|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|||||||||||||
|
Journal 4 -
Beth Hinchey: Mission Day 2: Tuesday, November 12, 2002
Janet and Beth: The corals are now in the chambers and the bleaching experiment is up and running. The surface team visited us today on the bottom and collected tissue samples from the corals before they went into the chambers. They photographed the corals as well. They did a great job! We are looking forward to seeing them tomorrow. This afternoon, Jo and Janet went out the "5th leg" excursion line (this line runs out onto a beautiful, pristine area of reef behind the camera that looks at the starboard side of the habitat) to collect profile data (see picture). We saw some amazing creatures…including another big, green moray eel, a little octopus guarding its den entrance, and little tube worms in the sand. It began to get dark while we were finishing up or transects and we saw the coral polyps begin to emerge to feed on plankton! We even saw a lot of bioluminescence caused by dinoflagellates in the water! It was like seeing little flash bulbs going off all over the reef! After we finished our transect measurements, we returned to the habitat and checked in with Jim, and went back out onto the "battery pod deck", adjacent to the floor of the wet porch (which is at our "storage depth"). We have unlimited bottom time at this depth (45 feet) since this is the depth we are living at in Aquarius. As long as we don't dip below the deck off the wet porch, our dives at storage depth don't utilize our available bottom time. Then, after waiting the 12 hours required after our last dive today, we can utilize our maximum allowable bottom time tomorrow. The lights around Aquarius attracted a lot of planktonic organisms. We laid on our backs and looked up at the lights and watched the wide array of larval fish, swimming worms, and crustaceans with wonder. It was truly amazing! We look forward to nighttime again! When Beth and Mark finished setting up the chambers tonight, they headed over to a nearby portion of the reef to take some fluorescence measurements with a remarkable instrument called PAM. Manufactured by an Austrian company named Walz, this instrument measures Pulse Amplitude Modulated fluorescence. Tonight we used PAM to measure fluorescence in dark-adapted zooxanthellae in the coral, and during the day we use it to measure the light-adapted cells of the corals in the chamber. This is an important measurement, as we can learn how the bleaching process affects the function of these cells. P.S. Tonight for dinner we all had lasagna- it was DELICIOUS! We worked up big appetites diving after diving for 6 hours today! We ate a lot of hot soup too- even though the water temperature is about 85 degrees; we lose a lot of body heat and need to warm up often. |
Mission
Date: November, 2002 Mission Summary Aquanaut Profiles Expedition Journals Mission Pictures |
|
|