Meyer-Kaiser lab

Coming home from an expedition is always hard. It feels like you've been on another planet , or that your whole time at sea was just a really good dream. The people you've spent every waking minute with for a whole month are suddenly gone . It helps if you have a few days to decompress before settling back into normal life .  Unfortunately, I did not have a few days. I went straight from Tromsø, Norway to my home in Massachusetts, slept, and went to work the next day. I had important things to attend to.  Two of the pluteus larvae that Hollis found Important things - like my intern, Hollis. The last time I saw him, he had blue hair , but it was black when he arrived in the lab this time. He had some new life updates to share with me, and I was very excited to listen. Admittedly, conversations with Hollis sometimes involve me learning new vocabulary so I can keep up with the ever-evolving modern lingo. Hollis also peppered me with questions about my Arctic trip - larvae, pola...

Sea ice! Deploying the hand net. Photo by Kyra Marie Böckmann The CTD descending to the water. Our hand net deployments corresponded with the CTD casts.  Photo by Johanna Weston. In the ROV van during my dive. Photo by Johanna Weston. Waiting for the ROV recovery with Melanie and Lydia. Photo by Melanie Bergmann. ROV Kiel 6000 coming on board Polarstern after a dive. One of the "dragon amphipods" collected during my ROV dive.  Photo by Johanna Weston. We got close enough to Svalbard that we could actually see land! A puffin flying around the ship. Photo by Lydia Schmidt.

I stood in the so-called "working hallway" on Polarstern 's main deck. The doors to outside were wide open, and the cold Arctic air surrounded me. Two technicians used the ship's built-in tracked winch system to lift and move the CTD onto the main deck. It was a familiar procedure. As soon as that CTD was in the water, I would get my next larval sample.  Another researcher, Peter, walked up and stood next to me. I nodded a greeting. He nodded back and pointed to the CTD.  "This is my extra sausage," he said in German.  "Good for you!" I responded, giggling a little inside. It's true - things have gone well enough this trip that we've barely had to cancel anything. What cancellations we did have were because of ice conditions, not equipment malfunction. The chief scientist was even able to honor requests for extra samples toward the end of the expedition. If this was an American ship, Peter might have told me that the CTD was the icing on hi...

My experiment had to wait 5 years for me to return, but it was not the only patient experiment in the HAUSGARTEN this year. My friend and collaborator, Melanie, started an experiment of her own in 2015 to figure out how plastic litter impacts deep-sea sponges. After 9 years, she was finally able to finish the experiment.  An anemone on the base of Melanie's experiment. I volunteered to help Melanie during her ROV dive by keeping notes. The ROV team has a specialized system that automatically time-stamps and georeferences every observation during the dive. A dedicated laptop in the ROV control van and a second one in the winch control room are used for data logging. We don't want to miss anything that happens on the seafloor.  As I watched the video feed from Melanie's dive, I started to notice something unexpected. Small white lines appeared on many of the plastic pieces in her experiment. Looking closely, I realized they were worm tubes! The worms must have settled on the ...

It has been 5 years.  Back in 2019, I started a series of experiments at a station in the HAUSGARTEN . We call the station "Senke," but that's actually a misnomer. "Senke" is German for "depression." There is a depression in the seafloor, sure, but right next to the depression is a giant rocky reef. And I go to Senke for the reef.  It's been my mission for the last several years to understand the assembly of hard-bottom communities in the Arctic deep sea. How are new stones colonized? Who arrives first? Where do the larvae come from? Ever since an 18-year experiment showed that Arctic communities take decades to form, I have wanted to dig into that process.  One of my larval traps, successfully opened and even covered with life! If you want to understand hard-bottom communities, Senke is the ideal study site. It has bedrock and boulders and is covered in sponges like you wouldn't believe. I find it fascinating and incredibly beautiful. It is m...