Friday, Oct. 2, 2009
Diving with Laurel Hiebert (Bunker Hill, Blossom Gulch and Madison schools)
I have been on many collecting trips – to the rocky shore, to the sandy beach, to the mudflats. But this was a very different sort of collecting trip. Instead of bringing along my rubber boots, rain jacket, and bucket, I brought along a video camera and clipboard to take lots of notes and record video. Instead of being able to stick my hands in the mud or lift up the rocks to find animals, I could only observe through a glass sphere and pick things up with a robotic arm. The site I went to is called Garden Bank and it was unexplored by any of the scientists onboard. My mission: to explore the area and record what I see.
The first sign of life at the bottom was a small white shell sticking up out of the mud. It turned out to be a carrier shell, which belongs to a snail that builds its shell by picking up pieces of other shells and sticking them onto itself. Next, we ran into a slope and when we made our way to the top, we found that it was an active mud volcano, bubbling with methane gas. The muddy seafloor was dotted with the occasional sea star, a few crabs, and beds of mussels here and there. But around the mud volcano, the mud looked flat and new, as if it had recently spewed out of the volcano and had not yet been inhabited by animals.
We came across what I thought was a pink anemone, but when we got closer, I noticed that it wasn’t just an anemone, but actually a hermit crab with an anemone living on its shell! Back onboard the ship, I found out that this kind of anemone, called a cloak anemone, attaches to a hermit crab’s shell and dissolves away the shell!