7-13-09

“When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.”

-Samuel Johnson

Land ho! Those words have new meaning after being at sea for a month, especially knowing that once you reach shore you will be getting off. I am feeling the whirlwind of excitement to be heading home soon, sad that this incredible experience will be ending, anxious that all our gear and samples will be unloaded and shipped successfully, and stoked for a night on the town with the crew and scientists. The mountains of Unalaska Island look even more spectacular than when we set sail. For the moment I am trying to take in the landscape. Who knows when I will see it again.

We waited just outside the Dutch Harbor Port for a tug boat to come and escort us in. It didn’t actually pull us, just made a brief pass. I guess it is all part of procedure to check out each ship before it docks. As we pulled up to the dock everyone headed onto the deck to get their gear ready to be unloaded. There were several men on land waiting to secure the ship to the dock and pile our equipment into trailers for shipping. Crew members operated both of the cranes to unload the many pallets of gear that had been used throughout the trip. Rachel and I held our collective breath as the HPLC instrument crate was hoisted up and set onto the dock. As I was carrying a pile of cardboard off the ship to be recycled I took my first step back on land. “Success!” I thought. “I survived the cruise!” I owe the credit to Rachel and the crew for keeping aware enough not to get knocked overboard. Now I just had to survive one night in Unalaska.

After everything was unloaded and we had completely cleaned out our lab space, all of the cruisers started moving towards the bars. I had heard plenty of stories about the craziness that ensues at the end of research cruises, and had been looking forward to finally getting to party with all of the scientists and crew on the ship. The first bar we headed to was in the Grand Aleutian Hotel. It was a small group to start but others started to trickle in as the evening progressed. Most of us were starving and quickly ordered food.

Looking out the window we saw a juvenile bald eagle. I actually had no idea what a young bald eagle looked like, but they have patchy spots on their feathers. In a way they actually look more grizzled at a young age than at adulthood. I guess you could say they become more refined with age. I was able to get within a few feet of the youngster sitting on the hotel deck without it flying away. I moved very slowly so not to startle the eagle. Unfortunately, as we walked to the next bar, my patience had diminished and I scared several adult eagles away as I tried to photograph them up close. There were bald eagles everywhere, sitting on top of pieces of scrap wood, fish processing warehouses, apartments, ship masts, and of course all over the surrounding hills and cliffs. The natural living symbol of America’s rugged wilderness made me feel more patriotic than any flag or national monument ever had. In that way Dutch Harbor was the most American place I have ever been.

The thick smell of fish billowed out of the processing buildings filling the roads with a strange mist. There were several apartment buildings that provided permanent and seasonal housing to those who worked at sea and in the warehouses. I try to imagine what it must be like to live this isolated lifestyle surrounded by fish fog. Many people feel more comfortable out in the wilderness than in civilization and others just take remote jobs to support their families. Whatever the reason, it is certainly a big change from the lifestyle that most Americans are used to.

We arrived at the Unisea Harbor View Bar and Grill. Apparently this was a real dive bar several years ago and was recently renovated because of the popularity of “The Deadliest Catch.” We spotted a number of other scientists and crew members hanging out playing pool, having a beer, and unwinding from the cruise. Tracy Smart informed me that there is a horse shoe pit behind the bar. “We should start a horse shoe tournament!” she proclaims. In order to get the horse shoes I had to give the bartender my ID. At that moment I wasn’t worried about getting my ID back because I didn’t think the horse shoe game would last very long…

Each horse shoe game would last about three rounds of throws before someone would get distracted. Ebett (University of Alaska, Fairbanks graduate student) and Lucas (3rd Engineer) had numerous cartwheel and handstand contests that would always draw our attention away from the horse shoe pit. I made a few ringers and I think I won a game or two, but the scoring was not very official. The party eventually moved inside to the dance floor. Monday was karaoke night, which made for some excellent entertainment. The highlight was seeing Kent (Captain) and Dee (Chief Mate) sing together. I have no memory of what song they sang, but I’m sure I cheered extra loud. After the song I danced with Dee in what was, thanks to me, surely some of the worst dancing ever seen at the Unisea. Dee told me that “If you don’t lead I will.” I decided to try my best to take the lead, but I don’t think it helped at all.

Some locals really showed off their pipes on the microphone. I think one guy might have sung four or five songs. There were up tempo rock songs, slow ballads, beat boxing, and some pretty good break dancing. It was one of the most lively Mondays I have ever spent at a bar. After the last call at the bar I realized I had not recovered my ID from the bartender. To do this I had to find the horse shoes. For the first time that I could recall, since I had not stayed up till 2 AM while in port, it was actually dark outside in Unalaska. I sifted around in the sand of the horse shoe pit for all the horse shoes. In my “slightly” intoxicated state I was certain that I would not be given back my ID unless I found all four shoes. Otherwise the bar owner would certainly throw me into the harbor for causing him all the trouble of loosing their valuable horse shoes. Luckily I found all the shoes without too much trouble and proudly returned them to the bar to receive my ID. We recovered as many people as we could find (Wes, a grad student from University of Alaska, Fairbanks wondered off and helped some fisherman sort fish) and everyone piled into a couple pickup trucks and rode back to the ship for our last nights sleep on board. There was still a lot of energy in the group so we all ended up talking and joking for at least another hour on the dock.

As we all headed to bed, the only thing I could really think about was falling asleep for as long as possible before our three leg flight back to Maryland. But looking back on the cruise, I thanked my lucky stars that the Bering Sea was still conserved and managed at a state that allowed it to remain such a productive ecosystem that warranted so much scientific interest. If not, we would likely not have come together to study and experience this amazing place, and I wouldn’t have been able to meet all the incredible scientists and crew on the Knorr. After seeing the natural beauty, economic benefit, and American majesty of a well preserved ecosystem, I have new perspective on environmentalism. I always thought conservation and restoration was the smart plan of action, but now more that ever I see it as the patriotic choice as well.

-Eli

"To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them."
-Theodore Roosevelt

7-11,12-09 Last Full Days at Sea

7-11,12-09

Sunday, our last full day at sea. Somewhat fitting that on the seventh day he rested, and we continued packing up our gear for the long trip back to Maryland. In the last two days the weather has gone from foggy, to clear, to windy and choppy, and then repeated the cycle. Our last time point in the phytoplankton degradation experiment was this morning. It was truly gratifying to collect all the planned samples from the experiment without any major errors. I had trouble sleeping last night thinking about all the ridiculous things that could go wrong before we came into port, but as the final hours unfold I am relieved to see everything go smoothly.

Our lab area is looking almost as bare as it did at the beginning of the cruise, as the supplies are packed into boxes for transport. Rachel’s experience fitting everything together nicely in the available space is more and more evident as I struggle to get things together. Many on board have asked if I am having trouble adjusting back to the regular daytime schedule. It’s actually not that hard when you are already tired to begin with, and can’t sleep because you agonize over insignificant details.




Eating in the mess deck throughout the cruise I have looked constantly at a picture of the Knorr next to the Sydney Opera House. In 2007 my father, sister, and I went to Australia and New Zealand while my sister was on a semester abroad at Victoria University of Wellington, NZ. We even saw a concert at the famous Opera House. In over 40 years this ship has likely traveled the globe many times over. It is humbling to think that I got to be on a small part of the Knorr’s fantastic voyage. One of the other students aboard wondered from which room the explorers located the Titanic with their navigational systems and deep sea cameras. Since I have been around all of the common areas of the ship, I’ll go ahead and tell myself that I have successfully retraced all of the history that has taken place here.




















-Eli

7-10-09 Last Bongo Tow

7-10-09

As we continue to head south we are following the 70 meter isobath, a fancy way of saying that the ship is being navigated to stay at a constant depth of 70 meters. The purpose of this is to observe the hydrography (physical characteristics like temperature, salinity, and density) along a constant depth. These types of physical trends in the water column during the summer are set up by the ice cover of the preceding winter and spring. “Everyone (all the organisms in the system) has to play by the rules set by the ice for the entire summer” as it was put by Chief Scientist on board, Ray Sambrotto. This past spring a large mass of ice detached from its original sheet and headed much further south than expected. An observation mooring was moved miles from its original location by a southward iceberg, and had to be recovered and tagged with a GPS unit for later repair.

I looked at the schedule board for the time of our last bongo net tow. For each station we have the time and, which sampling activities will be taking place. From the board I could see that we were arriving at our station, 70m29, at 1:30 AM and that the bongo net was the fourth sampling procedure of the station. As we set up the nets everyone was a little quiet at first. We were anxious to get our last catch of krill and finish up, but sad that our duties on deck were coming to on end. As we waited the MOC-NESS was being received and the operators were looking to see what they had collected. The MOC-NESS (Multiple Opening/Closing Net and Environmental Sampling System) is a series of nets that can be opened and closed at different depths so that one can collect many samples from specific depths. While they did collect some jellyfish, including one huge one held up by Dr. Tracy Shaw in the picture, they also had healthy collection of krill from about 10 to 20 meters.

It was reassuring to know we would at least get some krill during our last tow, and to spice things up a few jellyfish as well. While the bongo was in the water I did my best to will the jellyfish away from the openings of the nets. Each time I would see a jellyfish approach the nets looking like it was heading dead center into the opening, it would just slide past the edge above or below the net. It looked like we might avoid a lot of the stingy tentacles that could damage our sampled krill. When we emptied the cod ends into the cooler we had plenty of krill and only one small jellyfish. We decided to do a second bongo tow for grad student, Jared Weems (also studying krill). Once again our good fortune held up. Lots of krill and only one small jellyfish. After plenty of ups and downs, we got a final taste of favorable catch. It’s probably best that we end now before our luck runs out.














-Eli

July 9, 2009

7-9-09

The end of the cruise is drawing nearer and it is now starting to sink in. We have finished our last east-west cruise line and are heading south back to Dutch Harbor. Tracy alerted us that this was the penultimate (or next to last) bongo tow. Since we had some poor luck the last two nights I was hopeful that we could bring in a nice haul tonight and tomorrow. We had a bad omen as we looked out into the water, before the bongo nets were deployed, and saw numerous jellyfish drifting about. Considering that we had some decent catches of krill when there were jellyfish in the nets, it wasn’t a sign of complete despair. When the nets came back we had the usual tenticles wrapped around the net line, as was customary when many jellies were in the water. However this time we had a whole jellyfish hanging from the line is the nets were pulled up, something we had not seen before. It made pulling the nets aboard especially tricky so not to get stung in the face by all of the dangling tentacles.

Carrying the nets to the cooler we could feel the gelatinous material collect at the bottom of the nets. Unfortunately, our low expectations were validated. When everything was dumped into the cooler, all you could see was a mass of jellyfish squished together. As we tossed them all back we counted 22 total jellyfish, including the individual wrapped around the line. Certainly a record for most jellyfish caught in the bongo nets at one station. And at the bottom of the cooler, zero krill. We had only one more night to get a good final sampling before calling it quits. At this point we had plenty of nice krill catches, but you always like to finish on a high note.

We noticed in one of Dave Shull’s sediment cores from the previous day, there was a soft coral sitting on top of the sediment. Dave said that no one had noticed it at first when collecting the cores. He could understand why, since the core was collected at 3 AM, much earlier than their normal collection time of 8 or 9 AM. The coral looked like something covered in snow from a Dr. Seuss book. I learned from my sister that Dr. Seuss received much of his inspiration for peculiar vegetation from the Yucca Trees of Joshua Tree National Park. She showed our family pictures she had taken of the Joshua Trees in winter, and there was definitely a slight resemblance to the coral.

It’s interesting to think about nature repeating itself in vastly different environments. Some scientists have theorized that life began at the bottom of the ocean as organisms getting their energy from chemicals spewed out of deep sea hydrothermal vents. With that in mind it is likely that something resembling the soft coral came along well before the Joshua Trees. One can only imagine what types of organisms will come in the distant future that might resemble the coral and Joshua Tree. What ever it is, after watching “The Matrix” again last night for the 25th time, I just hope it isn’t a machine based life form.

-Eli

July 8, 2009

7-8-09

Why was 6 afraid of 7? Because 7, 8, 9. At the beginning of each century there are always a number of fun dates that come around. Yesterday was the two year anniversary of 7-7-07, and today I thought it would be a good idea to pick things up with a lighter blog. You can only be serious for so long. My favorite pun joke is one that I made up myself. It’s a timeless classic: Why can’t a female bovine work in the postal service? Because she’s not a male cow. Get it? Male? Mail? Pretty slick, I know. That little gem has ended conversations since I thought it up in high school.

As far as our cruise activities were concerned, Wednesday morning was another dismal bongo tow. No krill again! The otherwise uneventful morning was made more interesting by another trip to the red light district to sample from our degradation experiment. This being the third day of the experiment, I am hoping that we will start to see some interesting changes in the diatoms and other phytoplankton once we are able to do some analysis.

This was also the last day that Dave Shull and the sediment group would be collecting sediment cores. Sure enough, they encountered some good mud and had an extra core for Rachel and I to slice up, and take some samples from. To our amazement, there was a brittle star at the surface of the sediment in the core tube. Considering who gave us the core, I thought of it as the brittle star of David. Two of the star’s legs were shortened by the coring process, but not to worry, Ophiuroids can readily regenerate lost arms or segments (unless all arms are lost). I was a little worried at first as the brittle star disturbed the sediment surface by moving its arms around. Rachel reassured me “Don’t worry, it’s all part of the natural processes that affect sediment.” We carefully picked up the brittle star and sent it back into the water to sink down to its natural sedimentary environment.

After slicing and collecting sediment I was compelled to eat some mud again to compare the taste with the deep core (~3500 m) that was collected earlier in the cruise. To be quite honest it wasn’t as palatable as the deep station sediment, it had a higher silt content as well. That didn’t stop me from having fun and smearing the sediment on my teeth for a nice picture. It was still better than pond mud. Since it was still the 8th day of the month I thought of a new joke: Why was the brittle star afraid of Eli? Because Eli eight sediment.

-Eli

July 7, 2009

7-7-09

On July 7th, 2007 (luckiest day of the century) there was a worldwide global warming action concert series featuring some of the biggest musicians in the world. The event was put on by a coalition of groups including the Alliance for Climate Protection, chaired by Al Gore. Performances took place in New York, London, Sydney, Tokyo, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg, and Hamburg, with special events broadcast from Antarctica, Kyoto, and Washington, DC. The 24 hour event set a record as the largest global entertainment event ever held, reaching 2 billion people in seven continents.

July 7th, 2009 was a relatively uneventful day as our activities on the cruise were concerned. The weather was foggy and eerily calm. At 3 AM it was still a little light out making me feel like I was in the twilight zone again. There were zero krill in the bongo net tow, something we had not seen since very early in the cruise. This meant that we had no water to filter for the night’s sampling station. And finally, I didn’t have any incubation water to filter until the following morning. The time did give us the opportunity to catch up on some sample processing with krill eye removal, lipofuscin extraction, and analysis. There is always plenty to do on the ship, even if you are not currently collecting samples. The methodical work does give one time to think about what the future may hold for this ecosystem (uh-oh, here I go again).

One half of the fish caught in the U.S annually, and one third worldwide, comes from the Bering Sea. The Bering Sea’s unusual productiveness comes from diatoms (the same type of organisms we are observing in our degradation experiment). Diatoms are large fast growing phytoplankton, which support large zooplankton. The large zooplankton, are then eaten by large fish and marine mammals. A recent study in Marine Ecology Progress Series from the lab of marine ecologist Dave Hutchins, found that a warmer Bering Sea will support smaller phytoplankton, creating a less productive ecosystem. The study was done under temperature and carbon dioxide levels predicted for 2100. Scientists are already seeing massive die offs among marine mammals and birds in the Bering Sea, potentially due to changes in the area.

According to Walt Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center NASA satellite data shows that there has been a 50% decrease of perennial Arctic Ice from February, 2007 to February, 2008. While this is sea ice, which won’t cause sea level rise, it does pose a problem because of the change in albedo or reflectiveness of the region. Ice is light colored and reflects much more light than seawater does. With so much extra exposed seawater there is a greater capacity for the Arctic Ocean to absorb energy and continue to warm. These changes could lead to the type of scenarios described by Dr. Hutchins lab.

On June 7th, 2007 I was actually driving from New York back to Maryland after celebrating successful passage of my comprehensive exams for my graduate program. I got a big jolt of optimism from listening to the Live Earth broadcasts on the radio. It certainly felt like a lucky day to me. For the planet, it looks like 7-7-07 will only be the luckiest day of the century if we are willing to work for it. Otherwise, it will just be like any other day that passed by while we watched the world change at an unprecedented rate.

-Eli

July 5 & 6, 2009

7-5,6-09

I think it’s safe to say that at this point the regular blog schedule has gone out the window. Because of our cruise path timing, a large collection of work has presented itself as we arrived at the spring phytoplankton bloom site. We were able to get another sediment core, courtesy of Dave Shull and company, and collected a hundred liters of water for a phytoplankton degradation experiment.

After our usual nightly krill tow the nets returned from the water covered with phytoplankton. While everyone else was a little annoyed to have to deal with the slimy algae all over the nets, I was ecstatic! “Yes!” I thought “more material to observe in our degradation experiment! Cha-ching!” The CTD cast returned with ten Niskin Bottles, ten liters each, for us to use for the degradation. Three twenty liter carboys were filled with seawater from six of the Niskins. The additional four of Niskin bottles were filtered to about a half a liter each and added to two of the carboys to increase the amount of phytoplankton in the carboy. The carboys were then placed in a cold room at a realistic environmental temperature.

The cold room was nicknamed “The Red Light District” for all of the riskay science going on inside, and that fact that the lighting is actually red to limit the amount of light on sediment samples. Despite this, the carboys are covered with garbage bags to prevent the phytoplankton from photosynthesizing (if they continue to harvest any light they will continue to grow and we will not be able to observe any degradation in the time remaining in the cruise). We will take samples of water from each carboy at various time points for the remainder of the cruise to observe how the protein in the carboys degrades. Do certain classes of protein degrade faster than others? Do proteins degrade differently during different seasons? (A similar degradation experiment was conducted on the spring cruise by Rachel and our advisor, Rodger Harvey). Very interesting stuff for us marine organic geochemist types.

The whole process required a lot of water filtering (and little sleep) over the last day and a half, but it will prove to be very useful once we get the samples back to the lab in Maryland for analysis. Rachel’s performance was by far the most impressive, as she stayed awake for nearly two days strait organizing the filtering effort and analyzing dozens more krill eyes at the same time. A true champion at crunch time.

Once we had finished all of our experimental setup and preliminary sampling/filtering, the sediment core was available for slicing. The busy schedule did not yield any time for pictures of the sediment processing, but we encountered a small worm in the surface sediment and a small sea star (about 2 inches across) a few centimeters down the core. The core was taken from water 135 meters deep. I am certainly accustomed to seeing worms and sea stars in tide pools, but not hundreds of feet below the surface. It just goes to show how diverse the life is in this dynamic system.

-Eli

July 4, 2009

7-4-09

Happy 4th of July everyone! I would like to celebrate our nation’s independence by not shooting off any fireworks. That would be a safety hazard. To make up for any lack of explosive-excitement, the ocean wave action has continued to pick up. Nothing dangerous, but certainly enough motion to make deploying the bongo nets a little more exciting. Simply carrying the nets across the deck to the deployment location was more work as you had to stop periodically to regain your balance. As the nets were lifted up into the air we all had a hold of the support lines and long dangling nets so nothing would start swinging around and get tangled or hit someone in the head. When we let go of the cod ends over the railing they blew around in the wind a bit and clunked against the side of the boat. The nets lowered slowly down into the water, which stopped them from blowing around in the wind, but caused them to bob up and down in the water slightly as the slack on the line tightened and loosened with the rocking ship.

The easy part was waiting for the nets to reach their desired water depth of 70 meters and then return to the surface. Once again we had to be very methodical securing all the loose lines and cod ends as we pulled them onto the deck. More than any other bongo tow, I was anxious to see what we had caught because of the extra effort that went into tonight’s catch. We emptied the cod ends into the cooler and sure enough, we had a decent catch of krill. It was the closest I think I’ll get to “The Deadliest Catch” type conditions. The poor blurry quality of the pictures from my camera makes the weather look even more dramatic. In reality, there were no waves falling on our heads, just some unstable footing. Rachel told me later in the day that we had analyzed 330 krill. She had done the lion’s share of the work while I merely filled the supporting role, but it was a nice result for a productive three weeks of work at sea. I had seen fireworks on just about every other 4th of July. This time the deckwork was much more exhilarating.

July 2 & 3, 2009

7-2,3-09

I was convinced that I would be able to keep up with my pace of a blog a day, but work, uneven sleep, and confusion has slowed down my otherwise pedestrian writing. My mother always said “The Bering Sea is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.” Okay, she never said those words, but it seems to fit in this unpredictable ecosystem. As we were waiting for the bongo nets to return to the surface of Thursday’s tow, I saw something jump out of the water and dart out of view. I initially thought “Whoa! It’s a shark and it’s trying to bite my arm off!” It was unlikely a shark could jump 10 feet out of the water to the deck of the ship and get a hold of my arm, but it seems I have a knack for jumping to extreme conclusions. At least I didn’t go as far as to think it was a giant squid.

A few seconds later the mysterious animal reappeared. A full leap out of the water revealed that it was a fur seal. I was surprised to see a seal so far from land, but apparently fur seals can spend months at sea hunting for food. Perhaps that is why you always see them sleeping whenever you spot them at the beach. Even without the choreographed jumps and behaviors I was accustomed to seeing from seals and sea lions at Sea World, this fur seal seemed just as playful. It disappeared for a few minutes and then returned for an encore. As usual, I was unable to get a picture of the fast moving seal. Needless to say, Rachel and Megan were thrilled at the sighting. Even they were difficult to photograph at night with the reflective strips on their life jackets.

The bongo nets yielded a very healthy collection of amphipods, the dark colored animals swimming in the cooler. At first I thought it was an unsuccessful tow for us, but looking a bit closer there was also a nice amount of krill. The following night the bongo net tow looked very different. There were enough tiny copepods to make the water appear brown. Plenty of amphipods could also be seen swimming in the water, and once again there was a nice collection of krill once they were scooped out of the crowded container.

The seas had become choppier in the last few days, probably contributing more to my disorder than anything else. Once we were done with filtering water, I thought I would head up to the bridge and stare at the horizon for a while. I ran into our other resident bird expert, Sophia Webb. She had been kicking herself for briefly seeing a pair of short tailed albatross without having her camera available. The birds were out of sight before she could capture their image. Short-tailed Albatross were hunted to the brink of extinction for their feathers up to the 1930s. Numbers were estimated to be as low as two hundred. Since the ban on hunting they have made a recent recovery.

I had never been a huge bird enthusiast, but I still thought it would be exciting to see such a rare species of large sea bird. Sophia went down to get something to eat and I was joined by biogeochemist, Pat Kelly. We sat looking at the water when he said calmly, that looks like a Short-tailed Albatross. Having just gained a new appreciation for the bird, I raced down to the lower deck to get a better picture. On my way I saw Sophia and alerted her of the sighting. Sure enough, she identified the birds as our elusive Short-tailed Albatross. Two individuals were sitting in the water while another soared over our heads. The Albatross, with its huge wingspan (up to eight feet), reminded me of prehistoric flying reptiles like the Pterodactyl and Pteranodon. I felt a little like a kid again as I looked up at the winged giant.

We were observing juveniles, as one could tell by the dark colored feathers (adults have more white feathers). The juveniles will spend years at sea before reaching maturity when they return to nesting grounds to breed. This behavior may be what actually saved them from extinction. After WWII the Short-tailed Albatross were not observed at their normal nesting grounds and were presumed to be extinct. A handful of juveniles returned from years later to continue to breed after hunting had been outlawed. I had been spending my time leading up to the cruise thinking about whales and porpoises, but now here we were observing one of the largest, and at one time rarest, living bird species in the world. Birds that had cheated death, and overcome extinction to sit calmly in the water next to our research vessel. I had heard that there was a possibility we might see Albatross during the cruise, but I didn’t think seeing them would reveal such a remarkable survival story. In the Bering Sea, you never know what you’re gonna get? Or, in this case, you can never understand it until you get it.

-Eli

July 1, 2009

7-1-09

“He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man”
-Bill Shakespeare

I figured I would throw in a beard update picture. I had foolishly brought my electric razor on the cruise, without the charger. Once the battery went dead I asked around a bit to see if others had brought an e-razor that I could borrow to give myself a quick trim. Wisely, everyone else brought strait razors leaving me without any options. Now that my neck has stopped itching, I decided to just let it go until I get home.

We are now embarking on our longest west bound cruise path, the MN Line. You can see our current location on the cruise path image. The path is laid out in order to study as many important features as possible in the allotted time. I am particularly excited for the MN Line because it takes us by the spring phytoplankton bloom location. Phytoplankton are the autotrophic component of the plankton community. The name comes from the Greek words phyton, or “plant”, and plankton meaning “drifter” or “wanderer”. Phytoplankton get their energy from the sun by photosynthesis, just like land plants, and are the base of the marine food chain. They are the primary food source for the krill we have been collecting and studying throughout the cruise. A bloom refers to a rapid increase in phytoplankton population in an aquatic system. Bering Sea phytoplankton blooms typically take place in the spring after the sea ice melts allowing sunlight to be harvested. Phytoplankton can live below the ice, but in much lower numbers.

One bloom location in particular was visited by the spring BEST (Bering Sea Ecosystem Study) cruise. Water particles and sediment were collected from this spring location. We will be returning to this same location after completing the MN line, allowing us to collect more water particles and sediment to see how the spring bloom material has changed and degraded over time. Of particular interest to me is the protein fraction of the water particles and sediment. Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, are routinely measured in marine sediments. The source of these amino acids has been elusive. We are using proteomic techniques to unravel this mystery. Once we collect the samples they will be frozen at -70 degrees Celsius to be analyzed back at our lab in Maryland.

At each sampling station one task is carried out at a time. Often times, our bongo net tows are done after other tasks, like water collection, have already been carried out. At our last station, those of us operating the bongo nets, were the first sample collectors. This allowed us to collect water from the CTD Niskin bottles at the same time as everyone else who was collecting water for different analyses. It was a welcome change to collecting water in smaller groups of people. This time it was like a Niskin party as everyone filled up their respective containers. It is not clear yet exactly what time we will be returning to the spring bloom location, but the more I get to interact with the other scientists and learn about the past cruises, the more excited I am to fill in my piece of the Bering Sea puzzle. Seeing as how it can be commonplace on a cruise to let one’s beard grow out a bit, I am fitting in little more with each day’s growth.

-Eli

June 30, 2009

6-30-09

During last year’s summer cruise the ship crossed the international dateline. Crossing the line going in the western direction takes you into the future a whole day (Land of the Rising Sun). When you cross back you have to make sure not to interact with your past self or you could tear a whole in the space-time continuum. Very confusing. I was hoping we might get the same opportunity, but this summer’s cruise track does not take us that far west. Apparently, on the latitude we are currently at, crossing the dateline would take us into Russian waters. For my money, I would take safe national waters over becoming a golden dragon (golden dragon is the honor bestowed upon someone who crosses the international dateline by military vessel, in which case this does not apply to us since the Knorr is a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute vessel).

Our nightly krill tow was a relatively deep station, on the order of thousands of meters, but surprisingly there were still jellyfish in the water. I had learned earlier that jellyfish generally prefer warmer, calmer, shallower waters. Normally this would not have been too big of a deal since we had run into them plenty of times before at all types of stations, but the size of the jellies was particularly alarming. When we pulled up the nets I could feel a good sized clump of jelly caught in the bottom. I figured it was multiple jellyfish packed together. When I tried to shake them out they wouldn’t budge. I hung the net over the side of the ship and shook it up and down for almost a minute until a single large jellyfish slid out. It splattered in the water and drifted away (smeared a bit from the shaking). It was by far the biggest jellyfish I had seen so far on the cruise, in or outside of the net. The jellyfish looked to be about eighteen inches across.

While this was the largest jellyfish I had encountered on the cruise so far, I had mentioned earlier about lion’s mane jellyfish that live off East Asian coasts that can grow up to 6 feet wide. Jellyfish of this size wouldn’t cause too much of a problem for someone in a boat, but the idea still makes my skin crawl. Somehow my fear of being eaten alive is enhanced when it comes to a school of giant jellies. I could envision a panicked version of myself pulling out a gun and firing round after round into the water yelling at the jellyfish to “Die you gelatinous monsters!” At this point I am willing to admit I have a jellyfish phobia. My bizarre sentiments toward jellyfish have raised a few eyebrows among my friends.

“What kind of marine biologist dreams of killing animals?”

To which I reply,

“This is why I study molecules and not whole organisms. Even the molecules get fragmented to pieces in the instruments I use to observe them.”

Maybe some day a jellyfish will save my life and my opinion will change, but for now it is probably best for me to observe them from the ship and not create any invisible predator-prey relationships. I guess it turns out that avoiding the East Asian coast isn’t such a bad idea after all.

-Eli

June 29, 2009

6-29-09

Most evenings on deck we have been able to encounter a part of the Bering Sea wildlife that I had not experienced before. Last night’s krill tow was no different. While we were waiting for the nets to be pulled back up, a bird possibly caught in a strong gust of wind swooped by our heads and almost ran into the cabin of the ship. We were a bit concerned, but our winged friend corrected its path and rejoined the flock cruising next to the side of the ship. Tracy informed us that the lights of the ship can sometimes disorient the birds as they fly at night. That made sense to me since I have opened the bathroom door into my face more than once while my eyes adjust to turning on a light in the dark.

I looked down at the deck and noticed another bird that had landed onboard and was crouching beneath some stairs. Tracy picked it up and said some comforting words while stroking the birds head to calm it down. It was unclear if the bird was hurt or was just resting from the windy weather. The bird was a petrel, dark grey with some white stripes on its wings. It almost looked like a seabird version of a pigeon, with a little more grace and class. Tracy placed the bird into a box to rest for a bit to see if it could build up enough strength to return to the air.

My mother has always been a big bird enthusiast. I remember she would pull the car over to the side of the road if she saw a majestic individual hunting quietly in a pond or marsh. “Shhh, it’s a great blue heron” she would say, despite the fact that we were in the car unable to make a loud enough noise to disturb the bird a hundred feet away. “Look at how still it is while it waits for food.” Since I was five and couldn’t stand sitting still for more than two seconds, I thought it must be awful to be a great blue heron and have to wait hours to catch something to eat. I had always thought it would be much more thrilling to be a plunge diving bird, like many we have seen here at sea. At least hunting would be a source of excitement rather than boredom. If there was a nice sunset at the time of spotting the bird we were almost certain to wait upwards of ten to fifteen minutes to experience the true magnificence of the heron.

A couple hours after I had gone to sleep I heard a loud knock at the door from one of the ship’s crew waking us up for a fire drill. The crew was holding the drill at 10:30 AM, a good time for the majority of the people on board, but an unfortunate time for those who had just gone to sleep after working through the night. Thankfully this morning’s drill went pretty fast. During the last drill I had volunteered to put on a survival suit (kind of like a big wet suit that goes on over your clothes), which slowed things down for everyone. I was certainly not as graceful as a hunting heron.

When I woke it turned out that the bird was okay and had returned to the sea from whence it came. We weren’t sure if it was really hurt or just having a rest. Certain types of seabirds can spend months to years on the ocean without ever seeing land, so I would guess this particular petrel was equipped to handle some windy weather. Still, I couldn’t help but feel grateful to Tracy for giving back to the birds who have given children everywhere so much viewing pleasure, even if they didn’t appreciate it until twenty years later.

-Eli