Monday, Sept. 28, 2009 – ship log
On the Boat with Greg Gavelis, aka Mr. Biology Dude (Highland Elementary)
OIl platform off the starboard bow
This morning we awoke to a huge breakfast of sausages, eggs, toast, hashbrowns, bagels and lox. It was a good thing no one went swimming because they would have sunk right to the bottom. Kristina Sawyer and Craig Young then set out in the sub on a trip to the largest tubeworm city known on earth. Their goal: to find iceworms, mussels, and a strange substance called methane hydrate, which, when lit with a spark, can create fire and water at the same time. If seen underwater, it looks like big chunks of yellow ice, and is often surrounded by all types of strange creatures. Methane hydrate serves as food for the bacteria, which are themselves food for many of the animals that lurk at the bottom of the pitch black sea.
Meanwhile, on deck, the rest of us learned how to operate the MOCNESS. Its name is a fancy acronym which I have forgotten, but it doesn’t matter because the crew simply calls it “the beast.” The MOCNESS is a metal frame the size of a cafeteria table, which, when trailed behind the boat, can measure the speed, temperature, depth, and salinity of the water, and even how much phytoplankton is in it. But its most important job today was to capture larvae in giant nets (it had nine of them). While we were getting the MOCNESS ready up on deck, a rainstorm kicked up, and we had to work in the downpour. Fortunately, the rain was as warm as bathwater, but if you’d seen us slaving away on deck during the storm we would have looked pretty extreme, and looking extreme is what marine biology is all about. (What do you think marine biology is really about?)
After the rain cleared, the water was blue as kool-aid, and full of great purple jellyfish the size of dinner plates. I hung out with Captain George who told me about how our same boat was used on Shark Week but that the sharks weren’t actually that terrifying. Soon after, our friends returned from the sub dive with a squid as clear as glass. We could see its organs right through its skin, and they looked as shiny as mercury. We spent the rest of the evening sorting out larvae that were caught in the MOCNESS. It had caught so much that we stayed huddled around microscopes long into the night!