Dana Nieuwkerk: Week One!


Our introductory activity was to go kayaking! We took out two-person kayaks and partnered up to paddle into the harbor. It appeared sunny with some dark clouds and a bit of rain off in the distance. Though a storm was brewin’, we took our chances. The rain came out of nowhere just after we made it out of the harbor and just barely into the open Gulf – it was a downpour. Though the rain stung and the wind picked up, making it more difficult to paddle inland, the fun was still alive in our group – water wars were had, and Castaway jokes were made; once we made it to land, everybody agreed that this was a great start to the semester, having to paddle through the storm introduced a vulnerability that was overcome by the group as a whole.

Day Two: The Ocean as a Habitat, Patterns of Associations, and Labs

The day started with power point presentations, doughnuts, and bagels. After reviewing how chemistry, biology, and ecology divide the ocean both physically (i.e. through salinity, temperature, depth, pressure, and oxygen content) and biologically (i.e. into microbes, producers, invertebrates, and vertebrates), I came up with a little mnemonic device to remember the zones that the ocean is divided into: “It’s going down, I’m yelling EMBAH!”** Epi-, Meso-, Bathy-, Abysso-, Hadal- (-pelagic is the suffix for all zones). The Epipelagic zones is also known as the photic zone, as it reaches ~200m in depth thus photosynthesis can occur because this zone receives enough light. Mesopelagic is also known as the twilight zone, as it reaches ~1000m; light still penetrates beyond the photic zone into the twilight zone, and as one descends deeper into the twilight zone, light penetration diminishes and the water turns to complete darkness. The darkness is maintained in the abyssopelagic and hadalpelagic zones, also known, respectively, as the abyss and the trenches.

We watched a 40-minute presentation demonstrating what happens to the ocean floor through divergent plate movement (which has been happening for billions of years), as shown by a wax machine. USFSP has one of four such machines; it was incredible to see an accurate representation of the formation of fault lines, tectonic plates moving in opposing directions alongside one another, the expansion of the ocean floor (mirroring what is currently occurring in the Atlantic Ocean), the development of mid-ocean ridges (i.e. the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which can be seen on land in Iceland and Bouvet Island), and even the earthquakes that occur resultant of plate movement.

 

Wax Model of Divergent Plates 

In the paleontology lab we observed >10,000 year old forams (shelled protists)! Using microscopes, we were able to see samples from the Carribean (just South of Puerto Rico) and Antarctica! We also saw a sediment core that has not yet been studied, in which the foram samples are found, as well as the inorganic and organic mass spectrophotometers that are used to isolate and identify ions, chemicals, and compounds present in samples. This data is often used to date the sample as well as provide insight about the earth’s atmospheric conditions at the time the sediment was settled. This lab was exciting because the passion of the researchers was infectious, they got me excited to look at sediments from thousands to hundreds of thousands of years ago – it was like having a first-hand account of Earth’s developmental history! I was initially caught off-guard by the girls’ description of the sediment core we were observing as “gorgeous,” but I soon realized that beyond the true beauty of the colorful layering of the sediment from years past, there was a beauty in knowing the historical value of the sediment that lay in front of me. Beyond historical context, this lab had the best decorations thus far, including science jokes posted throughout the room, a relic of a spectrophotometer system, and a hula girl that dances above the current organic mass spectrophotometer while the machine analyses samples.

Foram from South of Puerto Rico (Carribean)

Organic Mass Spectrophotometer

Hula girl atop Organic Mass Spectrophotometer

Pressure causes Styrofoam to Shrink in Deep-Sea

We studied currents and watched as salinity and temperature affected density of water and therefore depth/layering of water, mirroring what happens on a much more grand scale in the ocean. Through the model, we were able to observe upwelling of water, similar to the nutrient-rich, cold-water event (in which the water moves up the continental shelf to displace the denser water above it) that occurs on the west coast of the continents.

A wave moves through the water, the layers maintain separation

 

Hot, fresh water; cold, low salinity water; cold, high salinity water

In the remote sensing lab, we learned how to find the data collected by passive sensors on the NASA website. I found Colored Dissolved Organic Matter from January 2010 through April 2014 at 4km intervals to the west and south of FL. My graph shows a spike of CDOM in early 2011, which could be linked to the Deep Horizon Oil Spill because organisms that died throughout the oil spill would have started decomposing to produce DOM around the time of the drastic increase.

Due to our interest in phytoplankton, we were able to make an impromptu trip to the electron and scanning microscopy lab where we saw high resolution images of the tissues in a marine organism (at 80,000x) using an electron microscope, as well as the outer shell of a coccolithophore in extreme detail using a scanning electron microscope, which would scan the image every few seconds to continuously produce an accurate and high resolution image. One of the most fascinating parts of the scanning electron microscope is that it is able to identify electron energies to, in turn, identify which compounds are present in a sample. The machine provides general statistics, giving ratios of the compounds present in a sample to aid scientists in identifying which taxonomy each organism belongs. This data is useful because in using such small sample sizes it can be difficult to differentiate between members within a phylum based on sight alone, regardless of magnification.

Finally, we wrapped up our day by inspecting the adaptations of benthic and pelagic fish; the most exciting to see up-close were the deep-sea fish that I have only seen on documentaries before! However, the frogfish was the most shocking to me because of its scaleless body that feels like flesh and its 'legs,' an evolutionary advantage for sitting on the ground and attracting food then exerting minimal energy to propel forward for it. The frogfish lives on the benthos and has a ‘lure’ that resembles a small shrimp, similar to the lure seen on an anglerfish. It also has piston holes that look similar to armpits, used to siphon air and help its propulsion for food or moving from predators. Most deep-sea organisms are small to maintain a slower metabolism and a smaller surface area of cells to maintain. The jaw of the viper fish unhinges so the fish is able to engulf any food that may come its way. 

Frogfish

Deep-sea viper fish