June 28, 2009

6-28-09

Land ho! St. Paul, Island. We have reached the mid-cruise change over. For me that means one thing. Success! I have made it through half of the cruise without sustaining any injuries or causing any catastrophes. With all this good fortune, and being surrounded by experts, I can ease up on panic mode and start to get into a little bit of a groove. For example, during a recent bongo net tow I reached for the net too early before someone had been able to get a hold of the weight that is used to keep the line to the net taut while it is in the water. The weight bonked me in the head, but it didn’t do any damage because of the hard hat I am required to wear while working on deck. I just chalked it up to experience and have been more mindful since then while working with the nets.

Despite getting my groove back, or finding it to begin with, it is a little sad to see some of the other cruisers leave the ship. Liz Labunski (Bird Expert), John Allison (IT Expert), and Heather Whitney (Grad Student Sediment Expert, who helped me with sediment coring) all packed up their stuff and loaded onto one the small boats on board and headed into port at St. Paul Island. Captain, Kent Sheasley, got into the boat by himself to test out the motor and did a nice loop next the Knorr. You could certainly see his lust for the water as immediately gassed the boat to full speed, or what looked like close to full speed, and jumped of a couple small wakes before turning around and loading up the rest of the people and luggage. Unfortunately, he was too fast for me to get a picture. Chief Scientist, Ray Sambrotto, rode to port as well to pick up some supplies that didn’t quite make it to Dutch Harbor before we set sail.

The previous night, during some down time after dinner, I sat around with several other cruisers and swapped funny stories about various cruises and other non-marine science related experiences. Stories ranged from strange encounters with animals to watching dramatic drunk friends get thrown out of bars. One individual, who would probably prefer to remain anonymous, even showed off the ability to inter-link their toes without using their hands. Truly beautiful, people from all over the country coming together for a common purpose, investigating the Bering Sea. We’re not exactly soldiers at war together, but being in the field with a group of scientists is a distinctive experience. You certainly get something more living and working together in situ, than you would over the same period of time at home in a lab.




As the small boat glided away towards St. Paul I couldn’t help but wonder when, or if, I would ever see my new Bering Sea colleagues again. If not, I’ll always have my memories of this special time at sea. Then again, the knowledge gained from this cruise will further the scientific communities’ understanding of this dynamic ecosystem. In that sense, it is comforting to know that a part of this voyage will live on forever.

-Eli

June 27, 2009

6-27-09

We were hoping that the clear weather would last for a good portion of the remainder of the cruise, but we should have been hoping it would last through the night. As soon as it got relatively dark, the clouds promptly rolled right back in. It was like the sea pulled up the covers for a night’s rest. We were approaching the mid cruise change over at St. Paul Island. Several scientists would be getting off, returning home, and replaced by several new cruisers during our stop. Rachel encouraged me to walk around and chat with some people before they left.

In particular, Liz Labunski, the ship’s resident bird expert who records all bird sightings during her portion of the cruise. She does all of her observing from the bridge, a part of the ship I had not been to yet. I figured now was as good a time as any to venture up to the top of the ship and boldly go where I had never gone before.

Despite being nearly 41 years old (launched August 21st, 1968), the Knorr is outfitted with some very technologically advanced navigational and maneuvering systems. I was curious if I would see a characteristic wooden ship wheel for the sake of historical preservation, but the controls looked a lot more like what you would envision in a jet than a sea worthy vessel.

At the helm was Third Mate, Alyson Paz. She had the ship on auto-pilot for the moment until we reached the next station where she took control to maneuver the ship into the desired position for sampling by the scientists. I asked what the highest seas were that she had encountered during her time on the Knorr. “About thirty foot swells up by Greenland” she replied. “Unfortunately I was scheduled to get off before the ship headed back out and I missed some fifty foot swells.” I couldn’t help but feel surprised that Alyson was disappointed to have missed, what seem to me, as very dangerous conditions. I guess that is the mentality of someone who captains a ship. I would like to think that I would enjoy being on some high seas after a reasonable amount of sea time, but I wouldn’t put a large wager on it.

Liz was noting all the birds that were flying within sight of the ship. The hundreds of birds that had been following us earlier had dwindled to a few random individuals. Since her duties required her to observe the water at all times, she had seen all the whales and porpoise that had swam by the ship so far on the cruise during daylight. The fog was currently limiting our vision to only a few hundred meters, so there was not a lot of viewing area to cover. I could see how, without any type of navigational tools, you could get lost at sea pretty quick.

For me, the best news of the day came from the floor of the House of Representatives. Bill number H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES), passed by a vote of 219-212. For the first time ever, America has a comprehensive clean energy and global warming bill with the potential to transform our economy by creating clean energy jobs, improving our national security, and protecting our planet from global warming pollution. Let’s hope it can pass through the senate with its core policies still intact. Sub-polar areas like the Bering Sea are especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change. However, I am still optimistic that we can preserve the diversity and productivity of the world’s oceans with significant government and public action. In the mean time another taste of deep sea mud will help ease my trepidation.

-Eli

June 26, 2009

6-26-09

“Mind you lad, if God ever wanted to be a fish, he’d be a whale”
-Herman Melville, Moby Dick

After many days of foggy weather, I woke in the late afternoon to some of the clearest skies of the cruise. There were hundreds of sea birds still following the ship, so I thought it would be a great time to get a little sunshine. I went up to the second level deck and exited from the cabin on the starboard side of the ship. I stepped outside and immediately saw it, a huge whale spout (about 20 feet high) a couple hundred meters from the ship! I ran in circles for a couple seconds not knowing if I should go inside and tell someone, get my camera, or stay and watch the giant marine mammal cruise by. Since the whale was going in the opposite direction compared to the boat, I guessed that I would not have time to go inside and come back out before it had disappeared. I ran down to the lower deck and told some others looking at birds in a different direction about the whale sighting. Luckily, the whale spouted a few more times before it was out of sight. We could see its huge arching back come out of the water following each breath. Judging from the small dorsal fin, black color, and large body, it was most likely a fin whale, the second largest whale species on earth. They can grow up to 88 feet long and estimated up to 77 tons. Fin whale are common in this area as well (other observers on the ship had spotted some fin whales during a time when I was asleep). It might as well have been one of the fastest whales on earth by how quickly it passed the ship and was out of sight. Even though I didn’t get any pictures, I was ecstatic after the chance encounter of one of the largest creatures to ever live on the planet.

As if the day wasn’t eventful enough, Dave Shull and company, were out coring sediment at a very deep station (3,455 m or over 2 miles). After two multi-corer drops, there was an extra core for Rachel and I to work with. I was finally going to get to slice up a sediment core! I tried to remain as calm as possible so that it didn’t make any horrible mistakes and waste the incredibly valuable sample. My heart was pounding a mile a minute as if I was about to attempt a game winning shot in the state playoffs. Rachel and I set the core on the slicing post and slid the plastic core tube down while pushing the sediment to the edge of the top of the tube. We collected the overlying water just above the sediment, and some 0.5 cm and 1 cm sediment slices (core processing pictures are of Dave and graduate student Maggie Esch). This was done with a clean turkey baster for the water, and some plastic rings, thin plastic cards and a spatula for the sediment sections.

The sediment sections looked like dark brown pancakes, to put it kindly. When it was all said and done we had successfully collected sediment ranging from months to thousands of years old. It felt a little like traveling back in time while we sliced further down the sediment core. While I was watching Dave and Maggie slice their core, I wondered out loud how the sediment would taste. Dave encouraged me to taste some of the discarded mud that they were not collecting. “Grit you can feel with your tongue is sand, and grit you can feel between your teeth is silt. That’s the ‘technical’ way of analyzing sediment grain size distribution.” I didn’t notice any sand, but there was certainly plenty of silt. I was actually surprised at how palatable the mud was.
“The saltiness makes it taste much better than pond mud” I remarked.
“Yes, it’s nicely seasoned” Dave agreed. I guess grey whales don’t have it so bad filtering all their food from huge mouthfuls of sediment.

That night we were treated to, by far, the best sunset of the cruise. It was a fitting end to a landmark day. I remembered getting upset when mud would get in my mouth from our epic pond mud conflicts, growing up. Funny how it turned out to be some of the most valuable career training I had received during my childhood or college days.

-Eli

June 25, 2009

6-25-09

When a lot of people on the ship were enthusiastic at the beginning of the cruise about the beautiful sunny weather, I though I was just as excited. However, I was not on board for previous summer cruises where grey is the most common weather you see. At this point I am thankful for all the sun we have had because it has been almost a week of consistent overcast. Being from Oregon, I can handle some clouds, and as I long as I keep telling myself that it is summer it feels a little bit warmer than mid 40s. To go along with the mild cloudy weather, the water is extremely calm today. You could probably pull out the ski boat and go wake boarding. Getting the boat hundreds of miles back to land would be the difficult part.

When I have told people that I look at sediment from the bottom of the ocean, a few times I have gotten the question “Ooo, so you go down in those deep sea submersibles to get samples?” Unfortunately, and fortunately, no. No traveling to the sea floor and reaching into the sediment with remote control robot arms to collect samples. Unfortunately, because it would be very exciting to travel to the bottom of the ocean. Fortunately, because it would be challenging getting into a tiny tube for hours on end over and over coupled with the high cost associated with repeating such an expensive endeavor. It turns out you can do almost anything you would ever need from the deck of the ship with the right instruments.


The exciting thing about studying sediment is that it is a historical record for everything that has happened above it. Since sediment accumulates at a rate of centimeters every thousand years in the Bering Sea, you can look pretty far back into the past as you go down a sediment core. This was a shelf break area, where the water depth is increasing from the continental shelf to the deep basin. It was likely an area where not very much settling material will accumulate because it will simply fall down the slope to the basin. However, I am not sure if I will get a crack at another station like this, so I figure why not collect some sediment here if it is available. The shelf break can be an area of upwelling which can lead to some interesting biological activity.

It was a less than fruitful krill tow this morning, and we had arrived at an interesting station for sediment collection. I asked our shipboard sediment expert, Dave Shull (shown in the foreground with the white hard hat), if it was possible to get sediment from him at this site. “Possibly” he said. “If there is extra mud, you can certainly have it. That is, if the multi-corer works properly.” When ever I hear the word “mud” I can’t help but think about the mud wars my siblings, friends, and I would have at our family’s house growing up. It would usually end with someone getting mud in their eye and complaints as we cleaned the scattered mud off the dock. The concern of the multi-corer working properly didn’t register at first, but I got the idea after the first drop.

I got the chance to help deploy the multi-corer so I was not able to get many pictures. The multi-corer is lowered down to the sediment with a crane. The water depth at the station was about 200 m (656 feet). As the multi-corer came back onto the ship it was very clear that this was a difficult site to core sediment. In the picture of a core from a previous station, the far right core with not very much sediment was a very successful collection compared to this station. The sediment was very rocky and sandy making it difficult for the cores to close properly. Some of the cores had little or no sediment, others were leaking, but there were still some good usable cores. After a second drop, there was the same inconsistent success. Closely examining the sediment you could see rocks and pebbles sitting in the sand. With the coring difficulties, there were no extras for me this time. I’ll just have to sit tight until the next station. No problem, we still have over two weeks to go. There will certainly be plenty of mud to go around when it is all said and done. So long as I don’t get the urge to sling it at my fellow cruisers.

-Eli

June 24, 2009

6-24-09

While I was busy wishing for a dramatic battle between orcas and humpbacks, it turned out that trials of life were unfolding in our bongo nets this early morning. There was another striking collection of bioluminescence, setting the stage for what we were about to find. After we emptied the cod ends into the cooler, Tracy spotted a small jellyfish, and quickly noticed it was eating a krill alive! The krill’s body was engulfed by the gelatinous predator, with only its tail hanging out squirming futilely as it was slowly paralyzed and dissolved into the medusa of the killer jelly. Ever since I saw the movie “Jaws” it has been a fear of mine to be eaten alive. The movies “The Edge” and “Anaconda” didn’t help matters either. At least in “Jaws 3” a victim gets his revenge after death by holding onto the hand grenade via rigor mortis for others to detonate. I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for the krill, but that’s the way it goes when you are a big pillar of the food chain.

While one krill was being eaten alive, another was being violently parasitized. At first glance the krill was extremely swollen and dark colored due to the same parasitic ciliates mentioned in an earlier blog. Despite its dire state of being, the krill was still swimming around the collection dish. Minutes later we glanced at the krill again and it had exploded “Alien” style releasing its guts and the ciliates into the water. The innards eruption was actually even more violent than in the sci-fi classic. In the movie the alien would simply break a hole through the stomach of the victim, but right in front of us the tail of the krill had been blown completely off, separating the krill into two lifeless halves! In the picture you can only see the body with out the tail. Two curious copepods are swimming nearby. All of this carnage helped me appreciate the challenges that krill face in their life cycle. They are certainly a hot prey item or host for many different types of animals, not just the giant baleen whales we are all so familiar with.

With my new found respect for our krill samples and their precious eye extracts, we returned to the lab to continue analysis. The autosampler, which was shown last blog, is the third section from the top on the left side of the liquid chromatography instrument. The pump, which pushes the sample extract and solvents through the instrument, is the bottom-right section. The solvents are in the top-right section. The fluorescence detector, which measures the amount of lipofuscin or other target compound in the sample extract, is the top left section of the instrument. After running many samples some of the parts on the autosampler were clogged and had to be replaced. Rachel, cruise rockstar, was on top of things as usual. From big animals, down to the little animals, there is plenty of excitement to witness at sea. Since there are so many more small creatures than big ones out here, the smaller you go, the greater commotion you are likely to encounter.

-Eli

June 23, 2009

6-23-09

As a consequence of having a radical sleep schedule (radical by my standards), my internal timeline of events is a bit off. Many of the experiences in this blog actually happened later in the day on the 22nd, but they seemed like they occurred during a new day because I had already been awake since before midnight on the 21st. Consider if you will, a confused graduate student, on a boat, in the Bering Sea. Now consider that his sleep schedule has been turned upside down. How would he be able to decipher the date? Would time and space still have meaning? ... Well, it's not exactly "The Twilight Zone," but the confused part is pretty accurate.

After the initial krill eye extractions described earlier, Rachel and I were able to continue processing the extracts to be analyzed with the liquid chromatography (LC) instrument. The extracts were exchanged from one solvent (2:1 dichloromethane:methanol) to another (100% methanol) and then half of the volume was pipetted into small autosampler vials (the other half to be analyzed later). The orange colored liquid in the end of the pipette tip (in photo to left) is the final lipofuscin extract. Lipofuscin is an oxidation product of proteins. As the krill gets older, more lipofuscin accumulates in the eyes. On average, the more lipofuscin you measure from a krill the older it is. Once we fill the autosampler vials with extract, they are loaded into the LC autosampler to be injected, by the robotic arm in the picture, into the instrument. The amount of lipofuscin is measured by a fluorescence detector. Later we can use all of the data to go back and age all of the krill individuals whose eyes we extracted and analyzed.

While the analysis was running I went outside to check out the water. The word on the ship was that there had been an orca (killer whale) sighting earlier in the day 400 m (about a quarter mile) from the ship. When I got outside there were no orcas, but the ship was surrounded by hundreds of sea birds. They look like light and dark specks in the water from the top of the ship.
It was a bit eerie seeing so many birds with no land in sight. I am used to seeing high bird numbers at the beach. I couldn?t help but think about the scene from Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" where a murder of crows covers the jungle gym, while the lead character waits unsuspectingly by the school. Despite my efforts to live inside a movie or TV show again, the birds just circled and waited calmly in the water. They could have been waiting for the latest sampling nets to stir up some potential food. Other scientists onboard mentioned that birds will hang out by boats because they block the wind. I guess my hopes of seeing mid air collisions of breaching orcas and humpbacks in a seasonal battle for Bering Sea supremacy is not very likely. I?m still crossing my fingers, we have 20 days of cruise left.

-Eli

June 22, 2009

6-22-09

Hey there sea monkeys, back for another round of Bering Sea Plunder with Ensign Blunder. Despite a less that stellar krill tow early this morning (only nine individuals, not enough for any additional water filtration) I was very excited because one of Megan and Tracy's growth experiments had just completed (Megan is shown in the picture standing next to her filtration apparatus). The growth experiment takes place in a rotating incubator with six tinted tubes.


The tubes are tinted to block out sunlight and expose krill to approximately the amount of light they would encounter at their natural living depth. The daily vertical migration of krill is an amazing feat for such a small animal. During the day they essentially hide in the dark from predators who have a tough time seeing and catching them in deep dark waters. During the night when it is dark at the surface the krill migrate towards to the surface to feed on algae. The algae live closer to the surface to harvest sunlight for photosynthesis. The krill can migrate up to hundreds of meters in one evening to feed. Not bad for only being an inch or two long.

The light filter that Megan has on her growth experiment allows 6% and 25% light penetration. This is a good indication of how dark it is around the depth they live during the day. It is also a good explanation why their eyes are so big compared to the rest of their bodies. After Rachel and I collected the eyes from 45 individuals, we submerged them in organic solvent (used to dissolve our target chemicals out of the eyes) in 4 mL vials, and sonicated them for 15 minutes. The sonicator (vibrates samples at a very high frequency to allow the solvent to better penetrate the eyes) is the white box by the right side of the fume hood. The fume hood is the black cabinet with the vertical sliding door holding all the lab equipment. Fume hoods are used for lab work with toxic chemicals. They suck air inward so that fumes stay in the hood and the lab worker doesn't breathe them in. Once the eyes are sonicated they are placed in either the -80 Celsius freezer or the 4 degree Celsius fridge, depending on the type of eye extract. The freezers are the off-white units shown in the picture to the left, and the fridges are the metallic units to the right.


After doing a few rounds of eye removal from the krill, I have a new appreciation for doctors and veterinarians. It is very easy to damage the krill eyes as you are removing them. I imagine it would be much more difficult to work with a patient that is still alive in which you are trying to repair a vital organ. I read a newspaper article recently which stated that there is a shortage of primary care physicians because it is a less popular specialization for medical school students. This is becoming an even bigger issue with health care reform on the table in congress. While primary care doctors may not be as high profile as surgeons or specialists, they are just as essential to the health and well being of all medical patients. Unraveling the mysteries of the Bering Sea is no easy task. It takes a team of scientists from many different disciplines to make real progress on answering tough questions about how all of the nutrients and organisms in the ecosystem interact. Some have said that our problems with healthcare are virtually un-resolvable. Right now it seems that lawmakers are at least on the right track by pulling together a wide range of experts to address all the different issues. Ugh, here I go again. Let's just say that if I had to choose between affordable high quality healthcare and seeing another whale, I would take the healthcare. But another whale never hurts.

-Eli