Florida State University : Research in Review

Day 12 - Wednesday, 09/24/08

Position: N36 41.008 W122 49.320

Overnight, we moved to Station No. 6, which will be our closest point to shore for awhile. All day, we’ve hovered over roughly 2,700 meters of water only 44 miles from Monterey. The sun has been relentless, and welcome.

I should have mentioned earlier how the Point Sur manages to stay in position for such long periods in waters where anchors are little more than useless cargo. Some large vessels are equipped with bow thrusters—powerful electric motors that drive propellers mounted below the water line at the bow—that can help their captains hold them steady in one place. Mammoth-sized oil drilling ships have multiple thrusters, computer controlled with the positioning aid of GPS signals. But the Sur has none of those gadgets. The men at the con use the ship’s autopilot and a fine hand on the throttles, and it works—at least in the seas we’ve encountered so far—beautifully well.

Today the work was steady and productive. By 6:30 a.m. we had made four, maybe five casts of the multi-core (unless one’s research hangs on the numbers, one tends to lose count) plus two CTD casts, which take almost as much time to do, about two hours each. All of the corer casts came up with good quality samples, and lots of them, too, which kept the core processors in the mud room busy all day.

A treat this morning for our animal rustlers. Russell, now into the second year of a doctoral program at Texas A&M and specializing in the study of annelids—segmented worms such as the common earthworm—discovered a four-inch-long worm, intact, in one of the mud cores. Buz identified it as an echiuran, an animal whose place on the worm evolutionary tree has yet to be clearly defined. Some scientists hold that echiurans are annelids, some don’t. Russell found more of them, along with some other species that he identified as bona fide annelids that live in tubes. Whatever its pedigree, Russell’s four-inch echiuran is by far the largest specimen of macrofauna (big animal) we’ve found in our mud.

Seas were lighter today, but the crew of the Sur still handled all our casts. They are tops, these guys. And funny, if you don’t count Andrew’s lame jokes (“Have you seen a picture of my ex?” produces a palmed card marked with an X). Ok, it was funny the first time.

We’ve run short of coring tubes. Already, we’ve lost at least seven, possibly eight, and we are down to only 13, total. What’s been happening, apparently, is that the sticky mud literally wrenches the tubes right out of their brackets when the corer lifts off the bottom. This has slowed operations measurably. It takes eight sets of corers to fill the multi-corer, so when it’s retrieved and sitting on deck, we don’t have eight sets ready to be remounted for the next cast. We’re obliged to wait until the core processing team has finished with at least three cores until we can reload and recast. For a couple days now, we’ve resorted to using duct tape—yes, the universal fix-all—to keep the tubes fixed in place. Since then, we haven’t lost another one.

Chef Karen, who doubles as the Sur’s chief medical officer, this afternoon thrilled some worried victims of the sea misery. Since Day 2, Karen has been supplying them with prescription-grade patches loaded with scopolamine, an anti-nausea drug. Unlike the over-the-counter meds members brought with them, the scopolamine has done the trick. But a couple days ago, Karen alerted the victims that her supply of patches, placed behind the ear, was running low. Not to worry, she said—she still had a boxful of scopolamine suppositories. When she bounced into the lab this afternoon with a fistful of patches she’d just found, a shout went up!

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