Catapult

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 specimen!

Eventually, we came across a large boulder almost the same size as Pixel. The ROV settled on the seafloor, and I could see a yellow sponge on the rock in front of us. It was a species I had observed last year but was never able to identify. Leaning forward, I asked Mike to see if he could collect a specimen. Getting a physical sample would enable me to identify the species using published keys in my lab.

Pixel has custom-built suction samplers for scraping biological specimens off of rocks. Driving Pixel forward, Mike pressed one of the samplers against the rock and turned on the suction. I could see a piece of the sponge get sucked into the tube - we had it!

A few minutes later, we found a sea squirt I wanted to identify and repeated the procedure. I really couldn't tell if anything had gotten sucked into the sampler, but when we opened it later, there were actually 3 individuals inside. I was very excited!

It was a great day on the water!