Meyer-Kaiser lab

CATAIN. You may see a fouled housing, but I see data. Friends, in between spending days at sea on R/V Catapult looking at shipwrecks, I have another project that's at a very exciting stage. I've been collaborating with a group of engineers over the last year or so to develop a camera system that can photograph newly-settled juvenile invertebrates. The engineers kept calling it "LarvaeCam" as a working name (despite my insistence that it didn't photograph larvae), but I think I'm going to name it CATAIN - CAmera To Analyze INvertebrates. This name is also conveniently a nod to the nerd-tastic board game Settlers of Catan (because the camera photographs settlers, get it?). A snail crawling on CATAIN. The light part is its foot, and I think the skinny light part might be its radula. CATAIN got its first test deployments this summer, and the results look very promising. Our major innovation was photographing the settlers from the underside, using the c...

Scituate Harbor in the early morning, as we headed out for a long day at sea A major focus of my shipwreck project this year is completing our documentation of the steamship Portland . This ship is sometimes referred to as "New England's Titanic ," because it was a passenger vessel that sank with all hands in a tragic storm in 1898. The ship's significance extends across the region, as descendants of the passengers and crew are still actively connected to its story. Last year, we were able to document a large fraction of the Portland wreck using ROV Pixel , but we wanted to make sure we got to 100% coverage on this historically important ship. The footage we collect is being used to build a 3D photogrammetric model of the wreck, so we can view all the structures in context and better understand how the site is transforming over time. One of the most important things we've done this year is fly Pixel over the top of the wreck. All of the superstructure a...

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...