab is ignoring the thousands of folks who head to the Hamptons in August each year and instead I've headed to the west coast. Um, make that the north north north-west coast.

First up, a week-long cruise in the bays and fjords of Juneau, Alaska investigating humpback whales and their prey. Then we'll go a bit south to the Pacific Northwest of the United States and participate in a two week cruise with the National Marine Fisheries Service on one of the legs of their Hake survey.

More posts to come from the boats, airports, and places in between. Right now, my brain is trying to explain to my body that a 4 hour time difference and an overnight layover in Seattle last night is no reason to be sleepy at 9pm Alaska time.

We are scheduled to leave the dock around 5pm tomorrow so hopefully the weather will stay clear and we can get all our gear and equipment set up and tested.

Joe

Returning to shore.

2010-12-21T10:04:00.000-08:00

We're in the middle of the Straits of Magellan about 8 or 9 hours from arriving at the dock in Punta Arenas. Our return trip across the Drake Passage was actually quite smooth, a little bit of rock and roll action but nothing too severe (i.e. lots more people were at mealtime). We packed up almost all our equipment before we left Palmer Station and the South Shetland Islands so the past few days were a time for most of us to catch up on sleep, trade photos and addresses, and begin some preliminary analysis of our data.

We won't have any quantitative results for quite some time as we need to take our net samples back to the lab and start processing them, however we can provide the following recap/summary of our trip. In a little less than two weeks, our team of four did the following: 37 CTD casts, 35 mid-water net trawls, multiple deployments of our acoustic towfish, 6 days and ~ 200 km of small boat acoustic surveys, measured the density of 146 salps, 585 krill, and 41 chaetognaths, multiple measurements of soundspeed from krill and salps, and measured and photographed hundreds of zooplankton. It's quite an accomplishment and all the credit should go to the women of team Salp: Karen, Katie, and Melissa. In addition to rough weather, they had to deal with a sleep-deprived chief scientist who would randomly wander into the lab and then make changes to everything they were doing. I sincerely thank them for all their hard work.

Some of us are returning home to the states in time for the holidays while others of us are going to take advantage of being in South America to explore the natural wonders of Patagonia. We've made a lot of good friends with the other scientists on board the ship, the Raytheon support staff, and the ship's crew and Captain. We'll have a post-cruise dinner tonight in Punta Arenas and starting tomorrow people will start to go their separate ways. It's a very odd life living and working on a ship. We've been exposed to the same twenty people or so for the last month and in a few days we'll go our separate ways. Maybe we'll run into one another on a future cruise or when passing through somebody's town or maybe not. All I know is that it was a great cruise in all regards from the science to the food (Thanks Ramses!) to the people and the people-derived entertainment.

Here are a few pics from the trip and that'll be it for Salp 2010. The blog will continue to document our future research cruises and lab activities so check back in with us in a few months.

An array of salps from one of our net tows. They come in a variety of sizes.

The other major zooplankton we found here. Krill (these guys are adult E. superba) with stomachs full of green phytoplankton.

umpback whales waved their tales at us when we arrived in the Gerlache Strait.

When the waters were calm, you can see penguins swimming underneath the surface.

A leopard seal hauled out on the ice doesn't seem to bother a group of chinstrap penguins.

This is our laboratory.

An iceberg sometimes made us change the path of the ship, but we usually didn't mind.

Thanks a bunch for all your efforts Karen, Katie, and Melissa. Let's do it all again next year!

Ta-Da!
-Joe

Wolfie joins the small boat survey team.

2010-12-19T11:36:00.000-08:00

Wolfie mans the bow of the small boat.

Wolfie is the Stony Brook University mascot and he finally was able to escape the confines of the Laurence M. Gould and join us on the small boat the other day for some survey work in Flandres Bay. We use a zodiac equipped with an echosounder like we have on the Gould to survey areas here near land where the large boat is unable to go. While we have nautical charts for the waters we work in, the Captain of the ship is cautious about getting too close to any shallow areas since some areas aren't as well-mapped as the waters around the United States may be.

Wolfie and Chief Scientist Joe Warren discuss where to head next on the survey.

We can also survey into extremely shallow water (a few meters) in our small boat which no large boat can do. This method is very useful here in the bays of the Gerlache Strait (Wilhelmina, Andvord, and Flandres) where there are lots of rapid bathymetry changes -- the bottom can go from 300 m to 10 m in a very short distance. And its at or past some of these dramatic bottom features that we've found large aggregations of krill here on previous trips. We didn't see any giant swarms of krill on this trip, but did see some patches in Flandres Bay, but in different spots than we'd surveyed previously. These were most likely swarms of small juvenile krill which we can identify by looking at the scatter on our echosounder at different acoustic frequencies and with our net tow data.

In Flandres Bay, you can see snow-capped mountains, glaciers, 100m high ice cliffs, icebergs, bergy bits, growlers, and brash ice. Sometimes all of them in the same picture.

In addition to being a neat place to work scientifically, these bays are beautiful with glaciers and ice cliffs reaching down to the waters edge, large and small icebergs scattered throughout the bay, regions of brash ice where we have to go very slowly so we don't damage our equipment, and lots of different wildlife. We saw a good variety of species of pinnipeds, penguins, and flying seabirds during our small boat work, but not any whales which will be abundant in these waters by the late (Austral) summer.

And Wolfie (like the rest of us) may have gotten a little too much fresh air and sunshine as most of the rest of the small boat team has noses that are the same shade of red as his hat.

- Joe

Answers to questions from 8th graders.

2010-12-19T11:33:00.000-08:00

Note from Joe: We got a great set of questions from Ms. Ungchusri's 8th grade class from Texas. The field team has been working hard to come up with answers to them so here they are.

Sometimes if you take enough pictures, you can catch a porpoising penguin in the air!

1 - What's the range of temperature outside? What is the coldest temperature you have recorded?

Karen: I have not been measuring outside temperature myself, but it seems as though the air temperature is ranging from around 40 degrees Fahrenheit on a really sunny day to around 15-20 degrees Fahrenheit on a cold evening.

Joe: The ship has a system that measures the air temperature (and wind chill) so you can see how cold it is outside before going out on deck (and deciding if you need one or two pairs of socks). Air temps are right around freezing normally, but with wind chill can be another 20 or 30 degrees colder.

2 - Are there polar bears? Are they friendly?

Karen: There are no polar bears in Antarctica; they only live in the arctic (where the North Pole is). There, they are known to hunt people and are not friendly.

3 - Is day to day living hard over here?

Karen: Day to day living is not hard. Our research vessel is very comfortable. We work very hard, though. Long hours of work with little sleep are the hardest things about day to day life.

4 - How do they grow vegetables/vegetation?

Karen: On the ship, we bring all of our fresh vegetables with us. The ship also delivers fresh produce to Palmer Station. At McMurdo Research Station, they have a green house and can grow some of their own vegetables.

5 - How long are the days/nights during the different seasons?

Karen: Right now, in the summer, daylight lasts almost all day. In fact, it never gets dark. Between around 11:00pm and 2:00am it looks like dusk outside. By 3:00am the sun is already above the horizon! The opposite is true in the winter (our summer, June-September)

6 - What is the favorite part of your work?

[Note from Joe: I had everybody in the field team answer this question, but they came up with the same answer!]

Katie: My favorite part of my work is when we pull up the zooplankton nets! While typically the usual suspects are present, such as krill and salps, you never know what you're going to get!! Last night Karen and I caught a large purple ctenophore. It was still alive and looked as if it was glowing!

Heres a picture of the star of one of our recent catch! Photo by Karen.

Melissa: My favorite part of work out here is trying to guess what we’re going to get in the cod end and then finally looking at what we got. Sometimes we get something really interesting and/or weird like polychaete worms or fish larvae. It’s also pretty cool when we get a long salp chain although it can be frustrating to try not to break it apart when we move the sample around.

Karen: My favorite part of this work that we are doing is getting to open up the cod end (the strainer at the end of the net where our zooplankton samples are collected as we tow our sampling net) after a tow and see what neat creatures we have caught.

7 - Can you play soccer outside? If yes, do the penguins play too?

Katie: I love soccer and would love to play with the penguins!!! I've seen them playing in Coca Cola commercials. I've yet to find a soccer ball laying around the ship, but if I do, maybe I'll try it.

Joe: On my last cruise, we had a soccer game in a big room on the ship where they sometimes store a helicopter. However, the ship we're on right now doesn't have a room like that. And it's dangerous to play soccer on the deck because if the ball goes over the side, you can't get it back!

8 - How long does it take to travel to Antarctica from North America?

Katie: A long time! It took me about 27 hour total to fly to Punta Arenas, Chile and then a 4 to 5 day boat ride to Antarctica!

9 - Does it rain in Antarctica or does it just snow?

Katie: Where we are, near the Antarctica Peninsula, it is possible for it to rain if it is warm enough (above thirty two degrees F). Most days it is not that warm, so it snows. Today is an exception though - its almost forty degrees and sunny!

10 - What modes of transportation do you use on Antarctica?

Katie: All transportation to and from Antarctica is by ship or plane. Once you get to the continent, there are trucks, snowmobiles, and more!

11 - Does Antarctica look the same 20 years ago as it does today? Is it affected by global warming? Is global warming real or fake? Will everything melt one day?

Joe: I've been coming down to Antarctica for only the past 10 years but I work with people who have worked here for more than 30 years studying animals and their habitat. There are definitely changes occurring on the continent here even though we are relatively isolated from the rest of the people on earth. The peninsula (the part of the continent that reaches up towards South Amera) is getting warmer at a rate much faster than the rest of the planet and scientists have started to observe changes in where they find certain penguin species which may be the result in climate change affecting their habitat or where they may find their preferred food (like krill). Climate change is real -- but depending on where you are on the planet, the effects may be mild or strong. I don't think everything will melt one day, however we may see changes in what areas of our planet are habitable for people (just like we're seeing changes in the penguins down here).

12 - What kind of food do you eat when you are there?

Katie: The food on the ship is delicious! I eat pretty much what I would if I were at home, but more cookies! The cookies are very tasty. Our trip is relatively short, so we still have some supplies of fresh fruits and vegetables, but this is not the case for all trips.

13. What language do you speak in Antarctica?

Melissa: Mostly we speak English, but occasionally we like to rattle off a little penguin or whale.

Joe: However, if you visit another country's research station, they speak their native language so you could hear spanish, chinese, korean, russian, polish, or several other dialects.

14. How much bigger is Antarctica than Texas?

Melissa: It’s way bigger (and way cooler) than Texas.

Joe: Melissa used to live in Texas. Joe and this blog takes no official stance on which location is cooler. The size of Antarctica depends on what season you are here as there is a lot of ice that freezes around the continent. It's around 5.4 million square miles in area. I don't know the size of Texas, but I'm guessing you could fit ~ 20 Texas(es) in Antarctica -- maybe your class can calculate how many and see how close my guess is ? We also have several people from Alaska on our ship and they would like to point out that Alaska is 600,000 square miles or roughly twice as large as Texas.

15. What kind of penguins are found there?

Melissa: While I’ve been down here I’ve seen mostly chinstraps but I’ve also seen a few Adelie’s and gentoo’s. While we were out on a small boat trip we even saw an emperor penguin, although they aren’t common in the islands where we’ve been. Mostly, the emperor penguins live down on the continent but they will move north to molt their feathers.

16. Do you shower even if it is freezing?

Melissa: Well, luckily the ship has a water heater so we don’t have to take freezing showers. The real issue with showering happens when the ship is rocking back and forth. It’s easy to get seasick in an enclosed space and it can be difficult to hold on to the hand rail and wash/dry at the same time.

17. Is there a big community of people over there? What do you use to get around?

Melissa: There are a lot of people out here, actually. A bunch of countries have their own stations in Antarctica that are like their own small communities and there are constantly people there working and maintaining them. The stations have vehicles for moving around in some areas on land but you can also take a zodiac, which is a small boat, to travel to other islands and explore on foot.

18. What kind of noises do penguins make?

Melissa: It’s kind of like a nasal squawk. Almost like a crow with a deep voice.

Joe: Sometimes when they are on land, the penguins will "trumpet" which sounds like (you guessed it) a trumpet.

Answers to ?s from College Students - Part III

2010-12-19T11:26:00.000-08:00

Note from Joe: The final set of answers to questions from Ms. Weiss's students. Katie take it away...

Karen and Melissa wash down the net after a tow.

We caught a lot of juvenile krill in this net haul. These animals are about 1" in length and can grow to be 3-4X that size.

Who's got two thumbs and loves bioacoustics ? Katie!

How do adverse changes to this current such as increasing temperatures and carbon dioxide uptake impact this and other bodies of water that are connected to the flow of Antarctic waters? What changes in other bodies of water might be impacting Antarctic life?

This deep current is unlikely to be adversely affected noticeably by short term increasing temperatures and carbon dioxide. Much of this exchange occurs in the surface waters. One way this current could be affected by these changes is if biomass increases or decreases in the surface waters. This could change the levels of nutrients, through detritus, that rain down into the deeper current. Then, when the deep current is finally upwelled, whether in the Atlantic, Pacific, or Indian ocean, effects of these changes may be realized.

While Antarctica is one of the most remote places on the planet, it is still affected by other bodies of water and land. It is important to keep in mind that the natural world of our entire planet is driven by cycles in a delicate balance. The systems are seemingly resistant to small, gradual changes, but there is evidence, such as geological studies, that the currents have shifted in conjunction with shifting climates.

What was the most amazing discovery that you have come across while conducting your research?

One of the coolest things I’ve learned during my research is how powerful acoustics can be as a tool. I have worked in a bioacoustics lab, studying cetacean vocalizations and acoustic ecology. We left hydrophones on the bottom of Massachusetts Bay to record for a few months, picked them up, and then we able to tell when and where the whales were hanging out! I don’t know how to talk to whales, but I can tell different species apart! This summer I interned with NOAA and worked on a project using active acoustics to survey walleye Pollock. The technology is similar to a fancy fish finder. This trip is particularly exciting for me because we are collecting data to develop acoustic models. It’s pretty cool!

Due to the increase in upwelling and down welling off of Antarctica from the Global Conveyor Belt, do you see any evidence that an increase in phytoplankton is directly proportional to the amount of zooplankton per cubic meter?

An increase in phytoplankton might lead an increase to the amount of zooplankton per cubic meter, but not always. In the Southern Ocean, the Spring phytoplankton bloom happens very quickly each year, and much of the life (zooplankton and upper trophic levels) is governed by this increase. However, an increase in phytoplankton may not always lead to an increase in zooplankton. Some zooplankton only reproduce during certain times of the year and may not be able to opportunistically take advantage of an increase in phytoplankton. Salps are likely an exception to this. With a high filtration rate and growth rate due to alternative generations, Salps have the capacity of consuming very large amounts of phytoplankton leading to a dramatic zooplankton volume increase.

- Katie

Answers to ?s from College Students Part II

2010-12-19T11:18:00.000-08:00

Note from Joe: Sorry for the delay in getting these answers posted. The field team has been working literally non-stop since Dec 1st and today we are making our final shipboard measurements as we begin our transit northward. We'll try to have several posts in the next few days with answers to questions from college and junior high students.

Now here are Melissa's answers to some questions from college student's in Ms. Weiss's Introduction to Oceanography course.

3. Why study zooplankton?

Zooplankton are a really important part of the marine ecosystem and the type and quantity of zooplankton that you find in an area can be very indicative of the condition of the local ecosystem. For instance, salps and krill are two dominant types of zooplankton in the Antarctic. Both are common but typically are not found in high abundances in the same location. Krill tend to be more associated with the presence of sea ice, likely because that is what their primary food source is associated with, whereas salps tend to be associated more with open water. Because salps are not predated upon by many other organisms, they are often considered to be the end of the food chain and are not associated with very diverse systems. Krill, on the other hand, are consumed by a vast number of organisms which are in turn consumed by other organisms and are considered to be a key component to marine food webs. They are the primary food source for baleen whales like humpbacks which swim from the tropics in winter to the Antarctic in Austral summer to feed in the highly productive waters. Fish, penguins, and other marine birds also feed on krill and they in turn are fed upon by toothed whales and seals. In recent years salps have been found to be increasing in abundance and krill to be decreasing. With increasing global temperatures, sea ice is on the decline, correlating with a decrease in krill abundance. Because krill are so vital a part of marine food webs, this indicates that there may be a danger of collapse for Southern Ocean food webs which would have serious implications worldwide.

4. What was the most amazing discovery that you have come across while conducting your research?

I can’t say that there is any one thing that I have come across that I find particularly amazing but the experience as a whole has been pretty amazing in itself – learning just how useful acoustics can be in determining what is in the water column, seeing the diverse array of zooplankton species that we catch in the net tows, and seeing how the physical properties of the water in any one area correspond to the types and number of organisms that we find there. I’ve learned about most of it in my classes but it’s entirely different and there is a far greater sense of self fulfillment when you see it all in person and do the science with your own hands rather than just reading about it in a textbook or a paper published in a science journal.

Melissa gives MT Mark a hand with the radio comms. Depending on how far we are from the ship, having the radio antenna raised higher can improve our reception.

9. Have you seen any penguins or other animals on the cruise?

Yes, we’ve seen plenty of animals on the cruise. We see penguins practically every day. So far we’ve seen all of the common species for the area like chinstraps, gentoos, and Adelies and we’ve spotted one or two emperor penguins which are rare in the islands and generally only come here to molt. We’ve also spotted a few seals – leopard seals and crabeaters – and we occasionally spy humpack whales, minke whales, and orcas. Or course since we’re studying zooplankton we also see plenty of amphipods, krill, salps, pteropods, and other animals when we pull in the net tows.

A leopard seal hauled out on an iceberg with some anxious penguins nearby. On land, leopard seals aren't very mobile, however in the water they are incredibly fast.

- Melissa

Things are winding down...

2010-12-19T11:16:00.000-08:00

Today we sampled at our last few stations of this cruise. The early morning hours were graced with warm strong sun and a cloudless sky. The last several days have been, for the most part, absolutely beautiful.

Sunset over a large ice berg; can you find the penguins?

While standing on the 01 deck at around 3 AM this morning, admiring the mountain ridges that plummet from around 4000 feet directly into the sea, a massive very healthy-looking humpback whale fluked and dove next to the ship. While continuing to collect data, measure the gravity of krill, salps and chaetognaths, and enter data, it is impossible to ignore the grandeur of the sea and landscape here. It is also stunning how quickly the seas can change. In a blink the wind came up this afternoon and the sky clouded over. The winds went from a light 5 knots to a sustained 25 to 30 knots. We are on our way to make the last stops at Palmer Station and a field camp fondly called Copacabana, before crossing back over the Drake Passage to Punta Arenas. While it seems that we are all excited to be getting home, it is a little sad that the cruise’s end is drawing near.

- Karen

December 14 – Ship Tour!

2010-12-19T11:13:00.000-08:00

We’re on our way to our final station before returning to Palmer now so I thought it would be a good time to give a long overdue tour of the Gould!

We’ll start from the top and work our way down. At the very pinnacle of the ship is the bridge where dwell our charming navigators and the captain. Descending the stairs one will first find themselves on the second floor, made up entirely of bedrooms. On the first floor can be found more bedrooms and offices, including those of our chief scientist, Joe Warren, and our Marine Projects Coordinator, Herb Baker. Both offices have dry erase boards outside where announcements and general information are posted.

The white board outside Joe's office.

The lounge is also on the first floor. There you will find the most comfortable pieces of furniture on the ship, a big screen TV, a large collection of movies, and Rock Band setup.

Welcome to the lounge.

The next floor down, I’m not sure of the technical name of so I’ll just call it the ground floor. Here you’ll find the galley, always stocked with plenty of food…

The galley.

…as well as the laundry room, office supply room (the China Closet), and down the hall you’ll find the baltic room, home of the CTD, the E lab, the dry lab, and the wet lab where we do most of our work.

The E lab, home of the Electronic Techs Mike and Tony.

The wet lab, home of the Joettes.

From the baltic room or the wet lab you can exit onto the back deck where you’ll find the zodiacs and the MT shop, home to our three marine techs Mark, Chance, and Meriedi. The next door down from the shop is the aquarium room where we keep our live animals caught in the net tows. The back can be a scary place to be in bad weather and rough seas. Large waves crash over the side and could easily drag a person overboard, so always wear a float coat when you’re out there!

The back deck in not so great weather.

- Melissa

13 Dec - It's Always Greener at the Chlorophyll Max.

2010-12-19T11:06:00.000-08:00

This morning was a really interesting morning! We performed a station and net tow, as usual, but had some unique results. The CTD revealed more chlorophyll in the water column than usual as well as a particularly shallow chlorophyll max layer ~ 5m! This was even more apparent when I filtered the water from this depth. Check it out:

This is a picture of a 2 micron filter after 300ml of water were filtered through. The brown stuff is phytoplankton! Usually we filter 500ml and the filters are only lightly tinted brown.

We also had a unique catch in the net tow! We caught lots of little transparent copepods - they were so full from nomming [Editor: Katie informs me that nomming is how the kids say "eating" these days.] phytoplankton their guts were green under the scope! We also caught a myctophid (a type of laternfish) and other fun zooplankton. Pretty cool!

This is an ostracod! We haven't caught too many of these critters yet!

This is a gammarid amphipod! His stomach is green from eating so much phytoplankton! What a life!

-Katie

12 Dec - Ship-board Experiments

2010-12-12T17:56:00.000-08:00

Part of our work on this cruise is to find material properties of salps and krill. These material properties include, among other things, the densities of such organisms. Density is important to know if you want to differentiate organisms from one another in acoustic scatter data. We are using different techniques to find the density of krill and the density of salps. Both rely on the principle that when an animal is placed into a liquid that is less dense than it, the animal will sink. When the animal is in liquid denser than it, the animal will float at the surface. Finally, if the animal is placed in liquid that is the same density as it, the animals will (you guessed it) become neutrally buoyant and float!

To find the density of salps, we start with a known amount of seawater, in which salps are negatively buoyant, or sink. We then add hyper-saline solution (i.e. saltier and therefore denser than seawater) very slowly using a burette, a long glass tube with increments of volume marked. This process of adding one substance slowly in measured increments is called titration. As soon as the salp starts to lift off the bottom of the container and become neutrally buoyant, you know that the density of the solution in the container is the same as the density of the salp. Using volume and salinity of the ending solution in the container with the salp, you can calculate density!

Here you can see Katie doing a density experiment on a salp. Notice the burettes (the long tubes), the bottles holding the seawater and hyper-saline solution used to add to the container holding the salp, and the YSI instrument used for measuring salinity.

Krill are generally denser than salps, so mixtures of glycerin are used instead of seawater and hyper-saline solution. A glycerin solution of known density is prepared and placed into a beaker or graduated cylinder. A krill is placed into solutions, one by one in order from least dense solution to more dense. We note in which solution the krill becomes neutrally or positively buoyant, and can therefore approximate the density of the animal based upon which solution made it float rather than sink (i.e. was the same or of greater density).

Here are the different solutions of glycerin in order from least to most dense, as well as the glycerin used to make the solutions.

Size of the organism and temperature of all the different solutions used are important to both methods. Therefore, we measure both and record all of the data.

Using the refined densities of salps and krill, or G-values as they are called in acoustics, scientists like Joe can refine their interpretation of acoustic data to be more specific as to which organisms they are seeing in their acoustic data.

- Karen

Dec 11 - An Icy Adventure!

2010-12-11T18:46:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I had the opportunity to do some zodiac work with Joe! It was really awesome! We left the boat around 10:00am, and spent the whole day jetting around looking for krill in the water column. We used a tool called an Echosounder, which is similar to a very delicate fish finder.

ere's a shot of Joe and me towards the end of the day. Five hours in a small boat = cold feet, no matter how dry you are!

Unfortunately, all the krill we did find were deep under the water, but I did manage to see many other amazing things!! Penguins were everywhere and would swim right by us as if unaware of our presence. We spotted two whales. But my favorite sights were the ice bergs. The ice here is absolutely surreal. MT Mark and I played "the ice game" which is similar to the "cloud game" in that you shout out what you think the ice looks like. Its amazing what a little imagination can do!

he ice can be found in a wide range of colors: clear, pure white, even blue. Sometimes we find "dirty ice" which has dark streaks of sediment lodged in it.

MT Mark and Joe taught me how to drive the Zodiac!

- Katie

You've asked ?s, We've got answers.

2010-12-11T18:42:00.000-08:00

Students at Indian River State College (Florida) in Ms. Weiss's "Introduction to Oceanography" course were kind enough to send us some questions. The field team is trying to answer as many of these as they can in their downtime, but now that the weather has gotten much better, we've still got a lot of stations to do. Here are a couple of answers and we're working on the rest.

These questions were answered by Karen.

1) While being in Antarctica can you see the effects of global warming occurring? Do you think it will get better or worse in the years to come?

This is my first trip to Antarctica, so I have nothing with which to compare what I see here now. However, I asked our Marine Projects Coordinator, Herb, who told me that he has been visiting and living on Antarctica for “longer than you [I] have been alive.” This means that Herb has seen the Antarctic continent regularly for at least the past 27 years. There is a glacial behind Palmer Station that you can hike up. Herb has noticed that in recent years you have to walk a lot longer on rock to start your hike up the glacier. In many parts of Antarctica, glaciers and ice are receding. It is safe to say that temperatures here are getting warmer, causing all this ice to melt more than in the recent past. [Joe: Studies have shown that the Antarctic peninsula region (where we are) is warming at a much more rapid rate than the global average. But, making things even more complicated, some studies have shown that the interior of Antarctica is actually getting cooler. This can often lead to confusion if somebody says "Antarctica is warming" as most studies that have found trends or significant changes are looking at a sub-area and not the entire continent.]

Regarding whether this will “get better or worse” in years to come, it is important to realize that environmental change like warming temperatures in the Antarctic is not a question of better or worse. Environmental change can be beneficial to some organisms, while detrimental to others. Some creatures and ecosystems show more resilience than others, being affected more or less depending on the level and rate of change. It does seem that this warming trend is continuing, but the mechanisms behind such change are complex and related to processes all over the globe. Therefore, it is difficult to say with certainty whether it will continue at all, continue at the same rate, or continue at a steeper rate.

4) What was the most amazing discovery that you have come across while conducting your research?

While I have not discovered anything new to mankind, I have discovered things that were new to me. While working on zooplankton and right whales off of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, I have come to appreciate the magnitude to which right whale food (copepods) controls the behavior and distribution of these animals. It appears that using information just about zooplankton and certain other environmental variables, one can actually predict the presence or absence of right whales, as well as their behavior, with statistically significant positive results. To me, the strength of this relationship between right whales and their feeding habitat is quite amazing. [Joe: My last research trip here in May and June of this year was examining the very same process Karen was describing except instead of copepods and right whales, we were looking at krill and humpback whales.]

8) What is there to gain from studying life forms such as zooplankton in this region? Could depletion of animals in the Antarctic impact communities in other bodies of water?

There are many things we can learn about the Antarctic marine ecosystem, and other ecosystems around the world, by studying zooplankton here. Secondary production [the growth of animals that eat primary producers or plants] not only provides an integral part of the marine food web foundation, but is also important to nutrient cycling and carbon flux. Salps, for example, produce fecal matter that contains carbon, and sinks to the seafloor after being excreted. This is a type of carbon sink, which removes CO₂ from the air (in the form of photosynthesis in phytoplankton) and moves it to the seafloor. Studying changes in zooplankton production here, and the mechanisms behind that change, can give us insights into how widespread certain phenomena are in the world’s oceans. Comparative studies are becoming increasingly important as we discover more ways in which Earth’s ocean waters and atmosphere are connected.

Depletion of animals in the Antarctic can impact communities in other bodies of water on in a number of ways. As mentioned above, the importance of zooplankton production to remove carbon from the upper ocean directly relates to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere; the whole world is affected by the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Also, many large whales travel from other parts of the world to the Antarctic to feed in the summertime. Humpback whales that winter in the South Pacific, for example, feed on krill here. A decrease in krill here would lead to a decrease in food availability for certain humpback populations, and therefore their overall success (calving, longevity, health, etc).

- Karen ([and Joe])

09 Dec - A Rockin' Time

2010-12-11T18:38:00.000-08:00

We've been spending the past few days attempting to do small boat work but unfortunately, are held to the wishes of mother nature. Yesterday we were able to get a group out on the water, but we had two days cancelled before that. The weather out here has a huge effect on what science we are able to perform and unfortunately, seems to have a mind of its own!

Additionally, we are doing most of our work around the South Shetland Islands. This means that we alternate from being in the protection from the elements and exposed. It is usually pretty easy to tell when we come out from cover as the swell significantly picks up and it becomes slightly more difficult to walk.

Our jagged cruise track is the result of the varied weather conditions.

The red graph on the screen is a good representation of our varied wind speed. During this point we were transiting in and out of protection. You can see where we were protected from the harsh wind by where the wind speed drops significantly.

Antarctic sunset. 10:45pm. Photo By Karen.

Though the weather isn't always ideal, we've had some beautiful days. The days are very long too! The sun does set but it never gets very dark outside.

- Katie

December 10, 2010 – Good thing I wore my lucky underwear

2010-12-10T21:42:00.000-08:00

It was another calm day in our area of the Antarctic Peninsula. The sky was blue, the sun was shining.

A difficult day for lab work.

From my bedroom window this morning, I could see from the glassy water that there was little wind.

A perfect day for boating.

Joe, Katie, and the Penguinos were all out on zodiac ops. I was the only member of the Joettes who had not yet been on a zodiac. Both of my opportunities had been lost due to foul weather conditions which were now perfect once my turn had passed.

The weather was taunting me.

I was not entirely pleased, but as I awoke from that night’s slumber I remembered that I was wearing my lucky underwear. I thought to myself, “c’mon lucky underwear, gimme somethin’ good.

The day began like any other. Missed breakfast, ate lunch, anesthetized some krill in alka seltzer. Gotta get those G values. The aquarium room doors were wide open. The sun shined in, tantalizingly. It called to me. I made a break for it. I journeyed to the 02 deck where I planted myself in full sun, soaking up the vitamin D and ultraviolet radiation. Just then, a humpback whale broke the surface a hundred or so feet off the port side. Watching him bubble feeding and flashing his tail at me, slowly make his way away for almost 20 minutes, I knew it was none other than the power of the lucky underwear.

The day continued as usual. Hot chocolate, more krill in alka seltzer. Katie returned from the zodiac trip with Joe with tales of krill, penguins, whales, and ice shaped like a shoe. I wished I had been there. I walked back to the lab, feeling dejected and ready to measure more krill when suddenly, THE POWER OF THE LUCKY UNDERWEAR! Mike rounded a corner, saw me, asked if I wanted to go on a short zodiac ride to pick up the Penguinos from their study site. Huzzah! I jumped on it. Quickly, I ran back to my room to grab something warm to put on.

I forgot my hat, but I had remembered my neck warmer. I put it over my ears. “Good enough,” I thought. I was good to go.

Ethan’s back, Mike, and the Penguinos, Steve and Melissa.

It was awesome. I’m still looking forward to going on a multiple hour zodiac trip but nonetheless, this first trip was da bomb.

Because I saw penguins.

Some chinstraps chillin’ out.

- Melissa

09 Dec - And now for something completely different...

2010-12-10T21:37:00.000-08:00

After a 3rd straight day (and night) of 30+ kt winds which prevented us from deploying our scientific gear at most of our recent stations, I was faced with a difficult decision. We were scheduled to be in the Bransfield Strait for at least 2 more days conducting stations and then heading south to the Gerlache for ~ 3 day of sampling. However, given that we had been unable to deploy the CTD or net at 5 of the last 6 stations and that the weather forecast was calling for more of the same, I decided that we should head to the Gerlache earlier than normal and hope that conditions there were better. We knew we'd at least be in the lee of the peninsula and protected from the strong east winds we'd been experiencing in the Bransfield.

Part of running a scientific research cruise is being able to adapt to changing conditions. By moving to a new spot, we'll be able to continue to conduct science, but we may not be getting the exact samples that we originally thought we would get. In some cases, the location of samples is critical for a project, in others it's more flexible and this is one of those cases.

It's been a pleasant change to go from 30+ kts of wind to winds that are less than 10 kts. The seas are fairly calm and we've even got to see clear skies and the sun. We're not catching as many salps and krill here as we were in the Bransfield, however we are catching enough animals to continue our experiments. We're also going to be exploring some bays along the Gerlache that had enormous aggregations of krill in them in May and June (when I was last down here). It'll be interesting to see if these aggregations have grown, shrunk, or disappeared all together.

MT Mereidi prepares the IKMT net for launching on a beautiful sunny, clear, (almost warm) day in the Gerlache Strait. Thanks to ET Mike for the loan of the fisheye lens!

Sometimes the scenery here is really spectacular with mountains, snow caps, glaciers, and icebergs littered throughout the view.

- Joe

08 Dec – On the water in a small boat!

2010-12-10T21:33:00.000-08:00

After two days of waiting for the wind to die down, we were finally able to do some near-shore acoustic surveying from a zodiac. While here in Antarctica, one of our primary goals is to use acoustics to look at zooplankton in the water column. Acoustics are used in tandem with net tows so that we can survey a wider area more quickly, allowing us to cover more sea over all. The net tows offer a source of ground-truth for what we see in the acoustic data. Acoustic data are returned to us from the instruments in the form of scatter, the strength and quality of which can indicate different things about the creatures in the water column. We are able to do acoustic surveys from our ship, the L.M. Gould, using a towfish, a winged craft that is dragged alongside and behind the boat. The towfish is fitted with the acoustics instrumentation. If we want to survey in close to land, however, we must use a boat that can go in shallower water, such as a zodiac.

Our zodiac, and Tony, are lowered over the side of the L.M. Gould.

Once in the zodiac, it was interesting to look back at the L.M. Gould, our floating home, from a distance. What a refreshing point of view! While getting our acoustic equipment warmed up, we were pushed away from the ship by the waves, which were only small enough to conduct our work in a narrow cone protected by the land nearby.

The L.M. Gould from the water.

The L.M. Gould from a distance, with ice!

We worked our way back and forth between the shore and the ship, completing track lines and collecting data. Our equipment worked with few glitches and we confirmed what previous net tows had suggested: there was not much in the way of zooplankton in the water column.

Joe’s water-proof echosounder box.

While we did not see so much as a few krill scattering sound on the echosounder, we did see gentoo and chinstrap penguins, elephant and fur seals, and some powerful katabatic winds blowing over a glacier, scouring the snow right around the side of a mountain.

Katabatic winds scour snow from around a mountain in great gusts.

Joe waves excitedly as his first day on the water proves a success.

- Karen

07 December - Humpday!

2010-12-10T21:25:00.000-08:00

Today is the midpoint of our cruise (otherwise known as Humpday). Unfortunately, not a lot has been happening over the past 48 hours as the weather has been very uncooperative for doing much of our science. We've had sustained winds of 25-30 kts for the past 36 - 48 hours, so that has meant we've been unable to do our CTD casts or net tows because of the sea state. We don't carry spares for those pieces of equipment so we are pretty cautious about deploying that gear in questionable conditions. We've also run out of live animals in our aquaria for our experiments so the field team has been spending today trying to catch up on entering data into the computer from our paper records.

The other science party on this trip has been able to commence some of their research. They are studying penguin colonies on the South Sandwich Islands so they have been able to launch a zodiac and zip over to land to count nests and see how populations at some of these locations are (or are not) changing over time. We'll try to get a guest blog post from them in the next few days but right now they're spending most of their time on the ship trying to warm up (as outside temperatures have stayed at around -20 oC all day today).

We've gotten a couple of questions from school kids that we'll be posting our answers to over the next few days, however if anyone has any questions for us, please post them in the "comments" section of this blog post. In a few days, my land-based team member (Hi Melissa!) will collect them all and send them to us on the ship so we can answer them in a future blog post.

And as requested by Dr. Gareth Lawson from WHOI, here's a photo of some of our experiments (before we ran out of animals):

Katie (left) and Melissa (right) are measuring the density of some salps relative to the surrounding seawater. They do this by titrating solutions of higher and lower density into a container with a salp in it and determine at what point the salp is neutrally buoyant. The difference between the density of the animal and that of the seawater affects how much sound a zooplankton will scatter.

We measure the soundspeed of animals (in this case small salps) by placing them in a chamber with a transducer (speaker) on one end and a receiver (microphone) on the other. Using a computer, an oscilloscope, and some other equipment, we can figure out how fast sound travels through the animals. This has an important effect on how much sound the animals scatter.

Post your questions in the comments section !
-Joe

06 December - Salp Poetry Special

2010-12-07T09:35:00.000-08:00

It appears that Salp-Fever is sweeping the hallways and decks of the L.M. Gould. We've been catching salps regularly in our net tows and several people in the field team are now members of the prestigious Southern Ocean Salp Sucker Society! Even the Marine Techs have become enchanted with our gelatinous zooplankton friends. So, I present two poems about salps written by two of our great MTs (Ode to the Salp by Mereidi Liebner and the slightly darker "death to salps, an anthem" by Chance Miller). For the record, Chance's poem does not accurately describe our experiments. Poets often use artistic license to illustrate a point and that is the case here. Warning: Some poems may contain adult language and/or themes.

A Grand Salp Adventure by Mereidi Liebner

There once was a Salp named Sylvester.

He lived in the sea with his girlfriend ester.

He thought she was boring, and went out exploring

And soon found that he did not need her.

He swam eating and growing,

He made babies behind, unknowing.

That fate would soon twist,

Carbon making desist,

And all that he knew would stop flowing.

A noise, and a swish surrounded,

He never was, nor not quite ever grounded,

Enough to foresee this new theme in the sea

Studies that more have astounded!

So feeble and yet quite forlorn,

The net got him, the vice of Joe Warren.

To be studied by Kate,

there be no more free mate,

He should have just kept being boring.

death to salps, an anthem by Chance Miller

those salps know what they done was wrong
we know those bastards don't got long
we'll catch them with this song
I think we'll catch them with this song
salty protean slippery salps
We'll kill them with our net
and watch scientists drown them in medicine
numbing wounds they won't forget.
these wounds they won't forget.
those salps... salacious, portentous,
boiling in alka seltzer while we grin,
We'll watch them sink to the bottom,
and float them back again.
In the end when we are done
and they've been sent through hell,
tortured in the name of science, 
for sins we can't re-tell
they'll find solace in their turmoil
in a negative eighty cell.

-Joe

05 Dec - Southern Ocean Salp Suckers Society Induction Ceremony

2010-12-07T09:33:00.000-08:00

It’s going on 2 weeks into the cruise now and each day is melding into the others. I no longer know what day of the week it is or what happened on any particular day without sitting and thinking for a few minutes. HOWEVER! Today is a notable one. Notably good!

First, I awoke this morning to learn that Joe has decreased our workload, w00t! Mostly, we’re not counting and measuring as many zooplankton. We still working or on-call 16 hour shifts total, but our on watch hours are significantly easier, leaving much more down time during the latter half of our shifts and potentially more time for sleeping (although I’ve yet to experience that because for some reason we seem to hit every station while I’m on).

Second, pizza for dinner.

Third, I found a strange Spanish Nestle chocolate flavored powdered energy drink behind the hot chocolate mix, which I added to my hot chocolate. It was quite tasty. And apparently very effective. I was on vibrate mode for a few hours.

Fourth, and finally, at the end of the day (well, the end of my day which ends at 4 in the morning when I get off shift) we hit the salp motherload. Buckets of salps! With the abundance of the gelatinous plankton, Joe made an executive decision. It was time for the LMG1010 first meeting of the Southern Ocean Salp Suckers Society! Karen and I were the new inductees as Katie was off shift and in bed. Induction into SOSSS is very simple and requires only one thing: you must eat a salp. Joe handed us each a salp from one of our buckets, took one for himself, and then it was down the hatch. It was a unique experience. The salp slid down my throat in one salty swoop, no chewing required. Not so bad! Not as good as, say, pizza or cookies but probably better than eating a krill, so I’m not complaining.

Melissa enjoys a snack between meals on the L.M. Gould.

-Melissa

4 Dec 2010 - What IS a Salp???

2010-12-07T09:29:00.000-08:00

You are probably wondering,….what are those scientists so riled up about down there! What IS a salp? Let me tell you: salps are awesome!!!

A typical salp.

So they may not look like much, but if you dive a little deeper into their natural history, you will become intrigued. First of all, while they appear to be just a small lump of gelatin, salps are indeed animals! They can swim (slowly) by propelling water through their bodies and are constantly feeding (just like I wish I could be…). They eat by creating a mucus net, allowing it catch food particles floating by, and then ingest the net full of particles!! Genius. They will eat pretty much anything entrapped in their net if it is between 1µm to 1mm in size. The red / orange blob is their coiled intestine.

Here are some salps we recently caught in a net tow.

You probably are wondering, what eats these guys? Lots of things do! Certain fish, amphipods, krill, and some other zooplankton may chow down on a salp if they find one. Delicious!

Another reason why salps are both awesome and related to your life back at home is their impact on the global carbon cycle. Because they consume food quickly and there are so many salps in the oceans – they have a significant role in the vertical carbon flux. Downward carbon flux, such as towards to the sea floor, is great because it removes carbon from the upper ocean which in turn removes atmospheric carbon dioxide. Salps do this by producing large (1 to 10mm long) fecal pellets chock full of carbon. The pellets are denser than sea water and rapidly descend into the depths.

Salps also have a very interesting sex life. They are found in both solitary / individual form (alone) or in an aggregate / chain group. The solitary forms reproduce asexually, which means the “babies” are clones of themselves. The offspring are produced in a chain which can be hundreds of salps long! They are released from the parent in chain form; this is known as an aggregate group. The group of young salps work together to swim and feed, and the chain grows. Each individual is known as a blastozooid. Some of the blastozooids will reproduce sexually; and a new baby salp (embryo) will grow attached to the body of the parent. Eventually, this baby is released in the solitary form, and will grow and reproduce asexually, bringing everything full circle. Can you imagine if we grew like that?

Because of this remarkable reproduction cycle, salps can grow very quickly!! One generation can be as short as 50 hours.

Scientists believe that salps have one of the first occurrences of a primitive nervous system. More complex nervous systems, such as ours, likely evolved from salps! That’s awesome!

Remember, a salp in the hand is worth two in the sea!!

Stay tuned to learn more about our Salp studies!

Signing off,

Katie.

04 Dec 2010 - Seamounts and Salps

2010-12-07T09:19:00.000-08:00

It was around 5 in the morning. Katie and I were performing titrations with sea water of different salinities in order to find the densities of individual salps, and I happened to look outside. It was the first crystal clear sunny day in a while and there were hundreds of birds swooping down to the water. A dozen or so penguins broke the surface of the water, porpoising. Porpoising is when penguins leap out of the water while swimming, making them look like they’re pretending to be porpoises. Katie and I ran up to the 01 deck (above the main deck where we work) to see the feeding frenzy. A couple of whales spouted. The boat steamed steadily along, and we realized that we and the people on the bridge (where you steer the boat) were probably the only ones who had seen this. The pictures I took did not adequately represent the explosion of life that we witnessed on that cold crisp sunny morning.

When we returned to the lab, the ADCP (Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler; also shows bottom contour) showed that we had just passed over a sea mount.

A seamount as seen on the ADCP computer.

Sea mounts are underwater features that are typically associated with high levels of biological productivity. This is often due to the upwelling of nutrient-rich deep waters that they cause.

- Karen