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

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...

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!

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!

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

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

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???

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.