This morning we woke up earlier than expected – around 2am! The air conditioning went off, and the habitat got quite hot and humid rather rapidly… Roger was the only one who seemed able to sleep in the bunkroom – it must be because he is from Miami and used to the heat. The rest of us, from more northerly climes (MUCH more northerly in my case) got up, had a drink of water and a bit of a laugh at the situation and then settled back down to sleep wherever we could find a cool spot. Janet and I settled down in front of the air vent in the entry lock, which gave quite a reasonable breeze. If anyone got too hot, there was always the water – we ate breakfast sitting around in the moon pool with our bathing suits on, which made an interesting change. Nevertheless, we are all very grateful that our techs and topside support, super-efficient as always, had the pump fixed and the temperature back to normal by mid-morning.
Meanwhile, we went on our usual morning dive. Kristen and I had duty at the chambers since poor Kristen is always delegated to do the tissue sampling (the rest of us are too cack-handed – at least I definitely am). We also measured photosynthesis with the PAM machine and left the corals out so the surface team could get their work done efficiently. Having got that done, we set off to do some more PAM-ing of wild coral colonies, down the Kamper extension line. We buzzed off down to 100 feet or so, stopping en route to gape at an enormous loggerhead turtle with a carapace the size of a kitchen table. He also stopped to gape at us a bit. That’s the good part about the Aquarius experience – the wildlife is looking in at you just as much as you are looking out at them! We got back from our PAM-ing excursion in time for 5 minutes of swimming around under the habitat. Aquarius is currently sheltering a huge school of little baitfish, so the usual crowd of schoolmaster snappers occasionally work themselves into a frenzy of feeding, which is something to see. In fact, it was quite tricky to get geared up in the wetporch this morning – there were snappers in the way of everything! We also like to poke around in the rubble, looking at the small animals that live underneath – worms, snails and brittlestars are common.
We came back in for our 4 hour rest and off-gassing period, as usual, grateful for our lunch and the nice cool temperature. In fact, most of us decided to make the most of the break by catching up on missed sleep from last night… It was hard to get up in time to stage out again, but we just about made it, and soon woke up when we got outside. Kristen and I went off down the Pinnacle drop-off line to do bristleworm transects (see Mark’s journal for an explanation as to why). There wasn’t all that much suitable habitat down there – they like loose rubble – but we found a few suitable spots. We also enjoyed the rest of the wildlife, as always. The corals are particularly beautiful out there. On one transect we came across a red-banded lobster, which was really exciting for me, since I have spent many hours underwater doing surveys for lobster, and have never seen that species before. They live on deeper reefs – and of course you don’t have much time at those depths unless you happen to be lucky enough to be in Aquarius! So we had another productive day, I think. It is now about 9pm and we are finishing up our work for the day – writing up data, cleaning slates and so on. Mark is making a habitat home movie and is currently interviewing Janet from her bunk and videoing the contents of the fridge. Some people blame nitrogen narcosis for people’s batty behaviour while saturated. We happen to know that he is always like this.
Waking up at 50 feet is a surreal experience. The faint glow of dawn from the bunk room is broken by silhouettes of predators and prey in the last movements of their dance, before the brief respite when the sun rises. The pulsations of pressure fluctuations in your ears from the waves passing overhead gives you the impression of a beating heart of a superorganism, the ocean. Aquarius itself seems a living thing, with a daily rhythm of noises and activity, a beehive for underwater workers.
Today was a good one. Jo and I were dive buddies and we “flew” the oxygen/pH/temperature profiler down deep at the Pinnacle in the morning, and at the NE waystation in the PM. By the afternoon, Jo gave me back my “profiler’s license.” The readings again change dramatically as you traverse the nooks and crannies of the reef, or let the probe linger over the water flowing out from the body of a sponge, or tuck the meter inside a crevice. The coral bleaching chambers are running well too; the new pre-mission repairs and super glue job done by topside coordinator and Ph.D. student extraordinaire Lawrence Carpenter have held up to the rigors of deployment. In fact, set up of the chambers took less than a third of the time last year, thanks to his “packaging” of wire bundles, and flotsam and jetsam in a way that makes it a cinch to unwind in situ. We are sucking up almost a kilowatt of power from the entry lock! It would be impossible to run this experiment from the surface. The temperature controllers have their own kaleidoscopic rhythm in the entry lock, as they pulse packets of heat into the chambers at their own rhythm. I can watch the current meter on the power supplies that Byron has expertly wired up pre-mission, and know by the rise and fall of the numbers that all is well on the seafloor.
Kristen and Janet collected tissue samples expertly. I was amazed by Kristen’s fine motor skills yesterday using a very sharp implement and syringe, centimeters from my fingers holding the base of the coral. She missed her calling as a surgeon. They did some PAM measurements in the AM and on their PM dive, they made some preliminary transects for bristleworms on the reef, that may or may not have a connection to coral bleaching. Some work in other parts of the world seems to indicate that this worm may be a host for a pathogenic bacterium. My student Lawrence wants to see how common the worm is around Aquarius.
Byron and Doc Cargile paid a house call between dives. Byron came to fix the cell phone and the Doc to check on physical (and surreptitiously mental) health. He seemed to indicate that we (OK, maybe just I) get weirder by the day. I don’t suppose the “joy palm buzzer” I subjected him to yesterday has anything to do with that! (Said buzzer accidentally found its way into Roger’s bed last night under the covers, which gave him a jolt and a laugh at O dark hundred. It is now his to use as he sees fit on unsuspecting visitors.)
I write this at O dark hundred myself, as the chilling unit has gone out after years of flawless service. It could be as simple as the circulating pump. According to our Papa Bear, Craig Cooper, later this morning, the experts ashore will arrive and fix, but we are up temporarily as the temperature and humidity make it difficult to sleep. As I close, Jo and Janet have decamped to the entry lock, where they look quite comfy under the blower, with their porta-bedding. I am off again to try for sleep in the bunk room.
This morning, it was Kristen’s turn to help Mark with the chambers, since she is an expert at tissue sampling, which we had to do today. This is for Lawrence’s project, which is looking at heat shock protein expression in coral in relation to bleaching. Meanwhile, Janet and I set off down the Kamper extension line to see what we could remember about oxygen profiling from last time. Measuring oxygen in the boundary layer (the water just above the reef) can tell us something about reef metabolism at a larger scale than the individual coral colonies, which we are using in the experiment. The technique is quite tricky because we have to take measurements while disturbing the water as little as possible – buoyancy control is everything! Luckily, it seems to be like riding a bike – once you learn you don’t forget. It was a really pretty area – a sand plain with individual coral heads and lots of sea fans and soft corals scattered around. We saw a cleaning station with fish lining up to have parasites removed by little cleaner gobies.
There is more profiling for us to do this afternoon, but meanwhile, my macaroni and cheese is smelling really tasty, so I will sign off here!
Today I made my first dive on Aquarius- a dive that won’t end until 10 days from now! We won’t be in the water the whole time, but we’ll remain at about 50 feet deep or deeper, both inside and outside our underwater home. This is my first saturation mission ever and it’s already been an amazing experience! We “splashed” at 10am this morning with our awesome trainer, Otter, sending us off and Byron and Joe helping to pot down a few more items needed to keep us comfortable and working for the next 10 days. Jo and I were buddies for the day. As we floated down through the water the habitat slowly came into view. There were large schools of yellow schoolmasters hugging the wet porch and legs of the habitat and a variety of other fishes hovering over the bottom directly under the habitat.
We checked in at the habitat with our mission technicians, Coop and Roger, and got to work right away. Our first task of the day was to go and find the corals that we used in November for our chamber experiments. We glued them back on the reef just outside of the habitat and tagged them so we could find them again this mission. The surface team, Randy and Lauren, then arrived and photographed each one so we would know what they looked like after having enjoyed some “time off” from our experiments! After Randy and Lauren departed we took measurements of flow direction and fluorescence (a way to measure how the photosynthetic machinery is performing in the symbiotic algae inside the corals). All the corals looked happy and healthy! Later in the day the corals would be removed from the reef and placed back in their chambers for another round of experiments over the coming days.
At around 1pm we came inside for lunch and a break until 3 pm and then headed out on an excursion line for another task- checking fluorescence of wild corals out on Conch Reef. We found lots of our species of corals to check and saw some other neat creatures too- a bunch of spiny lobsters, arrow crabs, spotted moray eels, and a really cool juvenile fish called a spotted drum, which looks kind of like a black and white miniature angel fish with really long fins that trail behind it on the top and bottom of its body. Between two dives, Jo and I spent 5 hours and 35 minutes diving today – who’d have thought I’d ever be able to do that!! The snapping shrimp sound like rain on the outside of the habitat, and are beckoning us to our bunks at the end of an exciting first day. We’ll sleep like a rock tonight…coral, that is.
Janet and I have just finished our first dive of the day (two and a quarter hours at about 110 feet), and we are drinking hot chocolate while we watch the fish out of the viewport and consider what to have for lunch…
Yesterday was our first day down here, but it was a hard working one for all that. Kristen and I went straight to work collecting baseline data on the corals that we are going to use for our bleaching experiment. They are the same colonies that we used last time (November mission 2002) – our surface team glued them to the reef at the end of the last experiment and we were really glad to see that they were all healthy and thriving. We located them all for the surface team of Randy and Lauren, who arrived promptly to take photographs of them. We soon discovered that four people diving in a small area was a little crowded – it was a bit like Oxford Street during the January sales – and since the surface team were more time limited than us, Kristen and I beat a retreat and spent a happy 10 minutes looking at the fish and little animals around the base of the habitat while they finished their work. Then we set to work with the PAM machine, measuring their photosynthetic rates. We got that done in the nick of time, and staged in with two minutes of dive time to spare. Coop gave us our safety briefing, showing us the escape lines and the emergency gazebo where we will be safe if anything bad happens to the habitat.
We all ate a swift lunch together and then set off again for our afternoon dive. Usually we leave four hours between the first and second dives of the day, but since we were staying shallow (defined as less than 95 feet!), we had plenty of time even without a long surface interval. Mark and Janet got to work setting up the chambers for the bleaching experiment, while Kristen and I set off down the Pinnacle excursion line with the PAM machine, looking at photosynthesis in wild coral colonies in relation to flow. There were a lot of healthy colonies of the species we are working on (Montastrea annularis), so we worked our way slowly down towards the way station, where we called in to contact the habitat and top up on air. It is really amazing to pop up inside an air bubble out on the reef and be able to call back to base and fill our tanks without going home. The reef around the Pinnacle way station is gorgeous, with lots of large, healthy multicolored coral colonies, as well as gorgonians, sponges and lots of fish and invertebrates.
Having filled our tanks, we worked our way back, but it was starting to get a little dark for the PAM to work well, so we decided to call it a day, and spent our remaining 20 minutes of dive time making our way slowly back home, pausing to look at a little spotted drum with streamers on his fins and some funny, colorful little cleaner shrimp. We ate dinner to the accompaniment of the fish and plankton show out of the window, and were lulled to sleep by the snapping shrimp…