Saturday, Oct. 3, 2009
Ship log by Myndee McNeill (Millicoma Intermediate School)
Sunrise here on the boat has become my favorite part of the day. In Oregon, we get to see the sun set into the ocean, but here, we get to see it come up out of the ocean and slip back into the ocean at the end of the day! How cool is that? I didn’t get to see the sunrise today, though. I was up until 4 am working on my research (counting tubeworm eggs) so I slept in until 8. There are so many things to see and do here that I don’t want to sleep so that I don’t miss anything! Another benefit of getting up early is that the lab is empty then. By the afternoon, everyone is up and cozying up to each other in the tight lab quarters, which makes it so much more exciting- you never know when you’re going to collide with someone!
This morning the sub brought back the tubeworms and clams that I have been studying, so I was really excited! It’s always like Christmas when the sub comes up- everyone heads out to see the weird and interesting creatures brought up, and to get cold bottom-of-the-ocean water for the animals in the cold room. In the afternoon, we pulled up Dr. Bob Carney’s trap (kind of like a giant 80-pound crab pot!) that we had set out a couple of days ago. We dropped it off so that it could sit on the bottom of the ocean for a couple of days, and today we picked it up to see what we caught. I think we were all secretly hoping that a giant squid or a shark would be brought up with the trap, but there were only two small spindle-legged crabs and a hagfish oozing gobs of thick slime.
The rest of the day I worked on my research- making cultures of the eggs that were dissected out of the tubeworms, and counting the eggs to see how many of them are developing to form new tubeworms. Of course, I took some time off to watch the sub come up at night from the second dive and to enjoy the warm night and the lights from the oil platforms twinkling on the horizon.