Sarah’s thought of the day: One of my favorite things about being in the Aquarius is watching the fish swimming around the viewport as I lie in my bunk. Our bunkroom is on the end of the Aquarius. There are three bunks on each side and a 30 inch viewport at our feet. My bunk is in the middle (Mark sleeps below me and Ashley is in the top bunk). While lying with my head on the pillow, I have a perfect view of the fishes at my feet! Before saturating I went to the bookstore and picked the thickest book I could find Ð figuring I’d have lots of time to read down here. I think I’ve finished about ten pages! Every night when I get in my warm toasty bunk, intending to read, I’m inevitably drawn in to the more interesting story at my feet! What a wonderful way to fall asleep! There is a light on the top of the Aquarius, and so we can watch the fish circling outside. Usually, there are dozens of yellowtail snapper, sergeant majors, chromis, and boga swarming about. And then they all disappear! Within moments the reason for their disappearance is obvious: first a giant shadow blocks the light above, and then a great barracuda slowly, menacingly, swims by… I’ve yet to see the big barracuda put its sharp teeth to use, but there’s still two more nights to go!
Emma: We started the day early, as usual - into the water by 6:30am! Sarah and I swam the northeast line to put bait (catfood) into the fish trap. We were met at the trap by 5 spiny lobsters who had found their way in during the night. They were somewhat reluctant to leave, but we finally got them out and they backed away, down the sand channel, and disappeared under ledges - only leaving their antennae sticking out, feeling for movement. The black grouper James tagged yesterday up the northeast trap has been standing guard over the trap ever since - every time we visit, there he is sitting beside it. Late this afternoon, however, the temptation was too much, and he was back IN the trap. (N.B. I actually don’t know that IT is a HE). The highlight of the day for me was a phone call to Ms. McKnight’s Fourth Grade Class at South Knoll Elementary School in College Station, Texas. My daughter, Sydney is in the class. I called from the Aquarius Undersea Lab, while they watched on the live webcam and talked on a speaker phone in their classroom. They met all the Aquanauts and Dom, our Aquarius guy (Mark was underwater). They had great questions ready for us. I could hear the interest and excitement in their voices - what fun!!! Thanks South Knoll for chatting! This week has flown by - only 2 more hours of diving tomorrow morning to go, then 17 hours of decompression. It sure would be nice if we could stay longer. I’m starting to recognize individual fish, eels, lobster, basket stars, sponges, corals - and thinking as I pass them, “Hey, I know you”.
Ashley: We were in the water as the sun was coming up and James and I were determined to catch a hogfish. We put up the seine net in a little spur and groove coral area near the habitat. I chased a nice big hogfish for quite some time; I could tell I was bothering him as he was trying to eat little critters in the sand. He ditched me easily every time (I looked pretty silly!). Then, I was hot on his tail (literally) and he was headed straight for the net, James swooped in from the left and we closed the net on him just in time! After he was decorated with a lovely tag for his bravery, we tagged two more blue parrotfishes and a small black grouper. It was a good day on the reef - although certain fishes may beg to differ. We’ll be going to the surface in a little over a day - at first it might be a little strange not to have water over my head…
This morning we awoke to cloudy viewports - not surprising given the seas we experienced all night! You may wonder how we know anything about the seas way down here on the sea floor…turns out that every time a wave passes overhead the pressure in the undersea lab changes, and our ears pop! I actually enjoy the rhythmic “whoosh”ing of the air in and out of Aquarius. It’s soothing - it reminds me of the sound of waves on the beach.
The other way we can tell that the seas are rough above is by watching the fish in the viewport. Without flinching a fin, they move in a circular motion: up, back, down and forward. Much like if they were in a washing machine!
As one who gets horribly seasick, I’m so very happy to be working from the sea floor! And all the more grateful of the professional and dedicated surface support team, who come out no matter what the conditions, to make sure we have all the supplies we need and to ensure that the habitat is functioning beautifully. They are outside as I type, filling our water tanks, so we can keep hydrated (important for keeping decompression sickness away) and so we can have our delicious hot showers! After four hours in the water, I’m shivering when I return to the habitat, so a hot shower is blissful!
The rough seas really stir up the sediment, and made finding fishes especially challenging this morning! Emma’s and my task is to find blue parrotfish, hogfish or black grouper and observe their behavior for twenty minutes. We also document the habitats they visit. We are recording data for fishes that James and Ashley have tagged, and fishes that are tag-free. The idea is to determine if tagging alters fish behavior in any way.
Once we spot a fish that we wish to observe, one of us attaches our cord-reel to the excursion line (a series of excursion lines lead from the Aquarius to several locations around the reef). Because surfacing is not an option, we always need to have a positive means to return to Aquarius. So one of our buddy team is responsible for keeping track of the excursion line by tying our reel to it and spooling out the line as the fish leads us around the reef. During the twenty minute observation period the fish can have us ALL OVER the reef! Sometimes I think they are just trying to get us lost - payback for poking them with a tag! Thank goodness for our fine training - we are always able to follow our own line track back to the excursion line, and to the habitat and a HOT SHOWER (Thank you, surface support team!)
It’s good to be back in Aquarius after dealing with a frustrating hurricane season. Conch Reef looks a bit different than it did during my last mission in July. There has been a good deal of sand shifting and the reef (and habitat) is covered in a light layer of fine sediment. You have to be careful when working near the sea floor or visibility goes to zero very quickly. Another change since July is the water temperature. It has dropped 6 degrees, making those 4 hour excursions a bit chilly. The habitat stays cooler, also. I’ve gone from wearing shorts and a T-shirt to sweat pants and sweat shirt.
Dominic and I have kept busy catching up with maintenance on the habitat valving and other equipment. The Aquarius crew has worked hard to recover from some pretty significant damage from Tropical Storm Rita (it became a hurricane just after it passed Key Largo). The effort has paid off as we move into Day 4 of the Lindholm Mission.
Day Three at the Aquarius Undersea Laboratory…or, considered in toto, Day Twenty-Three for me (this is my 3rd saturation mission to Aquarius, with previous missions in 2001 and 2002). Twenty-three days of waking up beneath the waves…twenty-three days of extensive data collection…twenty-three days of an opportunity that is currently available nowhere else in the world.
In an age of increasingly-automated oceanographic instrumentation, Aquarius continues to make human habitation of the aquatic world possible. While terrestrial scientists have been observing living organisms in their natural habitats for centuries, opportunities for sustained observations of marine creatures have been few and far between. But Aquarius makes it all possible.
We wake up with the fishes, we swim all day with the fishes, we eat lunch with the fishes, and we sleep with the fishes. We have tagged more than 30 fish this mission so far, and conducted more than 25 20-minute behavioral surveys. Given the strong winds and high swells currently raging overhead, we would likely not even have been out on a day like today were we diving from the surface.
All hyperbole aside, Aquarius really is unique. If you are reading this mission log, then you probably already know that. But spread the word.
Our first full day of saturation was an exciting one! We were up at 5:30AM and hit the moonpool (our doorway to the reef) by 6:31. Emma and Sarah stalked the tagged and untagged species that we are studying - blue parrotfish, hogfish, and grouper (black and red). They are recording the feeding behaviors and habitat of each of these reef species.\
James and Ashley spent the morning chasing blue parrotfish with a siene net - but to no avail. The fish certainly have the upper fin when it comes to escaping from humans. By 10:00 the score was parrotfish: 100, aquanauts: ZERO - and - were they laughing at us?!?! It seemed that way. Just as we were giving up on the net to come back to Aquarius for lunch, FOUR blue parrotfish swam into a baited trap and made all of that fruitless chasing seem a little more worthwhile.
After lunch Sarah and Emma continued with their behavioral observations, but not until they got a nice show - watching James tag some of the blues that were in the trap. By the end of the tagging episode, FIVE big blues were tagged. Upon a tip from Sarah and Emma, James and Ashley headed out to the “Ridgeline,” where another baited trap had caught some fish.
Together, through a cloud of stirred up silt, we tagged one more monster of a blue parrotfish - nearly 60 cm!
Tired and hungry from a day in the sea, we four aquanauts swam home to Otter and Dominick back at Aquarius for some warm food and dry snuggly clothes. And for night number 2 of sleeping with the fishes…