Dragonflies: part 2

When we got back to land, the first thing I noticed was I noticed was the dragonflies. Once again, they were fluttering around Sea Scout's working deck, gracing our world with their iridescence. 

M/V Sea Scout at the dock in Louisiana. Photo by Calvin Mires.

It felt weird to wake up and find the ship motionless after a week rolling around at sea, but we returned victorious to Intracoastal City, Louisiana. This project is actually a dream for me, because we put in equal effort on the shipwrecks and the hard bottoms. We collected data from seven sites total - four shipwrecks and three natural reefs. Usually, my datasets are either all shipwrecks or make just a passing effort at documenting nearby hard bottoms. This time, I have nearly equal data from both. Moreover, the reefs we looked at were the closest natural hard-bottom sites to each shipwreck. Two of the shipwrecks were equidistant from the same hard bottom, so I can actually do a one-to-one shipwreck-reef comparison. How do the biological communities on shipwrecks differ from communities on the nearest natural hard-bottom reefs? With this dataset, I can find out. 

Our time at sea was short, but it was a good cruise. I enjoyed working with each of the people on board - our funders from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the chief scientist and his team from the University of Rhode Island, and the usual suspects: Calvin and Evan. Sea Scout's crew was also composed of interesting individuals. Captain Bill found out on the first day that I hated being called Boss and made that my name for the rest of the cruise. Captain Snake reacted with feigned horror when I shook my preserved larval samples to make sure everything was dead. Lindan entertained me with endless stories of catching frogs and snakes while growing up on the bayou. Most of the crew and ROV team hailed from Cajun country, so there was a lot of distinct cultural flavor - literally and figuratively - on board. 

After demobilizing and offloading all our equipment from the ship, we piled in cars and drove to New Orleans. Dinner and drinks in the French Quarter were an absolute must before parting ways. It was a great trip.