124 posts from 2009

(how's that for an enticing title?  ... accurate, at least.)  guess what, we're still at sea, still eating four times a day, still watching for whales, still sampling at night, still catching up on sleep during the day.  of course there are interesting aspects of each of these, but overall there's nothing earth-shattering to report for now.  so i'll adress them in order.
still at sea: we're at about 12°S now and have been having very windy weather, with fine misty spray constantly wafting around even the uppermost deck, some 12m above the surface.  some nights are cloudy but some have spectacular stars, and the other night the moonrise was particularly lovely - the amber half-moon floated huge above the horizon for about an hour.  we have movie nights every couple of days, and the south american contingent and i have been exchanging language lessons by writing down and explaining song lyrics, which is good fun and excellent for the vocabulary.
still eating: the food continues to be mostly good, with a few extreme exceptions.  my new un-favorite is something called 'herring in a fur coat' (and doesn't that just sound appetizing) - it's chunks of raw, salted herring under a mat of shredded/grated pickled beets, bound together with mayonnaise.  i threw up a little in my mouth just writing about it.  and chicken jello was on offer again yesterday at afternoon tea.  but let's be positive: we've also had chocolate layer cake (about 1/5 of a cake each - portions are nothing if not generous), tangerine ice cream, and many good soups.
still whale-spotting: the other day we saw a group of baleen whales breaching in the distance.  which is to say, we saw the splashes (considerable) and the spouts, which told us they were baleen whales.  we didn't see the whales themselves (that would be too much excitement), so we don't know what species they were.  but the fact that there were about six suggests humpbacks; most of the other baleen whales are solitary.
still sampling: we've had about a dozen samples in total, and have about another 20 to go.  results have been excellent - among ~200 specimens of squid and octopus, we've seen 27 species from 13 families, a very nice diversity.  the strangest are still the cranchiids (like Cranchia scabra, of golf-ball-resemblance fame) - the latest bizarre newcomer has its eyes out on stalks longer than its arms; the arms themselves form just a small rosette at the end of a long 'neck.'  there are enoploteuthids with hundreds of blue-green photophores scattered in tiny galaxies over their ventral sides, deep-sea mastigoteuthids with long tentacles covered in tiny suckers, and octopuses that are completely transparent except for the eyes and shiny, spindle-shaped digestive gland/liver.  (i will put links to information on these species when i get home, but in the meantime you can find them on the tree of life project, if you're interested - www.tolweb.org, i believe.) where we have enough material within one species, we are also saving some specimens or tissue samples for DNA analysis when we return, which will help determine how closely these species are related to other cephalopods.
still sleeping: daytime naps are critical to our night-time productivity. the siesta (or siestita, depending how much time is available) is  a near-holy concept and can be interrupted only if the napper is in danger of missing a meal.  in fact, with 35 minutes before lunch, i think i can just squeeze one in...

yesterday afternoon, we sailed across the equator.  although we joked about feeling the bump as we went across, this is actually a big deal at sea, attended by rituals and ceremonies that are specific to each ship.  those who have not crossed before (at sea; by air and land don't count) are initiated, usually in some way that involves getting dirty and wet.  and our ship is no exception.  the crew had been building up to this for a week, giving each other and the 22 of us equatorial newbies significant conspiratorial or ominous looks.  (actually, that's about all the communication we get from many of the crew, since they're russian and there's a rather significant language barrier.)  announcements were made on the ship's intercom much more frequently than usual during the morning (all in russian, of course), and we were instructed to stay away from the aft deck until 13.30, when we were to appear in, yes, clothes that could get dirty and wet.
with some trepidation, but mostly curiosity, we arrived at the appointed time - and to what a sight!  a makeshift hip-high pool had been constructed on deck and filled with seawater.  the costumed crew represented king neptune and his queen, several sirens, some very impressive sea demons (painted black from head to toe, with masks, tails, grass skirts and cuffs, and various noisemakers), plus some other apparently more random characters - a nurse, a bizarre hairdresser, the ship's captain in full uniform, and a wizard.  don't ask me, i just work here.
the initates were corralled into a roped-off waiting area and then led forth and presented to the oceanic royalty singly or in small groups, kneeling before them and receiving liberal smearings of black goo from the sea demons, plus ice down the backs, dustings of flour, strands of spaghetti hung from the ears and many other physical delights.  each person or group was given a task to complete, from playing soccer with the sea demons, to drawing portraits of neptune, to carrying the sirens around the deck piggyback.  the biology team (mercifully abused as a group) danced around the deck with the demons, ultimately forming a conga line.  some initiates also had to crawl through a large pipe/tunnel while being rolled around on the deck and receiving percussive encouragement on the sides of the pipe; apparently it was also full of potato peelings.  everyone was ultimately dumped in the pool.  (and all of this was accompanied by speeches and possibly explanations... but of course they were in russian, so it all remained a mystery to us.)  after about two hours, all hoops had apparently been jumped through satisfactorily and we were released.  i suspect that the showers that followed made a significant dent in our fresh water supply. and i still have flour in my ears.
but in the evening, there was a feast - a barbecue on the aft deck, the best meal we have had so far, with grilled chicken and pork, baked potatoes, fresh veggies (usually in short supply), pickles, watermelon, and spanish melon.  this probably sounds like a standard barbecue to you, but to us, after two weeks of a plate arriving with three food items, which you either eat or don't, this was like christmas.  quantity!  variety!  choices!  given our drooling, they probably had to hose down the deck afterward.  (on a side note about food, further to my earlier observations about sea fare, another two unfortunate meals have been presented - liver and tongue.  by extreme luck, my lovely, carnivorous roommate is somewhat ambivalent to vegetables, so we've come to an arrangement that suits us both.)
the luxurious, languorous meal continued on into the evening hours - another nice change, since we're usually in and out of the dining hall in about 20 minutes.  we were presented with certificates of our equatorial crossing (which we are apparently supposed to bring along on future voyages to avoid repeating the spectacle - but of course that will only work if future crews can read russian; for all we know, they actually say that we failed and should be initiated again next time).  a little dancing rounded out the day, and everyone went to bed full and happy - if still a little floury, and smudged black in some strange places.

on monday night we reached our first 'superstation,' a central point around which we would deploy several kinds of sampling gear.  ten superstations are planned for the voyage, with 5-10 separate samples to be taken at each - a variety of benthic, mid-water and surface biological samples, plus hydrological, acoustic and geological data.
the first net (midwater, the most likely to catch squid) was shot at about 1am and recovered around 3.30.  those who would work with the specimens collected in this sample (the fish team and ceph-heads) had rested in advance, napping during the previous day and in the earlier part of the evening, since the catch would need to be sorted and photographed while fresh.  the fish people would first sort out their animals, then pass the rest of the sample on to the other squid guy and me for second sorting; we would pull out any cephalopods, and photograph, ID, and fix them in formalin, and fix the rest of the sample as well.
when the first net was retrieved, bad luck had struck again (an earlier test run of the benthic gear had suffered two malfunctions) -  the cable designed to hold the net open while sampling had come loose at one end, so the net had essentially been towed with the mouth either slack or mostly closed. the entire sample was about two handsful.  but there were some interesting things - hatchetfish, some very toothy deep-sea fish with interesting lights and barbels, several different kinds of shrimp, and two small squid.
while the net was being repaired, a plankton net was towed from the ship's bow, but no cephs came in.  the second deployment of the larger net, however, which finished around 6am, was much more satisfactory, containing about 45 small squid and octopus, from five different families.  these included some baby argonauts, a small species of squid called Pterygioteuthis gemmata with absolutely beautiful opalescent photophores (light organs), and a ridiculous-looking cranchiid squid called Cranchia scabra, whose mantle is a transparent, perfect sphere, and covered with pointy tubercles that make it look like an inside-out golf ball.  i promise pictures when i get back!
over the course of that day (tuesday), two more relevant tows came in, bringing representatives of another three families, from the squid group i study to a couple of very strange gelatinous octopuses.  all up we had about 100 specimens, all fascinating and mostly in excellent condition (enough so to keep us wide awake working until after dinner; then we crashed, and slept a large portion of the next day as well).  so the eight days' travel just to reach the first station were worth it, and hopefully the remaining ~3 weeks will be just as good!

although the days tend to run together a bit out here, each is usually marked by at least one unique event.  the day before yesterday, it was the flying fish.  they leapt out of the water singly, in small groups or by the hundreds, to spread their huge pectoral and anal fins and glide away from the ship's bow, just centimeters above the water but for dozens of meters at a stretch.  when they caught the sun, they flashed silver, blue and copper, and they were quite lovely.  i had seen them before but never so many and never at such leisure.  they have excellent directional control (best demonstrated by the one that launched itself toward the looming bow, experienced a small mid-air freak-out and then deftly executed a tight u-turn to splash down a safe distance away).  watching whole airborne schools is nothing short of marvelous.  but i did find myself wondering whether, in their ingenious avoidance of marine predators, they ever put themselves into other harm's way.
well.
yesterday afternoon on whale watch we were joined by a young gannet.  its aerial grace was breathtaking (although it did unfortunately remind us that our friendly neighborhood owl was rather far from home and its usual comfort zone).  it wheeled and soared, scratched itself in mid-flight with its bright orange feet, zoomed past the ship and then dropped back to make another swooping pass.  and soon, it began to dive - not into the water, but skimming just above its surface, in hot pursuit of (you guessed it) the flying fish.
the chases were intense.  the gannet would make a few high passes, then drop and put on a burst of speed and rocket over the low waves; the gliding fish shortened their flights noticeably in response, and usually escaped back into aqua firma just centimeters from the pursuing beak.  of the ten or so attempts i witnessed, i believe the gannet took three unlucky fliers, diving briefly into the water following each catch and floating smugly for a few moments before rising to start again.
watching the whole sequence elicited the usual mixed feelings - the excitement of the chase, the admiration for the sleek and speedy gannet, and the simultaneous inner cheer whenever the splash of safety came just in time.  and as usual, these emotions had absolutely no bearing out the outcome - probably for the best, since i caught myself half-hoping that a higher trophic power (say, a whale) might suddenly rear its head and snatch the careening gannet in a blaze of karma.  (of course no such preposterous event transpired.   but my camera and i were ready just in case.)

sometimes the most mundane aspects of a travel experience make the biggest impression, so i'd like to dedicate today's entry to food, preceded by a brief weather report.  neptune has continued to smile upon us, with very gentle swells accompanied by light zephyrs, or sometimes more refreshingly stiff gusts, as we move further into the tropics.  it is now decidedly muggy and the air conditioning is on in most parts of the ship, although in our cabin we prefer to leave the porthole open instead.  conditions have been fairly good (in theory) for whale-spotting, although the whales are not playing along.  instead we've had flocks of flying fish and visits from several birds, including - of all bizarre candidates - an owl.  before today i would almost certainly have scorned the idea of a sea owl, but short of a mass hallucination and some very weird camera tricks, i can't explain it away. this should-be nocturnal land-dweller  flew with us for several hours this morning, in fact, and may return tomorrow, if it decided to roost somewhere on the ship.
and it was far and away today's most exciting wildlife event.  apart from the whale-spotting efforts, the days until we reach our first biological sampling stations are mostly revolving around meals.  we are fed four times a day, every four hours starting from 7.30, and all other scheduled activities (plus naps, owl-spotting, and cards) are meticulously slotted in between.
my biggest reservation about joining this cruise, after the inconvenience of its timing and the nearly six-week absence from home and the pebbles, was actually the food.  i freely admit that i am a picky eater, and i'm pretty sure the relief i felt when i started cooking for myself was surpassed only by my mother's relief at the same development.  my usual list of don't-eat foods includes (but is not limited to) onions, seafood (including fish), green peppers, ketchup, and mayonnaise, plus a few more things usually too obscure to bother including (but hey, what the heck: veal, duck, any kind of organ meat or amorphous meat product including most sausages, and beer if that counts as a food).  the list of foods that don't appear on my home menu but may be eaten as politeness requires is much longer; a small sampling would include pretty much any bread other than white bread (especially 'chunky' bread with any kind of seeds, or sweet bread products like cinnamon bagels), peas, red and yellow peppers, things with nuts or raisins in them (although i like both on their own), anything with banana or banana-flavoring other than actual bananas, and most savory-sweet combo dishes.  you can see that the probability of finding an entirely tintenfisch-approved meal anywhere outside my own home is near zero.
luckily i married a saint who is both an excellent and accommodating cook, and whose own don't-eat list is short and very compatible, consisting of seafood and the easily omittable parsley and pineapple.
unluckily, my saint was not coming along on this voyage, and i would be at the mercy of an entirely unknown russian kitchen crew for over a month, who would be cooking on a scale capable of sustaining sixty people four times a day (enough to give the strongest of constitutions pause, i suspect) .  i packed a few chocolate bars, and a bag of cookies, resigned myself to probably suspending a few of the don't-eats (fish, for example), and envisioned either making illicit friends with some kitchen staff (a working knowledge of russian would have helped here), and/or returning home in a nearly translucent state.
to no one's astonishment more than my own, i have eaten almost everything put in front of me; i blame the constant motion of the ship (it takes a lot of effort to stand 'still'), and the invigorating salt air.  the top-ranking meals so far would have to be the daily soups, a delicious creamy rice pudding, and a couple of pasta dishes.  the 'surprisingly palatable' list contains borscht; a bizarre salad of peas and chopped pickles, beets, cucumber and carrots; and several kinds of fish.  the 'consumption ban temporarily lifted by necessity' litany (so far) reads: fish, shrimp, duck, and some kind of salami that was probably mostly made of blood.  and until today i wouldn't have been able to list anything i actually avoided/refused. but the honeymoon period couldn't last, of course, and when we sat down to 'tea' (the 3.30 meal) and were faced with bowls of cold chopped chicken buried under a 2-inch layer of cold chicken-broth flavored gelatine, i drew the line.  i did flop the gelatine layer aside and at least try the chicken, but i really couldn't get over the resemblance to jelly-meat-style cat food and had to give up pretty quickly.
it was then that the unlikeliest event of the day, and perhaps of my lifetime, transpired.  the other four biologists in my team watched my chicken jell-o investigations closely (which i would like to say stopped short of turning the bowl upside down just to see if it would hold... but i can't; it did).  when i put my fork down, perhaps a little visibly green around the gills, they pushed away their untouched bowls as one and shook their heads.  and one of them said, in complete seriousness, 'we know by now that if you won't eat it, we shouldn't even try.'
well.  anyone who knows me will realize how utterly ridiculous that statement is.  i chuckled to myself for the whole rest of today.  and i am considering calling for a helicopter to take me to shore right now, because i can just tell - no matter how the sampling goes, and what cool squid we find, i'm pretty sure that at the end of the cruise i will look back at that statement as my single proudest moment.

hi.  i'm in the atlantic ocean, off northwestern africa.  in fact, this morning we officially passed into the tropics by crossing the tropic of cancer.  but let me back up a little.
on saturday/sunday i traveled  from auckland to the canary islands (that sounds so simple... but it involved auckland, lax, heathrow, madrid, and las palmas over the course of 36 hours).  the ship departed around 10pm (about two hours after i arrived), and by the following morning we were well and truly at sea, out of sight of land.
so far the weather has been excellent - partly to only slightly cloudy and very calm seas (although today we have gentle, but noticeable swell - enough that if i sit back in the chair, squarely on the floor, at the very farthest point of the roll it starts to feel precarious).
we spent the first day settling in, and all the biologists on board (about 15, covering a range of zoological fields from plankton to sponges to fish, squid and marine mammals) met yesterday afternoon for our briefing about this expedition and our planned sampling schedule.  traveling at 10-11 knots, we won't reach our first official sampling station (about 1600 miles from las palmas) for about another five days (with one 'practice' station on the way), but in the meantime my group is helping with a cetacean-spotting effort, with each of us watching for whales and dolphins two hours a day. so far one pod of dolphins at a distance and one pod of about 20 pilot whales have been spotted, but neither by me.  hopefully by the time i'm able to upload photos (december) that will have changed...
but i did see something rather unique this morning, when i woke up at 4am (hello, jetlag!  there you are!).  a glance out our porthole suggested that stargazing might be worthwhile, so i went up on deck and watched the ship's antennae swaying through orion, taurus and the pleiades for a while.  when i stood up, i realized that something even better than stargazing was on offer: our passage was disturbing thousands of pyrosomes, which were flashing underwater like muffled fireworks, sometimes one every few seconds, sometimes dozens at once.  pyrosomes look like glowing green cucumbers, and i saw them once on the rainbow warrior, but didn't have the chance to watch them like this.  so i stood by the railing for about two hours, captivated.
and then the squid started flying.
among the pyrosomes,  they popped out of the water for short, gliding hops, each flight maybe 2m, with some individuals making several jumps in a row. i didn't get as good a look at them as i would have liked - the sides of the ship are partly illuminated at night but within a few meters the light dissipates, so while i could see that something roughly squid-shaped and about 30cm long was definitely jumping, i can't be absolutely certain that they were squid.  but flying squid do exist (i studied a number of hapless specimens myself that were originally collected from ship decks, following ill-fated jumps), and these didn't fly like fish, so i'm going to stand by my first impression, darkness, jetlag and glasses notwithstanding.
i realize this is sounding like a bad acid trip, but i woke up my roommate and she can at least confirm that the pyrosomes were real.  i'm not sure whether the others believe me about the squid, since i was the only one to see them, and we were talking about flying squid just yesterday (probably seems just a little too convenient).  the conditions weren't exactly conducive to photography, but again, perhaps by the time i can put photos up here, there will be some evidence.  for now i'll leave it to your imagination.

inkspotters, there is a chance that the entire month of november will be update-free.  i am off on a five-week research trip as of tomorrow, to the south atlantic ocean.  i hear that there will be email access (kind of counting on that actually), so i hope to get a few posts up here via the pebbles.  but if that doesn't work out, i'll tell all when i return in early december.  until next time, whenever it may be!

spider friends, in honor of hallowe'en this week (well... our hallowe'en party is tonight since i'll be away next week), i bring you a truly freaky spider.  in fact, i consider this possibly the most creepy spider i've ever seen.  (and alas, like most of the really cool exotics, i haven't actually seen it myself, so i'm borrowing someone else's photo again - and the credit was extremely difficult to find, so if anyone knows of updated copyright info, please let me know.)
this is an assassin spider, family archaeidae. 

when i first saw it, i couldn't even figure out what i was looking at.  this explanation at national geographic helps.  (it's also upside down.)  doesn't it just look... wrong somehow?  it's not even the fact that it hunts other spiders, or the hapless little victim clutched in its ridiculously long jaws.  i think it's actually the neck that bothers me, maybe that and what looks like a forward-facing pair of eyes, giving it a disturbingly un-spider-like appearance.  it's like a gut-wrenching spider-bird hybrid monster. 
for further nightmates, check out this animation, one interpretation of how the archaeid may hunt and feed.  on a related page (warning, more seriously creepy-looking bugs) there are lots more photos.  and here's a really old one preserved in amber.
not a huge amount is known about these guys, and i certainly can't add anything.  there seems to be consensus that the elongated 'neck' region of the cephalothorax is what gives them the height and leverage to support those jaws, so they can kill other spiders without being in range of the prey's own jaws.  (mm, macabre.)  but from what's been reported so far, they only appear to reach a few millimeters in length (but what about the height? ... eek), so at least if you came across one and weren't specifically out to see it, you probably wouldn't notice.  see, there's a silver lining. ;)
oh, and the other silver lining, if you really hate spiders (and aren't just squicked out by this one), is that webnesday will be on hold now for six weeks while i'm at sea.

this weekend we celebrated our one-year anniversary.  we still had an outstanding wedding present (outstanding indeed), a mystery weekend away, and decided to cash it in for a getaway in celebration of the past twelve months.  (actually a week early, but who's counting?  ... er, obviously, we are.) 
our destination turned out to be a lovely bach on orua bay, at the northern tip of the awhitu peninsula.  the bach was only accessible for two hours at low tide (by driving along the beach), so once we arrived on friday afternoon, we were in for the weekend.  and it was blissful.  we only saw other people from a distance, strolling on the beach.  the manic rain-and-shine weather was perfect for reading, watching movies, beachwalking, and cuddling up on the old couch on the porch, sheltered by an overhanging roof and about 20m from the water's edge (depending on tide).  tuis sang all day and kingfishers perched on the power lines, watching for their dinner in the waves lapping below.  herons strutted and seagulls dropped unlucky seastars and shellfish on the rocks.
we discovered the long-beached hulk of a small sailboat, nearly snarled in the roots of an overhanging pohutukawa tree; under the roots was a cave fully tall enough to stand up in.  we watched the sunrise on saturday morning, then went back to sleep until 11.  we followed the decadent menu our friends had planned and provided for us, prowled the exposed seagrass beds and pools at low tide, napped, and lounged around in companionable sloth.
do we really have to wait one more whole year for the next one?