Sunken Secrets of the Bahr Al-Ahmar

This post was written by guest blogger Noah J. D. DesRosiers, a research colleague who accompanied the FLMNH team on the KAUST Red Sea cruise.  You can read more from him at www.naturenoah.com.

“Thousands of miles from home, hundreds of miles from our institution, and thirty miles from any solid land, I am falling slowly into darkness.  Checking my life support system, I find my breathing gas cylinder is fully charged, its valves are open, my facemask is cleared, and the needle on my depth gauge is steadily rising as the twisted crags of a monstrous limestone wall climb ever higher over my head.  I break the silence with periodic Vader-esque respiration.  At nearly a hundred feet down I push a button to halt my descent, which leaves me hanging motionless in the depths. Feeling around my shoulder, my fingers recognize and unclip a bag of sampling equipment from my rig and I kick forwards towards the wall.  I am crossing over a thousand feet of liquid blackness that falls further still beneath me, a murk laden with swirling creatures staring upwards that I’ll never know.  The light I’ve carried with me beats back shadows to reveal a gnarled jungle of swaying and crawling non-terrestrial life on the wall’s surface.  Bejeweled green, yellow, red, and silver eyes flash on and off from numerous tiny caves.  While sweeping my light across the deep reef’s surface, the apparition of a nightmarish creature stops me suddenly, and my breath catches.  With a steady gaze I reach for a jar, unscrew its lid, and cautiously move it towards the creature.  Bright red claws sway from side to side as the jar draws nearer; mysterious green eyes appear locked on mine.  Using the beam of light alone, I herd the photo-phobic creature backwards into my jar, using my last ounce of breathless concentration to carefully screw on the lid.  With the cover in place, I exhale jubilantly, relieved to respire again.  I bring the jar close to study my mysterious prize; flecked with yellow, blue, purple, and white, the almost clear body of this potential new species broods within its flimsy cage of plastic, issuing an occasional defiant CLICK!  A flash of light from a camera draws me from my reverie; Dr. Paulay is nearby.  Looking over, I see him in a similar struggle with the strange, his dive light silhouetting his head in a dim halo.  Craning my head upwards to the distant surface, the distorted outline of the moon is surrounded by the eery contours of the midnight reefscape.  I take a deep breath before returning to the search for undiscovered life, and think that surely not even astronauts feel like this.”

One such creature from the deep - a beautiful swimming crab.

The above account, of a thrilling night dive I made with FLMNH’s Dr. Gustav Paulay on a deep offshore reef wall, comes from my log of a recent expedition to the Saudi Arabian Red Sea (in Arabic, Al-Bahr Al-Ahmar).  The two week cruise, organized by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), was planned as the first of five such cruises to make a rigorous survey of the region’s marine biodiversity.  Crossing nearly four degrees of latitude, our journey took us to points south in the Red Sea around the Farasan Islands (click to see our cruise map).  17 scientists (including professors, researchers, and students) from various institutions around the world participated, including various taxonomic specialists (Dr. Arthur Anker, shrimps; Dr. Sancia van der Mejj, gall crabs; Dr. Terry Gosliner, sea slugs; and Dr. Howard Choat, parrotfishes, to name just a few).  And while coral reefs are always beautiful places to survey, the Red Sea’s elevated temperature, consistently calm weather, and exceptional water clarity made our expedition particularly breathtaking.

A profile shot of a shallow Red Sea reef near Saudi Arabia's Farasan Islands.

Numerous fossilized limestone islands and aragonite cays dot the marine landscape of the Farasan Bank.

As soon as the sun was up each morning, we’d gather around the dining/lounging/data entry area of our floating home, the 85-foot liveaboard vessel Dream Master.  Over eggs, toast, and Spam we discussed the previous day’s events, laughed at each other’s morning appearances, and planned the objective for the current day’s dives.  You wouldn’t know from our appearance that we were actually a room full of professionals with years of schooling, madly pumping out written records of our sub-sea discoveries; salt, scales, and slime are the field researcher’s haute couture.  Assuming we weren’t hastily steaming south (local operators prefer not to navigate at night) we’d be suiting up and ready for our first dive by 9:00 AM.

Gearing up: cruise scientists prepare for another rigorous day on the water.

The scientists were loosely organized into two working groups – those collecting fishes, and those surveying and collecting invertebrate animals.  Some researchers, like our cruise organizer Dr. Michael Berumen, managed to assist all teams at one point or another in their collecting needs.  Your humble narrator attempted the same, only to realize when bogged down with spears, jars, vials, bags, clips, camera, forceps, bottles, brushes, and nets – that it had been too long since I’d last hunted a fish.  Avoiding the ridicule of my quarry (I swear fish laugh at you when you miss) I decided to focus on the invertebrate collecting, which offered interesting new sampling techniques of its own.

Cruise organizer Dr. Michael Berumen of the KAUST Reef Ecology Lab shows off a prize pistol shrimp.

X marks the spot?  FLMNH doctoral student Patrick Norby digging for 'burrowed' treasure.

As a prospective student, I had heard of Dr. Gustav Paulay’s legendary collecting ability.  Now, I watched it unfold before me each evening when, after two or three dives, the sun deck of our vessel was turned into a seething menagerie of abducted marine life.  Most of the other invertebrate biologists on board had worked with Dr. Paulay before, and they prepared themselves for specimen processing like dancers stretching before an arduous performance.  Certainly the work required poise; night after night workstations arose for specimen identification, labeling, relaxation (for the specimens, that is – science is too fun to take breaks), photography, DNA subsampling, and ethanol fixation.  And the star of the show each evening was Dr. Paulay; pirouetting past each plastic container, identifying every squirming specimen, and occasionally shouting with glee, “Ah, ha! Oh ho!”  The professor’s strength is his lasting excitement, carrying us all forward, as if every night were opening night in the biodiversity ballet. 

Dr. Arthur Anker acts as triage officer as the day's collection piles up on the sun deck.

While the upper deck was awash with invertebrates each evening, the dive platform at the stern was being covered with scales.  There, fish researchers measured, weighed, dissected, and at least once “subsampled” with lemon and soy sauce, their day’s catch.  A central theme of their research focused on evolutionary phylogenies; DNA from collected rare, native, or wide-spread species will be used to determine relatedness between species or populations, and thus aid in constructing part of the timeline of evolution.  With no railings around the dive platform, they could clean up with a quick dip in the sea – and enjoy the best view!

(Fish science on the dive deck!  From L to R: Dr. Luiz Rocha, asst. curator at the California Academy of Sciences, studying endemism; Richard Coleman, doctoral student at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, studying cardinalfish phylogeny; Dr. Howard Choat, emeritus professor at James Cook University, studying biogeographic variation in life history traits; Mark Priest, research assistant of the KAUST Reef Ecology Lab; Dr. Joseph DiBattista, postdoctoral scholar in the KAUST Reef Ecology Lab, studying population genetics.)

Your narrator, once also a mere fish biologist, now spent his time primarily chasing sea slugs.  Dr. Terry Gosliner and I ended up collecting 88 different species!  Since their colors are so charismatic, it is actually common for a species to be known from a locality (from divers’ photographs or generic collections) before it has been given a scientific name.  Though we found plenty of known species, we also found others that have never been documented before!  The area is rich for discovery; I found four species crawling over rocks on the jetty the night before Dream Master even left port, and one of those was a new species!

Slugs collected icluded A) described species known to occur in the Red Sea (Stylocheilus striatus), B) undescribed species that are still known from the Red Sea (Siphopteron sp.), C) described species not previously known from the Red Sea (Odontoglaja guamensis), and D) species neither described nor previously known from anywhere (Eubranchus sp.).

Of course, no reef research trip would be complete without studying the corals, the ecosystem’s architects!  KAUST doctoral candidate Jessica Bouwmeester assisted Dr. Francesca Benzoni of the University of Milano-Bicocca to establish a specimen reference collection of Red Sea coral species.  After just two weeks, they believe their collection represents 80% of the Red Sea coral diversity, and can now be used by all visiting scientists for further study!  Dr. Sancia van der Mejj of the Netherlands’ Naturalis Biodiversity Center worked right alongside the pair, as her study organisms burrow into live coral (the gall crabs).  Dr. Michel Claereboudt of the Sultan Qaboos University in Oman meandered through the group, occasionally helping with local species identification, while pursuing his own questions on the marine biodiversity of the Arabian Peninsula.  The reef is an interwoven network of life; so too the efforts of those who toil to know its secrets.

Coral specimens to be added to the reference collection must dry on deck before being bleached, labeled, and carefully stored.

KAUST doctoral candidate Jessica Bouwmeester shops the reef for new species of coral.

Overall, it was a very productive trip for everyone.  Much work remains to be done studying all those new samples!  But those are stories for another time.  For now, I will end this post with an MVP award.  Without hesitation, the coveted title(s) go to Dr. Art Anker and his faithful sidekick Norby.  The pair achieved museum-quality photography of most of the identified specimens – over 3,000 individuals – after each full day’s diving, on a rocking boat in windy seas without a tripod, often until 2 in the morning.  Though nary a (serious) complaint was heard, poor Art spent more time talking to alpheid shrimps than people, and we do all so hope that his return to Singapore included “liquid re-integration therapy” lest he begin growing antennae of his own!  ♠

A welcome sight after a long day of diving; the entrance to our floating home.

(Many thanks to Tane Sinclair-Taylor, field technician at the KAUST Red Sea Research Center, whose exceptional photographs bring this story to life; our hard-working Filipino captain and crew, who navigated, cooked, cleaned, and kept us afloat; and Jean-Paul Hobbs, a fish researcher on this cruise whom, despite being a strikingly handsome young fellow from the University of Western Australia, I could not work into this narrative.  Better luck next time, mate!)

We're still here!

Poor neglected blog!  It's been so long since my last post, but don't worry, we haven't been slacking off.  Here, Adania is sorting Jenna's Tuamotus collection which we recently received in the mail.  Adania is probably smiling because Jenna really nailed it with the data organization and packaging of this collection.  The formalin and ethanol preserved item were separated!  And well-marked!

 Carmen also assisted with the sorting of this collection; it was a big project!  I think John might be doing some put-away to help clear out space on the table for the incoming colleciton.

 Elizabeth is kicking it old-school.  Instead of a collection generated through recent fieldwork, she is precataloging a collection donated to us from Diane deVry.  It includes some interesting specimens from some locations that are underrepresented in our collection.

This annoyingly-rotated picture (I know, bush league right?) also represents an incoming collection.  You'd be forgiven for thinking that it looks like battered boxes of sand because that's exactly what it is. Over the past several days, we have received packages containing sand from Moorea, the Marquesas, and the Tuamotus.  George has already started combing the sand for ostracods and has found some new and exciting material.  Sahale Casebolt (one of Michal Kowalowski's students) has also been notified and will soon be swooping in to look at the mollusc assemblages.

Nicole is a volunteer working with John Starmer on a project sorting and identifying land snails from Micronesian sediment samples.  In the photo below she is labeling some tiny snails in a tiny jar.

The aquariums are still going strong.  Here is Portunus gibbesii, freshly molted and either threatening me or begging for food...I'm sensing threat.

Also, check out the floor around my desk.  Are you thinking "I see nothing"?  Exactly!  There are no boxes of specimens piling up around my chair and awaiting my attention. You know what that means, Gustav is out of town. 

He and Patrick just returned to dry land from several weeks on a research vessel in the Red Sea with researchers from KAUST.  They will return to us in a few weeks with their collection...we'd better clear out some more space.

:) Mandy

From the field: In the sea, comets become stars.

I'm currently in Papua New Guinea, with John (the Slapcinsky kind) where we are participating to the expedition "Our planet reviewed" organized by the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris; and the Institut pour la Recherche et le Développement. In the following weeks, I'll try to post pictures and natural history stories about the marine invertebrates we are finding.

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When it comes to plants, it is not uncommon that a small part is used to regrow a full organism. Gardeners have used this property to multiply and spread varieties of fruits and vegetables for centuries. For many species, a small branch, a leave or a root, placed in the right conditions, will give rise to a fully grown plant that will produce flowers and fruits. The plants obtained by this process are clones of their parents, they have the exact same genetic material. Many species of plants use this mode of reproduction in nature to spread. Because there is no exchange of gametes, this is referred to as asexual reproduction.

In the animal world, asexual reproduction is not very common. As I've previously mentioned, a particular group of rotifers have championed asexual reproduction. In other groups, like colonial organisms such as corals, asexual reproduction and growth are tightly linked. The colony grows by adding new individuals. If for some reason, one or a few individuals get separated from the colony, they will be able to go on with their lives and create a new colony of their own. A particular group of flatworms (planarians, class Turbellaria) have the amazing ability to regrow a full adult animal from a single adult cell (you can read more about it here). They use these regenerative abilities to reproduce asexually. They split themselves in halves, and each part regrow what is missing.

For larger and more complex animals, it is however much more uncommon to be able to regenerate the full animal from a part. Echinoderms are an exception. Some sea cucumbers can do it, but the most striking examples come from the sea stars in the genus Linckia. These sea stars can drop off an arm and from it, it will regrow a complete animal.

In the first few days of the expedition here in Papua New Guinea, divers have been bringing back many specimens of Linckia multifora. This colorful sea star comes in shapes that does not match their names. Instead of looking like stars, they often look like comets.

From the "tail" of the comet, the arm that was dropped off, 4 arms are slowly growing back to form a new complete sea star. As the process continues, the little arms grow bigger, and they will eventually end up looking like stars again.

However, the process is not always perfect, and it is often possible to say if a particular individual is the result of asexual reproduction. If you look more closely at this sea star, you can spot that it has 2 anuses (yellow arrows) and 2 madreporites (blue arrows). This is clearly the signature that this individual is the product of asexual reproduction.

Sea stars can probably undergo asexual reproduction more easily than other animals because they have most of their organs repeated in each of their arms. Also, they don't have a centralized nervous system, it would probably be a trickier thing to do if they also had to regenerate a full brain. Because of the position of their mouth, it is also one of the first thing to be regrown, so they don't have to starve for too long before they can feed again. If many species of sea stars can regrow a missing arm, only a few can, like Linckia multifora, regrow a full animal from just an arm.

Collection Improvement

A few weeks ago, we were notified that we had received a collection improvement grant from NSF (the National Science Foundation).  In our case, what this means is that we promised to catalog a large number of specimens from our backlog of donated and orphaned collections over a period of three years and to make them accessible online, which most of our database is.  Promising is one thing, but delivering is going to take more hands...a lot more hands.  So John and Gustav went on a hiring spree and we now have a small army of part- and full-time employees to help us with our follow-through.  They have been making short work of all the projects that we hand them.  Their efficiency polishes off in a few hours projects that would take John and I weeks on our own.  For instance, this aisle:

 now looks like this:

Fortunately, there are plenty of projects to go around.

One of our colleagues, Dr. Harry Lee, whom you might remember from this post, or this one, had a catastrophe at this house.  In addition to being a encyclopedia of knowledge of all things molluscan, Harry also has an extensive collection which he is generously donating to us over the next several years.  Unfortunately, a series of storms flooded the basement in which the collection (and its associated library) were housed.  For several weeks, groups of us would periodically head out to Harry's home to help clean up.

It was a large collection, and the clean-up took months, but with our help and the help of others, Harry managed to salvage most of the collection.

There is also a never-ending string of loan requests from other researchers who would like to borrow our specimens for their own projects.  I think that we currently have 5 pending requests.  That number could actually be much lower thanks to Adania, who has been hitting the loans especially hard these past few days, entering them into the database and packing them up for shipment.

In addition to several new hires, Gustav also has a new grad student.  Patrick is really excited to be here!

No really, he's excited!  Maybe he's just jealous that Jeanne gets to process and sort photos while he fills out paperwork online for registering for classes, paying fees, preparing for class (attending and TAing), and other new-student-y things.

Our dedication is also needed by the two lobby aquaria  Water changes, feedings, water chemistry tests, water level monitoring, cleaning glass (inside and out), cleaning filter media, emptying protein skimmer, animal additions, animal releases, etc, all demand our attention.  Here is an exciting water-change action shot.

The water is flowing from that carboy in the upper right corner, so it technically is an action shot.  A picture of the time I dumped the cart and busted open the huge carboy containing the salt water would be arguably more exciting, but hopefully less typical.

The aquarium is a lot of work, but totally worth it.  We have so many cool new additions, all from Florida.  Check out Scyllarides nodifer.

She eats clams that she opens with no claws, an iron will, and her chomptacular mouth parts.  I'll try and include photos of other interesting aquarium dwellers in future posts.

:) Mandy

St. Martin wrap-up

Our last days on St. Martin were a flurry of activity.  Our last day was spent draining ethanol in preparation for our flight and packing up all our specimens and gear.  The four of us who were returning to Gainesville checked a total of 9 bags eliciting the curiosity of our fellow passengers and the patient consternation of the airport personnel.  But as the end of our trip approached we kicked it into high gear and on our last day of fieldwork we did a total of 3 dives (or snorkels).  One of those dives was on a deep(ish) sand flat, which was habitat we hadn't hit before.  We found several new species for the project and had a hard time abandoning the bottom when it was time to come up.  This is especially true of Gustav who couldn't let the idle time of the safety stop go to waste and continued taking photos while hanging on the buoy line.

The sand flat was an ideal place for employing the yabby pump.

The rubbley reef we hit after that was an ideal place for some vacuuming.

As you may have noticed, neither spot was especially ideal for taking video.  After our final collecting binge we hastily dumped our equipment into our rustic rinse tank and pushed through the processing with the deadline of our departure looming.

I spent lots of quality time at the processing table which I shared with some urchins fixing in ethanol.  You'd be forgiven for thinking I had a tray of tea on the edge of my work area.  If only this photo were scratch and sniff, then you'd know better.

François took the opportunity of some time away from the photo station to do some picking through mass samples, and have a little QT with Holothuria mexicana, the donkey dung sea cucumber.  I can't imagine why it's called that, must be its pink belly.

 Our report with the final species list is due in August, and even though we're back in Gainesville our species count continues to grow as George combs through the sand samples we brought back for him.  He has already found 40 different species of ostracod!  We were able to identify many of the animals to species while we were in the field by emailing photos to experts in the various groups, but as we go through the collection we will continue to improve the IDs and sort through lots that were fixed as bulk lots with mixed species.  I'll let you know the final species count after we submit the report.  Even at this stage it is clear that we boosted the number of species that were known from within the reserve.

 

 It was a great trip and everyone from the Reserve was a great host.  Next step, cataloging!

:) Mandy

Tiny Science- The Scanning Electron Microscope

Stichopus ossicle microphotograph.

There is perhaps some subtle irony in that studying animals that can weigh several kilograms and can be longer than a loaf of French bread require a microscope to study.  Yet this is the case with sea cucumbers as their 'skeleton' is made up of bony plates called ossicles and these ossicles are the main character used to distinguish closely related species.

Just to add another layer of difficulty to the proposition of looking at these wee bones, most of them are also clear. On the right is an image of ossicles from a Stichopus species taken with a standard compound microscope using polarizing filters.  Light is passed up through a slide with ossicles on it and it is then possible to observe the image through the eyepiece or take a photograph.


Now trying to visualize, let alone illustrate, something that is tiny, clear and in many cases three-dimensional is challenging. Think of trying to take a photo of a glass with someone standing behind it shining a flashlight at you!  Happily, here at the University of Florida several departments have scanning electron microscopes (SEMs). Now SEMs bounce electrons off the surface of objects and the imaging system provides an opaque view of the object- imagine the image you would get spray painting the glass from our previous example with white paint before taking a photo.

What does an SEM look like? Below is a picture of George Hecht, FLMNH's resident ostracodologist, using the UF Geology Department SEM to image a valve of one of the tiny crustaceans he studies. Below that is an image of George's ostracod and it is followed by an example of sea cucumber ossicles.

George takes an ostracod image with the UF Geology Department SEM.

George Hecht's final SEM image of a Pussella species.

An SEM of Stichopus ossicles from a specimen in the FLMNH collection.

The Stichopus ossicle SEM above provides a much clearer representation of the three-dimensional nature of the ossicles compared to the light micrograph image that started this article.  Look for more photos in coming weeks as we expect to do quite a bit of imaging of not only of ossicles, but other tiny organisms, or at least tiny pieces of larger organisms, over the course of this summer.

Field agents still at large

As expected, after 2 weeks of searching it's becoming more difficult to find different species.  We no longer need to pick up every brittle star we see, or every hermit crab, as they have likely already been documented.  We've had to start looking with a finer-toothed comb.  In fact, John's comb has gotten so fine that I often have to ask him which speck in the container is the snail that I'm supposed to preserve and which is a grain of sand.  We've also hit some different habitats.  Here are Gustav and François bagging a giant crab at a brackish pond that we visited.

To get here we braved cactus and wasps, both of which claimed John as a victim.  From the look of that water, and the smell, and the proximity to the sewage treatment plant, we might have been braving other things as well.

We've also stepped up the number of collecting events per day including shore dives in addition to snorkeling on the weekend when the boat is not available.  We've also been going through lots of mass samples.  Here are John and Art bashing rubble.

Art is hoping for shrimp; John is hoping not to add "hammer smash" to his list of injuries.

Our project is to document the biodiversity of 3 major phyla:  mollusca (snails, bivalves, octopus, etc.), arthropoda (crabs, shrimp, ostracods, etc.), and echinodermata (sea stars, urchins, sea cucumbers, etc.).  But who can resist the wormy phyla, especially when you find a worm like this!

This nemertean worm was over 4 meters long!  Art and Jean-Philippe collected it on our night dive, and somehow managed to get it all in one jar without breaking it.

For all this collecting, we have to keep our energy up.  At night we all gather around the dining room table...

...for processing, and keep our energy up with energetic music and frequent snacking.  But sometimes all the energetic music in the world can't sustain you, or isn't available, so you nap when and where you can.

Yes, that's a pile of tanks and regulators that Gustav is laying on, but he does have a nice buoy for a pillow.

Ever attentive to the caloric needs of active field workers such as themselves and the rest of us, François and Jean-Philippe have been keeping us very well fed.  This is in spite of our fridge and freezer being full of things like this:

That sign says "Shhhh...sipunculans relaxing."  The cold augments the anesthetic effect of the magnesium chloride.  It's just common decency, I'm sure you all do it.  What kind of person are you if you don't have worms in your fridge?

Only a few more days to pack in the biodiversity!

:) Mandy

FLMNH Earth Day Exhibition

The FLMNH research departments set up displays at Powell Hall this past Saturday to showcase the importance of biodiversity and of museum collections in understanding that diversity . Invertebrate Zoology students and volunteers showed up to help educate visitors about the wonder of (mostly) marine invertebrates and the occasional land snail. Ashley, Jeanne, Tina, Rob, John and Eva all pitched in, helping to wrangle the stuffed squid, small children and the microscope stations.

Ashley surveys the final setup.

Rob educates visitors on the wonders of crab diversity.

Jeanne, Teena and Ashley enjoy a break in the action.

Come rain or shine or wind or surf or ear infections...

So, we've been generally doing two simultaneous field excursions per day, one group goes diving and one group goes snorkeling/wading.  Usually we split up at the dock, but one day we all piled onto the boat (9 of us, plus dive gear for 5).  Here is the boat from the water, once the snorkelers have abandoned ship, with one of the divers hidden, taken while treading water without fins with a collecting bag in one hand and a camera in the other while trying to keep one's delicate ears out of the water.

Our numbers have grown.  Both Art and Zach have come to join us.  Art was immediately up to his old tricks.  Our yabby pump might still have the impression of his hand on the handle.  He has recruited Jean-Philippe to help him and they have pulled shrimp after shrimp out of their burrows.  Looks like he's got the hang of it.

Zach is here to help out and see how we do things.  Unfortunately, the weather has kept us from diving for the past several days and limited our collecting to sheltered areas that we can reach by car.  But science waits for no one so we've hit up a lot of habitats and utilized our numbers to employ a diverse array of collecting techniques.

The technique at this spot involved trying not to get shredded to ribbons by violent waves on rocky daggers of doom...also, collecting rock for bashing, and reaching brazenly into clumps of seaweed.

Right on the other side of the peninsula from this spot was an idyllic beach with sand and seagrass flats with lots of burrows for Art and Jean-Philippe.  John spent a lot of time here snorkeling through the seagrass with a sieve to see what he could shake off.

We also recently hit up some mucky mangrove habitat.  Before getting in the water, Gustav laid a crab trap.  My attempted action shot ended up as a picture of Gustav with a string in his hand, but you can use your imagination.

François tried to sneak up on crabs with a metal basket net and hand net.  Zach went through the silt and seagrass with a fine mesh net.  We all tried to keep our faces out of the green, opaque water.

So, even without diving, we've been keeping ourselves busy.  With so many people now staying at the house, the gear-explosion has reached epic levels.

Keep in mind that this is just (most of) our gear.  Some more gear, all the specimens, and all the processing stations are not pictured.

Tomorrow heralds the return of diving (fingers crossed).  We'll see what we can find!

:) Mandy