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Charlie hangs out in a Dawn Redwood at the Asheville Arboretum.
Conservation, Popular Culture, Science
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Science
My day began with a balancing contest on the stern deck – who could stand on one foot the longest? It was an official welcoming to the world of those with sea legs. The rest of the day blended in with yesterday, when we ran our second diel experiment – nothing new there from the science end.
We pulled up our incubation/grazing experiment to look at the effect of grazers. We had dropped 96 bottles, each a different manipulated community, overboard. Turns out something got hungry and took a bite of the net bag that was holding the bottles underwater. We’d like to think shark, but that’s entirely our imaginations run wild. We spent the entirety of the day after lunch filling up large plastic carboys with water from the Sargasso – a prized medium for phytoplankton researchers. The water out here, though a classic mix of sea elements is very “clean”, meaning it has extremely low levels of organic matter, trace metals, or really any nutrients at all. It’s what makes the waters out here such a beautiful blue and is the reason we haven’t seen much life outside of the phytoplankton in our tubes the entire trip.
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Charlie and William hang out after dinner.
Science
A stormy beginning makes for a busy end. We spent the day prepping for a couple of experiments that will happen tomorrow while we’re all awake for the second round of the diel experiment. We sent a go-flow, typically used to collect data on trace minerals in the water, overboard to gracefully collect and filter seawater to be used for growth medium in an incubation experiment. It’s hard to think about treating seawater nicely, but apparently the go-flow apparatus is designed to not split any cells upon entry or exit. This ensures that the phytoplankton we’re trying to grow and measure will have the most realistic experience in their little containers as possible tomorrow.
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Charlie helps cook dinner in Asheville, North Carolina.
Science
Rimicaris exoculata, the eyeless vent shrimp is an iconic member of hydrothermal vent communities on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The shrimp is characterized by a lack of eyes, an enlarged carapace, chemoautotrophic symbionts that they farm in their gills, and, most curiously, large photoreceptors on the top of its carapace. A solution to the mysterious eyespots was first hypothesized by Cindy Lee Van Dover, who inferred that Rimicaris exoculata can “see” low-level light produced by hydrothermal vent effluent.
Iconic, novel, biologically fascinating; of all the adjectives I can think of to describe Rimicaris exoculata, the one that jumps immediately to mind is sort-of-canoe-shaped. In fact, it’s so sort-of-canoe-shaped that this hydrothermal vent shrimp needs to have a canoe made in its image.
Presenting the grand unveiling of Project S – the Rimicanoe (sensu strictissimo Rimicaris exocu-yacht-a)!
Science
Three weeks ago, the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources COASTSPAN survey started it’s 2010 season. I was thrilled- it had been far too long since I was out on a boat catching sharks. The weather report looked good, and our scheduled sample site was only a few miles from where we set the DNR record for most sharks caught in a day (248). On paper, it looked like it was going to be a pretty good day. As it turned out, it was a great day. As we hauled in the first set of the first day of the season, something in the net caught my eye. Despite sampling in this exact location a dozen times before, despite years of working with sharks and two decades of loving sharks, we caught a species that I had never seen before. The smooth dogfish pup, only a few weeks old, made his species the fiftieth I have ever seen. In honor of this occasion, here is a brief excerpt from my upcoming shark conservation book, including pictures of me with some of the 50 species I’ve encountered. Enjoy!