Diving in: part 2

 Problem: It's a hot summer day in Massachusetts, and sitting in an office just does not sound appealing.
Solution (to this and pretty much every other problem): Go diving!

The camera system CATAIN is in its last deployment deployment under the WHOI pier, and it was time to check on the system and clean it off. My grad student, Kharis, drove down and joined me for a dive under the WHOI pier. We learned a while ago that it's really helpful to take pictures of CATAIN's end-cap when it's underwater. That way, we can match up organisms we see from the bottom side in the images CATAIN records with their locations and appearance from the top - at an angle that's easier to identify. 

It's summer now, so I was expecting a lot of settlement on CATAIN. There was definitely some, but not as much as I expected. It seems the settlement patterns are highly seasonal and vary by species. This time, most of the organisms on the end cap were small white tube worms called serpulids. 

The camera we were using to photograph CATAIN today was accidentally turned on for most of the morning, so we got some really neat shots of the environment around the pier. Check out some of them below.

It's really exciting to see patterns emerging from the CATAIN data as the year-long deployment wraps up. Our invention is proving very valuable for science!

Kharis was carrying the camera, so this view is right before she jumped into the water. I'm already in the well, and you can see Alucia tied up to the pier in the background. 

A moment later, after Kharis jumped into the water.

Anemones, sponges, and ascidians on a piling under the pier.

Settlement on CATAIN's end cap