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As part of this NSF project there were two trips to the Antarctic. The first trip happened
January first to mid February. This is the trip we got back on the beginning of the year
which came in and went around this region of Antarctica into the Bellingshausen, Amundsen
and Ross Seas. We have another trip that we're going on November
into December and we will actually come again from South America to the peninsula. We'll
have to stop at a U.S. base station, the Palmer station here, and then we'll work our way
south. That trip is probably going to be about five weeks.
It was an amazing experience. I had been on cruises before. I had been on cruises around
Iceland and Norway and this was a completely different and maybe better experience. It
was really amazing to be in complete isolation for so long, and the animals we saw, you know,
it's a very very rarely seen endemic fauna of animals. So it was just amazing from both
kind of a we were in the middle of nowhere, no humans around, and all the amazing biological
diversity we saw, not to mention the penguins and the icebergs and all that really cool
stuff too. So a typical day, really there's no such thing
as a typical day, but we were doing a lot a lot of sampling. Ship time is very expensive
so any time there was an opportunity to be collecting samples, that's what we were doing.
So we used what is called a Blake Trawl which is a big metal frame with a net on it that
gets dropped over the back of the boat, trawls along the bottom of the ocean, and it come
up and if you're lucky it's nice and clean and there's just clean, non-damaged animals,
but sometimes the bottom's really muddy and you get this huge bag full of mud that you
have to sieve through for hours and hours and you have to get the hose out. So sometimes
we were on deck for a long time, sometimes it was pretty quick, but basically sampling
nonstop. The ship works 24-hours, there were two different teams, and one of them was going
at all times basically. We were looking at a variety of invertebrate
animals, so we were working mostly with bottom animals, so we got starfish, we got some shrimp,
we got nudibranch snails, sponges, things like anemones. So really it's sort of a smorgasbord
of invertebrate animals. It's amazing because being an invertebrate biologist when you go
there, you see all these animals, and they come up. You're sort of like a kid in a candy
store. It's amazing the diversity of things that you see.
On the Antarctic cruise we were able to use a piece of equipment known as a megacore.
It has twelve almost like PVC pipes going around and it basically just punctures the
sediment and keeps it in the stratification that you find it on the sea floor, and using
suction it keeps that stratification when it brings it up. Then that way I can cut it
off at certain levels and look at who's there in the community using an environmental DNA
extraction approach. Basically extracting whoever's there in the sediment, and using
DNA look at who's there in the community. So you never know what you're going to get
on these trips which is one of the things that's so exciting about them, and I went
in expecting to find huge numbers of this one particular species that we have in the
lab and that we have from past trips, from Dr. Halanych's last trips down there. We found
one, and I was expecting to get tons of them, so we had actually collected some preliminary
data on this species expecting to have a lot of them and we didn't get any really. So hopefully,
we're going back to the areas where they had sampled before, so if we get that species
in greater numbers there, that could be really helpful for me for future projects.
War Eagle!