Dr. Richard Leveille, from the University of Quebec Montreal Canada, examining his sulfides after one year on the seafloor.

Getting By With A Little Help From Their Friends

Every day something else happens that makes me even more amazed at the level of professionalism on this ship. If you've been following along with the logs from this expedition, you already know how multi-disciplinary it is. With all of these personalities on the ship, you might imagine that we would have someone who plays the evil scientist character - squirreled away in his lab, keeping all of his data a secret, trying to discover the mysteries of life before anyone else can. What I've seen has been quite the contrary!

Remember the larval settlement arrays that were brought to the surface the other day for Dr. Anna Metaxas and her graduate student, Noreen Kelly? If not, where have you been? Quick! Go read the previous entries before you go any further. We'll wait for you. Promise. OK welcome back.

As I was saying, you wouldn't believe how many other uses these folks found for Anna's arrays and the boxes that held them. Part common courtesy and part recognition of how costly and time-consuming it was to retrieve these samples, everyone is looking out for each other and making offerings to each other. For example, Anna invited Dr. Craig Moyer and his graduate student Leslie Chao to collect bacteria from her larval arrays. They discovered a new technique for gathering "bag creatures" and other bacterial marvels from the equipment: the ole' gloved index finger scrape technique worked really well for them. Graduate student Amanda Bates was able to glean limpets from the arrays for her experiments. Dr. Ray Lee used the bioboxes to obtain creatures for his temperature/pressure studies in the "zoo".

Graduate student Leslie Chao collecting bacteria and water samples from the larval settlement array that was retrieved from ASHES vent field.

Dr. Bob Embley collected a few pieces of anhydride chimneys that came up in the box so that he could bring them to a colleague on shore who studies minerals. Another student, Julius Csotonyi, scraped some reddish-brown mush from the arrays and will culture it to see what this mineral-organic matrix is (possibly bacteria, but right now, it's anyone's guess). Dr. Richard Leveille had used the larval arrays to host some of his own experiments. He was excited when they were safely back on deck. Richard's experiment will help him understand how sulfide weathers or "oxidizes" in the deep ocean. Until now, no one knew how quickly this happens. But Richard suspects that the bacteria growing on the submerged samples can actually use the sulfide (or the iron, copper, and zinc metal in them) as an energy source. If this is true, his experiments should be more weathered when they are placed closer to a bacteria populated vent area and less weathered when they are placed outside a vent area.

This is just a small example of the spirit of cooperation and general effort to take full advantage of every opportunity that presents itself. As the song says, "You get by with a little help from your friends.

Visitors at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport Oregon ask, "Did
you find anything in the larval settlement arrays?"

Yes! The larval settlement arrays that were placed in high temperature vent
fields (40° C / 104° F) were teeming with colonized vent animals, but the
ones that were placed in areas that were too hot (>280° C / 536° F) and too
cold (<8° C / 46° F) had fewer animals. Hmmm. . . sounds like a story I
know. . .
Can you come up with a hypothesis for why the larvae would prefer the medium
temperature range?