Meyer-Kaiser lab

The low-hanging moon reflects on the sea surface, 27 July 2015, western Atlantic The ship feels a bit different at night. Most people are still awake, but they’re working slower and having more fun. Tossing things across the room instead of carrying them. Taking a minute to chat between samples. Grabbing a snack in the galley, playing a board game, watching a movie, then disappearing one by one to go to sleep. There’s a group of us that gathers on the bow before bed. We finish all our samples for the day, then step outside to escape the fluorescent lights. The group is different every night – there are some regulars, but there are also a few that have come only once or twice. We chat and laugh and decompress under the stars. I find it helps to have a few minutes of darkness before I go to bed, because I have to convince myself it’s time to sleep. There’s so much stimulation inside the ship - lights and people and things going on - that it’s sometimes hard to unwind. A bit of

Back when we were planning this cruise, maybe a month and a half ago, we ended up with one free place on board. The spot had to be occupied by a man because it was in an all-male cabin. Well, all of the grad students and most of the undergrads currently at OIMB are female, so Craig started looking into other options. He ended up inviting a good friend and long-time collaborator of his, a sponge expert from Spain named Manuel Maldonado. In Manuel's words, "when Craig invites you on a trip, you go, because it is always going to be an adventure." The two of them can tell stories about outrunning terrorists in Sri Lanka, diving in a sketchy tin-can submersible in the Bahamas, hiring a fishing boat to take them SCUBA diving and watching their captain find the reef by ear. Their adventures have been numerous, and it's so fun to hear the stories. An encrusting sponge (not carnivorous) on a piece of carbonate from a methane seep.  Manuel and Craig traded places wi

When I first started at OIMB three years ago, I noticed there were some random stickers placed around our lab. On the windowsill, on the corner of a desk. All of them were the same approximate size and artistic style, and all of them featured dogs. They must have been part of a pack. At the time, I just assumed that someone had an extra sheet of stickers one day and decided to get rid of them by sticking them around the lab. It added to OIMB's charm. No big deal. Every once in a while, I would notice a new sticker and scratch my head for a second. It wasn't frequent at all - every few months, perhaps - seldom enough that I could convince myself the sticker had always been there and I had just never noticed it before. But recently, I've changed my mind. Ever since I've gotten back from Norway, dog stickers have been appearing in the lab on a regular basis, and they are showing up in places where I am positive there's never been a sticker before. Someone must be pla

If you spend enough time in Craig Young's lab, he's bound to make you spawn something. I define myself as an ecologist, but just by working in the Young lab, I've learned a lot about reproductive and larval biology by osmosis. I've gotten comfortable injecting sea urchins with potassium chloride and mussels with serotonin to make them release gametes. I've grown accustomed to the weird facial expressions one receives when using words like "gonad," "ripe," and "oocyte" as if they were normal. I know how to recognize a fertilization envelope, and I can find a ciliated larva in a slurry of copepods and diatoms like a champ. Urchin + electrodes = ? Besides sorting larvae on this cruise, we've been opportunistically trying to spawn deep-sea invertebrates to describe their reproduction. Let me tell you, it's made for some pretty entertaining evenings on the ship. There was one day that we got fantastic urchin specimens but fou

Friends, I'm going to let you in on a secret: scientists like to have fun. Sometimes, we even tease each other, give each other a hard time. It's hard to believe, I know, but scientists do have personalities. An XBT thermistor with copper wire attached. White paper used for contrast. Allow me to explain. There's one particular instrument for physical oceanography known as an XBT. It's used to measure the temperature in the water column, giving oceanographers an idea of what water masses are present at what depths. The X in XBT stands for Expendable, because an XBT never comes back. It's essentially a thermistor inside a weight with a copper wire attached. You toss it over the back of the ship while transiting. The wire pays out until the weight hits the bottom, and temperature readings are transmitted through the copper wire to a computer on the ship. When you're all done, you snap the copper wire with your fingers and say goodbye to the XBT. Well, ther

I promised I'd update you once Sentry 's plankton sampler had a name, and it finally does now! The sampler is officially called SyPRID, which stands for S entr y P recision R obotic I mpeller- D riven sampler. Clever, right? Well, I'm personally pretty excited about this name, for two reasons: 1) Cyprids (spelled with a C) are a larval form, and they grow up to be barnacles. The SyPRID sampler can be used for a lot of things, but I think it's neat that the name reflects its origins in larval biology. The Young lab in our Sentry shirts. 2) OIMB came up with the name! We had a brainstorming session in our lab, so deciding on the acronym and the meaning was a group effort. Carl, the leader of the Sentry team, told us some of the words he wanted to have in there, and we went with it. It was quite satisfying to see our name win. Because OIMB came up with the winning name, Carl offered all 7 of us free Sentry T-shirts. He travels with a large box of merchandise

Seen in the Sentry lab. We caught this beauty in one of our plankton samples. Rules are rules. Laurel's birthday! OIMBers on the bow. For Joe's first Alvin dive, Doreen went all out. She's wearing a shark suit and the flag of their university, NC State. Joe's sash, crown, and scepter are all made from rolls of XBT copper wire. Yes, the ice-bucketing ritual was performed in these costumes. "Big Red" ctenophore from one of our plankton samples. Sunset out our lab's porthole. I made a calendar with a different musical genre for every day of the cruise so that larval sorting would never get boring. 

As we glided around, exploring the mussel bed, our pilot said words that neither Adam nor I wanted to hear: "We're running low on battery." It wasn't entirely clear why Alvin 's battery was running lower than usual on our dive, but I suppose we had been sampling a lot. We did end up having to cut the dive short - it lasted 6 hours instead of the usual 9 - but to be honest, I really can't complain. I went on a journey to the bottom of the ocean, discovered a new cold seep habitat, collected samples from it, and saw amazing organisms in the process. We went to an entirely unknown site and came back with evidence of a thriving biological community. Exactly three humans have ever seen that particular patch of ground, and I am one of them. In fact, I am the only woman. Chris had to get clearance from the ship before we could ascend, so there were a few minutes when we just hung suspended above the bottom, waiting for permission. Alvin climbed slowly up a jagge

We flew over the jagged precipice and continued across the mussel bed. It looked for a while like the mussels might have been thinning out, but then we reached another jagged cliff. It stuck up from the seafloor by about a meter, so it was much smaller than the last one. We saw only a little bit of bubbling, but the mussels were still pretty dense. We collected a few more and also used Alvin 's slurp function to suck up animals living between the mussels. We couldn't really be sure what we were getting, since the in-between animals are too small to see, but we thought it would be an interesting sample to examine back in the lab. Our third precipice was the most dramatic by far, and as we pulled up to it, we could barely believe our eyes. It rose a good 8 or 10 meters off the bottom, and when we reached the top, we could see it was a straight shot down the back side. The entire surface was jagged carbonate covered in dense mussels, which created an even more jagged surface, an

I'm obviously going to have to split up this post into multiple entries. If you're confused about the Mumford and Sons reference, I know I never followed up on it in Part 1. It shows up here in a little bit; just keep reading. Me inside Alvin . Photo by Adam Skarke. Once we were all in place and the hatch was sealed, Alvin was hoisted by the ship's A-frame into the water. Deploying Alvin is a relatively streamlined process, but it involves a lot of people. Besides those on deck, there are two swimmers in the surface water that are responsible for unhooking Alvin from all its various cables and tethers to the ship. I had seen the swimmers do their thing from the surface before, but I didn't realize how much of their work was underwater. I watched through the porthole like a 5-year-old seeing reindeer land on her neighbor's roof, fascinated by the process before me. It took a few minutes, but then, we were off. On the way down, our pilot, Chris, asked if it

Somehow, the best days of my life always end up being accompanied by Mumford and Sons. I remember in the summer of 2013, I drove up to North Cascades National Park in Washington to meet a college friend. I hadn't seen her in two years. As we drove through the mountains in her red Mustang convertible, eating organic strawberries and feeling our ears pop with the ever-increasing altitude, Mumford and Sons came on the radio. We sang the words to each other as loudly as we could, and as the cool alpine wind teased our hair, we both laughed for the sheer beauty and joy of the moment. Then in Norway, on the day I went canyoning with two housemates in Voss, our Canadian driver had Mumford on repeat in his repurposed old school bus. I had honestly no idea what I was getting into at the time, but as I settled back into the bus seat, I looked to my housemate, Jonathan. He was wearing a wild smile and and was practically bouncing in his seat for anticipation. He had planned our whole crazy

"I will move heaven and earth to get you to the bottom of the ocean." - Craig Young Caitlin (right) with her dive buddy, Abbe, a Ph.D. student at Duke University, before they entered  Alvin . On a sunny afternoon shortly before we left Oregon, my labmate, Caitlin, came bouncing down the hallway to my desk. She leaned across the green table top, putting her face close to mine, and practically burst open as she spoke. "Guess what Craig just said to me!" she gushed. Craig had promised to do everything in his power to get her on DSV Alvin , and she could barely contain her excitement. I was more than happy for her, especially because our adviser's word is good. I'm not sure if any of you felt it, but heaven and earth have moved. Because yesterday, Caitlin got her first Alvin dive. Stepping out of the sub, Caitlin is all smiles. Dumping ice water on my labmate in the name of tradition! The word that comes to my mind right now is "comper

Just as soon as we finished sorting all our larvae from the MOCNESS, another gear deployment promised to bring us more. This time it was the autonomous underwater vehicle Sentry , which belongs to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. Woods Hole is in my opinion the best oceanographic institute in the world, and to put it simply, they have all the best toys. Ships, ROVs, AUVs, submersibles - Woods Hole has it all. The AUV Sentry is an amazing vehicle, and the team that keeps her running really knows their stuff. They're creative, intelligent, skilled engineers, and they're pretty agreeable people too. I have only positive things to say about Sentry . Sentry with the plankton pumps attached. Is anyone else thinking Despicable Me ? Anyway, autonomous vehicles haven't traditionally been used to collect plankton from the deep sea. The capability to do so is a new innovation. I remember being on a conference call in my adviser's office in Oregon a y

After leaving port yesterday, it only took us about 12 hours to reach our first station. The habitats we're sampling in this cruise are located on the continental margin, so they're relatively close to land. There was a short multibeam survey of the seafloor once we got the station, and then our first gear deployment immediately after. Not even a full day at sea, and we already had gear in the water. Freaky fast! Caitlin strikes a power stance while waiting to deploy the MOCNESS. The first gear deployment was a MOCNESS tow, which is our main sampling gear. MOCNESS stands for Multiple Opening and Closing Net Environmental Sampling System, and it's basically a series of giant nets. We lower it down into the water column with one net open (only one net is open at a time), then open and close the nets in series on the way back up. That way, we get plankton samples from different depths in the water column, all cleanly separated in their respective nets. The ultimate goal

Well, friends, I'm at it again. Yes, that's right, I have in the past 48 hours flown across North America to join another research expedition. I come to you now from Morehead City, North Carolina. In some ways, every cruise is the same, and in other ways, every cruise is different. This one is unique in that I'm traveling with a large group from my institute. There are 7 of us, and one more is joining us after the first week at sea. For a seasoned lone traveler like myself who's never afraid to board a ship full of strangers, it feels a bit weird to be surrounded by people I know. It's a change, but it's good. I'm excited for this cruise. Getting all of us here was actually easier than I expected. We flew into Raleigh, North Carolina, spent the night there, and then drove out to Morehead City yesterday. Only one person had a delayed flight; our rented full-size van got us safely down the highway; and when we arrived, one phone call to a colleague got us

Last week, when Mom, Grandpa, and Fran were visiting, we stopped at the Oregon state capitol in Salem. There were sidewalk tiles all around the capitol building with historical anecdotes, quirky place names, tributes to each of the Oregon counties. One in particular caught my eye, because it listed the Oregon state motto. I honestly had no idea that American states could have mottos, but there it was at my feet. "She flies with her own wings." Kind of a weird sentiment to describe a state, if you ask me, but the phrase has re-surfaced in my mind the past few days. I've been getting very frustrated recently, since each of the scientific projects I'm working on have stalled out at once. I've run into brick wall after brick wall, and I've been waiting for responses from collaborators for who knows how long. I've described this problem to you before , because it's been going on for over a month. Up until now, my response tactic has been to let go. I de