The Palmer and Crary

The sea was so flat, I could barely find the horizon

We left Gloucester before dawn. As the eastern sky grew pink, we steamed out of the harbor on a glassy sea. The weather was perfect; the ROV was working; it seemed fate was on our side.

Last week, my team was back in Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary to sample a new shipwreck. We had worked out many of the kinks in our sampling strategy and were rewarded with two amazingly productive days. Altogether, we collected 10 glorious hours of ROV video footage and covered almost the entire wreck.

Watching the ROV video feed with Calvin, the project's
archaeologist. My face says it all. Photo credit: Elizabeth
Weinberg/NOAA.

Our target this time was actually two ships, the Palmer and the Crary. They're both coal schooners - some of the largest schooners in history, actually, with 4 or 5 masts each - and they sank together in 1902. The ships were racing into Boston harbor during a very cold winter, hoping to arrive first and secure the highest possible prices for their coal. Instead of making it to the harbor, both ships collided and sank almost instantly. Their bows are still interlocked as they rest on the seafloor, forming essentially one giant wreck.

It's a grainy screenshot with glare, but you can see hydroids
(stringy brown clumps) and sponges (yellow blobs) living
on the rigging (old ropes) on the Palmer/Crary wreck.

I was extremely excited to see the Palmer/Crary wreck because I wanted to compare its community to the Portland. I was curious whether this wreck would have the same species as the Portland or whether it would have new, different species for me to find. I wanted to compare the community composition this year to footage previously recorded by Snactuary staff. Overall, it seemed the same species were present on the Palmer/Crary wreck as the Portland, but the community was more even. Portland species tended to be in patches, while on the Palmer/Crary wreck, the same species were living next to each other and were more mixed.

One exciting finding was that the outer hulls of the Palmer and Crary were gone, leaving the ribs of both ships exposed. I'll have to check the previous video, but I think they used to be intact. If my memory serves and the hulls were intact before, it means any animal living on the ribs had to have settled there since the year the footage was recorded. I can use this fact to estimate maximum ages and minimum growth rates for the species I'm seeing, including the glass sponges. Very little is known about sponge growth, settlement, etc., especially for deep-water species. The shipwrecks provide a rare opportunity to estimate difficult parameters and learn more about how the animals live.

It was a great week in Stellwagen Bank, and I'm excited to analyze the data!