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!)

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

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

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

The first few days: hit the ground running

These first few days have been busy!  We arrived Sunday evening after a quick 2 hour flight from Miami.  We settled into our place, had a good meal and got up the next morning ready to get to work.  We have been brought on board to do a biodiversity survey of the French Marine National Park on St. Martin.  So the first morning we met with the staff there to do some general strategizing and introductions.

The meeting was conducted largely in French, which everyone speaks but John and I.  We did a lot of smiling and nodding.  I assume that Gustav and François weren't making any extravagant promises on my behalf.  After the meeting Gustav took them out to gear-mountain, which we had brought with us to the station, to demonstrate some of our collecting techniques.  Here is what brushing off an overhang into a net looks like (or maybe it's a scraper, I can't be sure).

After that we were released on our own recognizance, and we took off for some some snorkeling and intertidal wading.  Gustav and François donned snorkel gear.

John, Jean-Philippe, and I braved the sun for some intertidal wading.

Of course, in our enthusiasm we bit off almost more than we could chew, collecting over 100 species the first afternoon and turning our nice, spacious accommodations into a crowded field station with an explosion of specimens sorted into tupperware, photo equipment, anesthitizing chemicals, preserving chemicals, vials, tools, field notes, collecting gear, computers, buckets, and bags as far as the eye can see.  Behold this tiny subsample of our handiwork (before things got really crazy, before they brought us as extra table, before we started mass sampling).

What is a mass sample you query?  Instead of picking animals up one at a time we sample by habitat and then pick through later to pull out tiny or hidden animals.  One example is sand sifting, which is exactly what is sounds like.

Another is rubble bashing which is also just what it sounds like.  Here is some ideal rubble, pre-bash.

Mass samples deserve the lion's share of the blame for keeping us up processing until midnight.  They also deserve the lion's share of the credit for the fact that we've documented around 300 species in 3 days (and the reason I haven't been able to post until now). Despite these long hours, for some reason people still think we're on vacation when we head to the field...well, maybe I know the reason...

Check out all those invertebrates (plus host)!

:) Mandy