We're back!

We finished up 3 days of very successful diving at 3pm on thursday and sailed to Taku harbor to overnight, 2 hours from Juneau but before the Taku inlet, a notoriously windy area. Our last day was extremely windy, 50mph gusts in the fjord, along with freezing spray, made for a cold last day of diving and a bumpy ride home. The project was a great success, we've returned with all our tagged coral colonies sampled, lots of macro images and four live colonies to keep in tanks at the Auke Bay Laboratory to look for spawning. A busy, but fun, three days of diving. 

We awoke in the protected Taku harbor yesterday morning to a tsunami warning. Just 2ft in our area, but as we got closer to Juneau we heard news of just how devastating the earthquake and tsunami have been in Japan, and our thoughts go out to all those affected. 

Packing, Preparing and Waiting.

After arriving late last night into Juneau, today was a full day, packing, preparing and now, waiting. You  can prepare for months, even years, for a science expedition, but one thing you cannot predict is the weather. A very unusual spate of high winds has hit the Juneau area, which means our research vessel is stuck in Petersberg, its homeport (~150 miles south) unable to come and collect us on Monday as planned. So for now, we're all on standby, and hope we're not delayed by more than a day or two. 

Today I went down to the Auke Bay Laboratory, to catch up with Bob Stone and start to get chemicals and equipment together and packed. It's been a busy day, but we've accomplished a lot already, most of the chemicals are diluted and aliquoted, and most of the science equipment is packed. Tomorrow we'll finish up the last of the chemicals, go through diving gear and hopefully get a lot of the equipment down to the docks in Juneau, so as soon as our boat arrives, we'll be ready to go. 

Here are some photos of the day. 

View from the Auke Bay Laboratory. Despite a cloudy morning, the sun came out in the afternoon, highlighting the mountains. Auke Bay is a protected bay north of Juneau, so although the winds were blowing in the south, here it was mostly calm on the water. 

Starting to get gear together and packed. It's important not to forget anything, as once we pull out of the dock, we have to make do! 

Another thing I got to do today was check in and sample the live corals we have growing in the flowing seawater laboratory. These are corals Bob and Jennifer collected in December, and they're doing great! 

A close up of our study organism - Primnoa pacifica

This beautiful pearlescent skeleton is the reason many of these species are called 'Precious Corals' and have been harvested for jewelry and ornaments. These corals grow very very slowly, so a few inches of this beautiful skeleton could equal tens or even hundreds of years of growth. Collection of these corals in many places is now banned, as they grow so slowly, they could never recover from the damage caused. 

The weather was so beautiful this afternoon we went on a quick trip to the Mendenhall Glacier after work. Stunning, and so different from September when I was last here. This is a tidewater glacier, meaning the glacier hits the lake - only this time of year the lake has 3ft of ice on top, so it looks like the glacier ends up on land! 

Update

Things are certainly moving right along with the Primnoa pacifica samples from Septembers cruise. In total we tagged 40 colonies, collected water samples for carbonate chemistry and set out environmental sensors to collect temperature and salinity data year around - quite the feat for just 4 days on site! Though most of the samples will be sent to Maine to await my arrival there, I did bring some back here to Hawaii to analyze and get a sense of what is going on in the fjords!

These corals are proving to be pretty interesting! The primary goal of this first set of samples is to find out which ones are males and females for sure, to make sure we samples the right ones when Bob and Jennifer go back in December. So far they've proved to be tricky - some of the ones we thought were males are actually females and vice versa! Luckily there is nothing like a good scientific puzzle! 

Image above - Top left - SEM image of the tip of a branch - those are three polyps all facing us, much more heavily armored than I was expecting, see all those plates! Top right - a large and small polyp (a) and an area on the outside of the coral where they seem to keep their larvae (bottom left picture). And bottom right - lots and lots of eggs in a female coral! 

Aloha Dr. W. 

Red Tree Coral

Photo by Bob Stone

Primnoa pacifica, the Red Tree Coral is a coral usually found at depths of over a few hundred meters in the North Pacific, however in the Alaskan fjords often grows much shallower, within a few tens of meters. How does it do this? We're not entirely sure, and call animals that do this, often in high and low latitude fjord systems, deep-water emergent species. It could be because fjords in high and low latitudes are cold like the deep-sea, the fjords often have a freshwater layer on top creating darkness below and often these systems are high in nutrients and have the fast currents that cold-water corals like.

The exact reasons are unknown, but it does present a unique opportunity to study these corals in a much more accessible place. Usually to work on deep-sea corals we have to get expensive equipment - submersibles or ROVs, which typically run at over $30,000 per day, so when you are lucky enough to get one, you don't get it for very many days! Cold-water corals that grow shallow can be sampled by SCUBA diving, and they can be sampled year around, just like you can with shallow water corals. To get a good idea of how corals reproduce you need samples from more than just one time of year - think of animals like birds, who lay their eggs in the spring. Well some corals can be the same, just reproducing once a year. If you took just one sample in the fall though, you would miss that entirely, so you need to have more than one "season", and preferably all seasons, to be able to really know what is going on.

In the deep-sea I am used to puzzles, we get samples here and there, from populations separated by many miles, yet because of the scarcity of samples I have to lump them all together to get a picture of what is going on. That works to a degree, but you're always missing something and there are always caveats with your data.

The Tracy Arm Primnoa pacifica represents my nirvana as a cold-water coral reproductive biologist - an area I can get samples, 5 times in a year, from 30 colonies, all in the same place, all at the same depth - that NEVER happens with deep-sea samples. So this is an exciting project for me - what will we find? Tune in to find out, though i'll only be joining the diving crew on this first expedition (to make sure we tag enough females and males), there will be 5 expeditions I'll be getting samples from over this next year. This first cruise leaves on Tuesday, after the long weekend.