Liquid world: part 2

Another day, another dive. It's a good life. 

Some of you might remember I worked with WHOI engineers in 2019-2020 to develop a new camera system called CATAIN. The system has been deployed under the WHOI pier for over a year now, and I've gone SCUBA diving in all seasons and all weather to periodically retrieve it. I thought that after 14 months underwater, CATAIN could finally surface and get some R&R.

Then I got the reviews back for a paper I had written about CATAIN. Obviously, I'd like the broader scientific community to know about this invention, and the best way to do that is to publish a paper (we submitted a patent application, but scientists don't read those). I've never actually written a methods paper before. I wasn't quite sure how to go about it but figured I would do my best and see what happened. 

CATAIN under the WHOI pier with its panels
attached to the frame. Photo by Kim Malkoski.

Well, the paper got rejected. The reviewers wanted to see more testing of the CATAIN system and wanted me specifically to compare the data CATAIN collects to data collected by standard methods. That's actually pretty difficult because CATAIN collects data that isn't really practical to collect any other way. CATAIN records images of animals that have settled on its end cap every four hours. If I were to collect the same data using a standard approach - deploying some panels and then counting what grows on them - I could obviously not do that every 4 hours for a solid 14 months. 

As a compromise, I decided to deploy some panels alongside CATAIN and compare what grows on them versus the CATAIN end cap after two weeks. It's a single time-point of data, but I'm hoping it will satisfy the reviewer. This decision to compare to the panels meant that after its 14 months underwater, CATAIN had to submerge one more time. We deployed it today with a set of panels attached to the frame. I'm curious to see how the numbers look in two weeks.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again: peer review is like democracy, simultaneously the worst way to evaluate scientific papers and better than anything else that has been tried. Scientists don't let each other get away with anything. 

At least I get to go diving again!