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