Florida State University : Research in Review

Day 9 - Sunday, 09/21/08

Position 7:14 p.m. local: N39 58.681 W125 26.762

We arrived at Station No. 4 this a.m.—only a few miles due east of No. 3, and hugging the 40-degree line—around 10:50, and had our first cast overboard in minutes. The weather remains beautiful, with slightly building seas—whitecaps showing early—from the N-NW, with winds of 12 to 16 knots most of the day, and cool. At this hour, the air temperature is around 60 with winds at 14. Forecast is for winds up to 35 to arrive by tomorrow evening. With any luck it will catch us in transit, toward Station No. 5 in the direction of Monterey.

Every cast we made today seemed charmed. Excellent cores came aboard in spades, and our “treasure chest” of samples, the deep-freezer in our lab, is starting to look heavy. Once the samples are separated from as much seawater as possible, that are poured into cups, doused with two or three ounces of ethanol to preserve them, labeled, sealed, bagged and stacked in the freezer. When the Point Sur ties up at Moss Landing Oct. 3, the science crew will transfer their near-frozen mud samples (ethanol doesn’t freeze, normally) to a trucking company hired to get them back to Florida State. Erin and her lab mates will spend the next 10 to 12 months sorting through this small mountain of mud to analyze what they’ve found on this trip. Such work is far too delicate to be attempted on a rolling ship, and beside that, there’s no time. Outside of runs to new sampling stations, members of this mission are lucky to find time to eat and sleep between work shifts meeting the many demands of the multi-corer.

We learned today that for preserving the animals we’re collecting, ethanol is preferable to formaldehyde—a fixer familiar to generations of biology students. The latter tends to play hob with the organisms’ DNA, critically needed for helping pin down the species found. Thistle says that in any single sample taken from the first centimeter of mud out here, there could easily be 60 species of harpacticoid copepods—many completely new to science—600 species of nematodes and perhaps another dozen species of other invertebrates such as bivalves. Working through the copepods alone will require many hours of keen eyes through a microscope followed by lots of DNA analysis.

Incidentally, late today we accidentally caught two of the unluckiest sea creatures in the eastern Pacific. One of our coring tubes slammed precisely down on a flaming red starfish--a brittle star, to be more precise--and caught it intact. Another tube snagged a free-swimming marine worm, called a polychaete, on its way to the bottom. Buz Wilson got a good photo back in the mud room.

Thistle has said that most, by far, of the organisms living in or on the bottoms of oceans do so in the topmost few centimeters of mud. Unlike beaches, where thousands of marine species may thrive from the surface to depths reaching two meters or more, seafloors are some of the world’s most sedentary sediments. Once laid down by the constant rain of dead and dying organic matter from above, these deep muds are beyond the reach of waves, wind, currents and tides. Churned up sediments trap plenty of food for all sorts of burrowing animals near shore and in shallow bays and estuaries. That’s not the luck of bottom-dwelling (benthic) deep-sea invertebrates. From the moment they’re hatched, their fate it is to find food and mates in the thinnest layers of the ocean’s topsoil, or die and check off the planet.

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