She's up!

"Be the kind of woman who, when your feet hit the floor each morning, the devil says 'Oh no! She's up!'"

- Joanne Clancy

My alarm went off at 7, like usual. As I picked up my phone to silence it, I noticed a text message from Kharis, my PhD student: "She's up!"

I sank back into the pillows and let out a deep breath. Wonderful. She's up. Thank goodness. 

"She" in this context is CATAIN, the camera system that my lab invented a few years ago. CATAIN is specifically designed to capture settlement - the process of a larva metamorphosing and attaching to its new juvenile habitat on the seafloor. A lot of animals die right after they settle, so it's really difficult to study settlement itself. Most of the time, researchers leave out fouling panels and then collect them with all the attached animals a few months later. The problem with that strategy, though, is you only see the sum total of everything that settled and everything that died over the few months your panels were out. You can't see any of the processes in between, and you're going to miss important patterns. I spent years being frustrated by my inability to study settlement anywhere except my local dock. 

Eventually, I channeled my frustration into a proposal, which got funded and supported the development of CATAIN. This plucky little camera first got tested under the WHOI pier before fulfilling its destiny and sinking into an Arctic fjord. It took a lot of preparations and planning, not the least of which was because Kharis would have to recover the camera by herself. I was unable to join her on the two recovery expeditions, so instead of a dive buddy, I sent Kharis to the Arctic with a robot. Our lab's little ROV would have to attach a hook to CATAIN's bridle so the camera could be hoisted back to the surface from 15 m depth. 

CATAIN being recovered in Kongsfjorden. 
Photo by Kharis Schrage.

It worked once. After about a week of trial and error, Kharis recovered CATAIN from its resting place in Kongsfjorden last year. She re-deployed the camera in the fjord for 12 more months of data collection. Going into this year's trip, she was very confident. She knew the system. She could pilot the ROV with confidence. It would work. 

Unfortunately, when Kharis got to Svalbard, she discovered that the ROV was having some issues. Its first deployment in the fjord ended with some warning lights flashing and Kharis losing control of the vehicle. She worked her way through the user manual, found the section that described the error she had experienced, and then called me. 

Now, I'm no engineer. But I am married to one. As soon as I got off the phone with Kharis, I called my husband, Carl. I read off the language that Kharis had sent me from the ROV's user manual. "Sounds like a shipping problem," Carl said. "A connector must have come loose in transit." 

Friends, if you have the option, marry an engineer. Seriously. You will thank yourself. Marry an engineer. 

If it really was just a loose connector, Kharis and I could handle that. We hopped on a Zoom call and walked through the process together. I had been trained in maintenance for my ROV shortly after  buying it, so I was confident telling Kharis how to take the various components apart. We made our way into the housing, and Kharis probed each connector with her fingers. She described the process as wiggling teeth. Some poking and logical interpolation eventually pointed to one connector that must be the problem. Kharis unplugged it. She plugged it back in. The vehicle worked. 

CATAIN's end cap - with barnacles! Photo by Kharis Schrage.

I actually had a hard time believing it was that simple. Kharis rocked the vehicle back and forth on the lab bench to make sure the connector was tight. No change - Carl was right. It really was just a loose connector. 

With the ROV back on line, Kharis described CATAIN's recovery as a "seamless operation." It is immensely exciting to have our precious camera back, and it appears to have worked, too! The data from CATAIN will be a crucial part of Kharis's dissertation. I am incredibly excited to see what the photos reveal. 

I am grateful for my incredibly competent grad student, Kharis, my engineer husband whose experience always ends up saving my lab's research, and the amazing data we now get to analyze. It is a good day!