Meyer-Kaiser lab

One of the shipwrecks that my team has been studying this summer is actually unidentified. We've been calling it the "Mystery Collier," because we know it's a coal schooner and very little else. The wreck rests in about 400 ft of water in the northeast corner of Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary and faces north-south. Was it coming to Boston to deliver a load of coal? What happened to the ship that made it sink? Who were the crew members on board, and where were they from? All these questions remain to be answered. In our investigations this year, we've found several diagnostic features of the wreck that may help us identify it. During ROV operations, my collaborator, Calvin, regularly leans forward to point out artifacts he wants the pilot to focus on. Shoes and plates and bits of copper - all of them could be clues to the ship's identity. In his notebook, Calvin sketches a site plan so he can keep track of where all the artifacts are. He pulls ou...

My favorite of the Star Trek series is Voyager , in large part because of the character Kathryn Janeway. She's the captain of a starship that gets hopelessly lost in a far corner of the galaxy, but that woman is fierce. Throughout the series, the Voyager crew encounters alien races that have never seen humans before, and it's a toss-up whether they will be receptive or hostile. Janeway respects all and fears none. Every communication from a foreign leader is met with the same command: "On screen!" - and with the video feed up and running, she negotiates her way through the Delta Quadrant. One of these days, when my team is anchored over a shipwreck in Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, I'm going to stand up, cross my arms, and give my best Janeway impression: "On screen!" At my command, the video feed will turn on and reveal a strange and alien environment, surrounded on all sides by a turbid, viscous matrix. Finned creatures will dart back a...

"I'm gonna swing from the chandelier, from the chandelier I'm gonna live like tomorrow doesn't exist Like it doesn't exist I'm gonna fly like a bird through the night, feel my tears as they dry I'm gonna swing from the chandelier, from the chandelier" - "Chandelier" by Sia The chandelier on board R/V Catapult For my shipwreck project this summer, we're going out for opportunistic day-trips anytime the weather is good enough. This weekend, we capitalized on two days with blue skies and calm seas for sampling. Currently, we're working on an unidentified shipwreck that we call the "Mystery Collier," and later in the summer, we're planning to re-visit the steamship Portland . I want to tell you about some of the methods we're using for our research, because they're pretty cool. The shipwrecks we're sampling are between 80 and 150 m deep and about 30 miles from shore. They actually fall into this wei...

Hi all! My name is Mimi Smith and I am a WHOI undergraduate student fellow working in Kirstin’s lab this summer. For the past month or so, we have been messing around with stalked crinoids from the arctic deep sea--specifically, Bathycrinus carpenterii, and today, I will provide a brief overview of what we have come up with so far. Crinoid anatomy. Image from Wikipedia. A juvenile crinoid specimen on a terra cotta tile. Collected from a long-term experiment in the Arctic deep sea . For starters, what are crinoids and why are they important? They are a member of the phylum Echinodermata, which also includes starfish, brittle stars, sea cucumbers and sea urchins. They are found in the deep sea attached to a substrate, feeding by filtering plankton and detritus off of the seafloor. They are important because they might provide important information related to climate change, particularly in relation to ice cover and water temperature. Initially, we had wanted to age the crin...

Pixel on the deck of R/V Catapult . One of the suction samplers is visible in the foreground. Friends, it is summer! And summer means field season. Today, my team for the Stellwagen Telepresence project had our first field trip of the season. It was extremely exciting to spend the day on R/V Catapult with my collaborators. We left the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary headquarters at 6 am and headed out to our study site. It was actually a banner day for biology. I had been wanting to compare the biological communities on shipwrecks to natural hard-bottom communities, and today, I had that chance. We dropped an anchor on a boulder reef, deployed ROV Pixel , and set to work. I could tell as soon as we reached the seafloor that we had picked a good site. Sponges, bryozoans, and sea squirts covered the rocks, and there were tubed anemones on the mud in between. I asked the ROV pilot, Mike, to fly Pixel around bit so I could get a survey of the area. My sponge speci...

"Wherever he saw a hole, he always wanted to know the depth of it. To him this was important." - Jules Verne in Journey to the center of the earth Diving under the WHOI pier feels like descending into an infinite hole. You jump from the pier into the test well with a splash. After letting a little air out of your wing, you descend slowly through the depths. The water starts out light blue but becomes green and gets darker and darker as you sink. By the time you approach the seafloor, everything is black, and you may as well be in Earth's core - except for the temperature. The water is a chilling cold that presses in on you from all sides. The pressure pushes on your ear drums, which you have to pop multiple times. After adding a little air back into your wing, you lift just a foot or two off the silty seafloor and hover there. Your light comes on at the flick of a switch, and you push yourself along with your fins. You are swimming through the depths, an alien visit...

Believe it or not, I love when I get to correct myself on this blog. Being wrong is actually an important step in the scientific process. As I work through a project and gather more information, I constantly re-evaluate my assumptions. Sometimes, they turn out to be wrong . Recently, I used DNA from my Arctic larval samples to try and identify some of the specimens to species. I shared in a blog post that I had a number of embryos in my samples, along with some larval and juvenile nemerteans (ribbon worms). I hypothesized they might be the same species.  Well, when the DNA sequences came back, I made an interesting discovery. A sequence from one of the embryos was a reasonable match to Saccoglossus mereschkowskii , which is a hemichordate (acorn worm). I was very surprised! The common names sound similar (ribbon worm, acorn worm, what's the difference?), but nemerteans and hemichordates are completely different things. Just do a quick image search, and you'll see exactl...