Heaven

“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads”

- Henry David Thoreau

I carried a larval trap in each hand, holding them away from my body so they didn’t hit my swift-moving legs. They were noticeably heavier now that they were filled with preservative. As I stepped out of the main hallway and onto the working deck, small white flakes swirled around my head. It was snowing! I took a breath of the cold, crisp air. Something told me it was going to be a good day.

My main goal for this expedition is to begin a number of new experiments on the seafloor in the HAUSGARTEN, using an ROV named Phoca. The weather has been horrible over the last few weeks, so we were not able to deploy the ROV until now, and even then, we weren’t able to reach my main station. I spoke to the chief scientist, looked at the map, and picked a new station in the northern part of the HAUSGARTEN. The seafloor looked pretty steep, so I was hoping there would be rocks.

A stone covered in sponges and soft corals on the deep
seafloor (1800 m depth). Photo by the ROV Phoca team.

As Phoca arrived on the seafloor, the cameras showed a muddy slope. The ROV pilots asked me what direction I wanted to go first, and I chose southeast, along the ridge. It was the right choice, because within minutes, I was looking at stone after stone and sponge after sponge – an underwater reef. I could see a thin, curved species that stood up from the rocks like a plate on its edge, and the taxonomist in my head said “Phakellia.” A skinny, branched species stretched out in all directions from the stone like a bad hair day, and my inner taxonomist said “Cladorhiza.” Pale pink soft corals – “Gersemia.” Red shrimps swam around. Sea stars lounged on the sediment. A fish wriggled lazily past. It was absolutely gorgeous.

The ROV deployed my samplers along with a homer beacon on the seafloor, and then I checked my watch. We had hours left to explore a brand-new station, and I was calling the shots – a dream scenario. My eyes scanned the screens in front of me and landed on a small, ball-shaped sponge on a stone. “Small white round sponge,” said my brain. I had been labeling the morphotype for years, but I didn’t know its scientific name. There was no way we could scrape it off the rock intact. Then it dawned on me: since my samplers had already been deployed, the ROV’s drawer was empty. I could collect the whole rock!

By the end of the dive, the pilots had expertly fit 7 rocks into the ROV’s various compartments, each one covered in sponges and soft corals galore. There were a number of species I recognized but also some I could not identify. I wonder if some of them are undescribed.

Tentorium semisuberites on a rock the ROV collected

Probably my biggest finding was the identity of the “small round white sponge.” Underwater, it looks like a puff ball – perfectly spherical, with a hole in the top. But by the time they arrived on surface, the puff balls had changed shape. They were now cupcakes – elongated cylinders with rounded tops. The holes turned out to be skinny white siphons, standing erect in the middle of the sponge like a candle. My rocks looked like they were hosting a mass birthday party for one-year-olds, and the shape shift meant that I could finally recognize the species. My inner taxonomist chimed in with their name: Tentorium semisuberites.

By the end of the night, 100 different sample jars littered my workspace, and I had learned about 4 new, solid, valuable things about hard-bottom communities in the Arctic deep sea. I’m sure a closer examination of the samples will reveal even more insights, but that will have to wait until I get home. I finally packed away my last jar at 12:30 am, making it an 18-and-a-half-hour workday, and I finally felt like I was at sea! It was an awesome day.