No rest for the weary

The tone on board changes as soon as we get our first samples – or more accurately, as soon as we get our first overnight samples. Throughout the transit, the whole science party was synchronized and diurnal. Now that 24-hour operations have commenced, there's always someone sleeping. The number of people showing up to breakfast has dropped by at least half. And if you need to talk to someone, you better hope they're not in the throws of analyzing a sample or fixing their gear. We spend more time with our own lab groups, with all other cross-group interactions becoming catch-as-you-can.

The pace also increases. There is no such thing as the end of the work day, because what is the end for one person is the beginning for someone else. There are screens in every room on the ship – the labs, the communal living room, the meeting room, even the gym – that show the schedule and the real-time events. This action log is constantly refreshed and helps us keep track of what's happening on deck. You have to watch and make sure you're ready to go when your gear is. Slight delays and adjustments happen on a rolling basis, so we just have to watch.

There have been plenty of adjustments happening over the last couple of days, starting with the first lander recovery. The gear that was deployed directly before us wasn't working properly, so it came on deck early. We were ahead of schedule and ended up signaling the lander to come to the surface a half hour before it had finished pumping. I was afraid there would be some surface contamination (larvae would get pumped into the filter at the surface, not just at depth, so I wouldn't know where they came from), but after looking at the sample, I think it was fine – none of the larvae we caught seemed to have come from the surface.

That means we caught larvae! Not as many as I was hoping for, but then again, I'm always hoping for more. Kirstin's Perfect Ocean would be chock-full of larvae, their parents on the seafloor, and very little else. We caught 3 species that I'm certain are the larvae of benthic invertebrates. There's a mitraria larva – a tiny blob of tissue with giant, knife-shaped spikes to protect it from predators. It grows up to be a segmented worm that lives in the tiny spaces between sediment grains. There's another type of larva that grows up to be another type of worm that lives in the sediments, and there's a tiny baby snail. The snail was actually really exciting to find because there's exactly one type of snail that lives on the seafloor in this area. I'll have to sequence the larva's DNA to see if it's a match to the adults.

Mitraria larva

Sponge gemmule?

Besides the 3 types of larvae, we also collected 5 types of embryos and one very surprising thing that looks like it might be a sponge. There was this little cluster of hollow spheres in the sample water, which had to have been sponges because their skeleton was made up of 6-rayed spicules, just like all deep-sea glass sponges are. Inside each of the hollow spicule spheres was a little ball attached to the inside wall. The balls were pale blue with little flecks of gold in them. We saw similar little balls floating around by themselves in the sample, and some of them seemed to have tissue growing out of them.

So is the little ball a fertilized embryo or the larva of the sponge? Some sponges have these things called gemmules that are basically spores – they're encysted clones of their parents that float off into the water column before settling and making a new sponge. Maybe we're finding sponge gemmules in the water. Honestly, I'm not enough of an expert on sponge biology to be sure, but you can trust I'll be reaching out to some colleagues after the cruise!

It's really exciting to have gotten our first samples back. The station work is rolling on, and we'll have more samples over the next few days!