Der Probenlager

Anja is a ball of sunshine. At a mere 5 feet tall, she packs more energy into a little body than I have ever seen. As we make our way down the hall, she keeps a brisk pace both in travel and in conversation, and I'm reminded how much I enjoy working with her. 

The Probenlager

We grab the key for the Probenlager (sample storage room) and let ourselves inside. It’s cramped with shelves and boxes and bins, and it smells faintly of formaldehyde. Dead animals in jars – my favorite. Anja glances at her notes, scans the shelves, and then hops onto a wooden box to read a jar’s label on the top. We spent a good half hour in there, pulling boxes out, reading their labels, then opening them to peek inside. Jar after jar and box after box. There were even a few labels in my handwriting – trawl samples collected in the Fram Strait in 2012. We searched everything, but we still didn’t find the samples I wanted.

I’m currently at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany. As some of you may remember, I lived and worked here in 2011 – 2012, and I have collaborated with AWI scientists ever since. Last summer, they invited me to analyze recruitment panels as part of a long-term experiment. A metal frame with plastic and brick substrata that had been deployed on the seafloor in 1999 was recovered, and I counted and identified all the animals on the panels. Well, I'm visiting the AWI now to finish up that analysis with my collaborators. We're almost ready to submit our results for publication, but I wanted to take the chance while I was here and add an extra piece to the story. A few panels had been removed from the frame in 2003, and I was hoping to take a look at them. We know based on the ROV video that no animals were visible on the panels, but I thought there might be some foraminiferans – single-celled organisms – that were too small for the ROV camera to detect.

Alas, we may never know. I had seen the 2003 panels very briefly when I lived here back in 2011, but I had no clue at the time that I would end up being the one to complete the long-term experiment. The room where the panels were stored has since been cleaned out to make space for new data. Samples accumulate faster than you might expect, so removing old ones from storage is an accepted and even necessary practice. I was hoping that the 2003 panels had been moved into the new Probenlager, but it appears not. After almost a decade in storage, the old panels must have been thrown out. 

It was disappointing to find out the panels were gone, but it's ok. I have great data from the ROV video and from the panels that were collected last summer. Our analysis shows important patterns in Arctic deep-sea colonization, and I'm excited about the results that I have!