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Friday, March 14, 2003: Leg 3, Day #3 Farallon Basin Today was one of those days you want to write home about. So I will. We launched right on schedule at 0630. NavProc, the balky
data integrating system that hamstrung us yesterday worked beautifully
today. We descended straight away into anothe |
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Sometimes, when you least expect it, things come together in surprising ways. Expeditionary research can be like that; you don't always know exactly what you are going to learn, but experience has shown us that the effort always pays off in the long run. Today, at 2,917 meters deep in the Farallon Basin two separate and unrelated lines of research suddenly intersected. Holy Smokes, nobody expected this— SPIDERS EAT SINKERS! For years Kim Reisenbichler, Rob Sherlock, and I have been measuring the amount of organic carbon that is transported to the deep-sea floor by discarded larvacean houses—sinkers. We were convinced, and our data confirmed, that this is an important energy pathway that has been overlooked by conventional sampling. The missing piece of the puzzle was direct evidence that the sinkers are consumed by animals at the bottom. This afternoon, as Karen Osborn was guiding ROV Tiburon's dive and searching for spiders, she calmly reported one carrying a sinker, and then another, and another. Soon we were cruising just above the sea floor counting spiders right and left, most of them eating what were unmistakable sinkers. I'd like to say that we all reacted to this important and happy discovery with appropriate professional decorum— but we didn't. Tonight the Western Flyer is heading back to La Paz. We finally got word that our lost trawl net is found. The ship's crew will pick it up, along with an oxygen regulating valve for Brad Seibel's respirometry equipment, very early tomorrow morning after a trip to the inner harbor in our RHIB boat. The transit will eat up about 16 hours so we probably won't be back on station until tomorrow afternoon. We'll try to get in a short, shallow dive then to test Edie Widder's low-light camera and a new idea of Bill Hamner's for how to accomplish video transects in the uppermost part of the water column. This was a busy, happy, and very successful day that I've only partially documented. Everyone is working hard and working well together. In future updates, you will hear from some other reporters, in order to provide some different perspectives on the cruise. Stay tuned... |