Jenna and Mandy on a Boat (Part 2 of 2): Science at Sea

Now let's do some science! As I mentioned in the previous post. Jenna and I were on the trawl shift from 8-noon and 8-midnight. During each 4 hour shift there were between 3 and 5 trawls. Each trawl had 10 minutes of bottom time and several minutes going down and coming up. A trawl is basically a giant funnel shaped net with wooden doors at the front that keep the net open as it is being pulled through the water along the ocean (or whatever body of water) floor. I can't tell you too much about the physics of it, but when you pull the net up, you untie the narrow end of the funnel and dump out the critters. This is when the biology part begins. As we sorted through the critters on deck the fish could go together in one or more giant fish bucket(s), but the invertebrates were sorted by level of aggressiveness with swimming crabs and stomatopods (mantis shrimp) being separated from more delicate animals like squid.

If you're studying fish, most of your animals ended up nicely grouped at the end of the net near the closure; if you're studying invertebrates then many of your animals have limbs for grabbing, and are probably scattered throughout the net. In the picture below Jenna and are are going through the net to remove animals that didn't make it through to the tied off end, usually starfish and crabs.

Anamar needed specific information for each trawl including total wet weight, number of species, number of individuals of each species, and measurements of some molluscs and arthropods. Starfish were a common theme in every trawl, as were juvenile Penaeid shrimp (also known as eatin' shrimp). In one trawl Jenna had the privilege of counting 453 Penaeids! Animals that we were keeping for the museum went into relaxants, which were different depending on the critter in question.

Most of those animals were photographed and had a tissue subsample taken. Below are some of the lab photos we took of an anemone and a worm with a portion of the shell-covered tube he constructed.

We kept a running illustration of the "Catch of the Day," one for invertebrates and one for fish. Jenna had the invertebrate illustration well in hand, but Jason (the fish expert on board) wasn't confident in his artistic abilities so Jenna volunteered to give the fish illustration a go. It looks accurate, based on the ID, but we're not fish taxonomists so there may be a few errors.

One of our Catches of the Day was this huge Pleuroploca gigantea. It is the largest species of marine snail in this hemisphere. The ruler in the picture with him is one foot long.

Not to be outdone, during the last trawl of the trip the fish team pulled up this giant stingray, which is also the record-holding species for the Atlantic.

He was so big that they couldn't weigh him using the winch and the largest scale available on the boat. All we know for sure is that he weighs more than 100 lbs. He was so big that the crew all gathered at the back deck to get a glimpse of him, although since it was April Fool's Day some people didn't believe the report when they heard it. In contrast to my usual liberal application of random gender assignments to the animals we caught, we actually know that this guy was a male due to his claspers. The females get even larger!

So after our evening shift we usually stuck around the lab and fished up the processing of the specimens for the museum: relaxing, photographing, subsampling, fixing. After our morning shift we pitched in with some of the other activities. During the 12-8pm shift there were several different sampling methods being employed. One of these was a bottom grab which got two different treatments. One sample was homogenized for chemical analysis, and one was sieved and bagged to be sent to another institution. Jenna and I did some sieving to give the usual sievers a dinner break.

We would also take turns catching up on sleep and manning the radio so we could root through the leftovers from the chemistry sample. We found some cool stuff in there including lots of worms and a cool sea biscuit.

Also during this time they would deploy the CTD. I'm sure its full name is very descriptive of its function, and might be useful for me to know now. In any case it took water measurements such as salinity, temperature, depth, current. It can also take water samples, but we didn't take any on this trip.

A few people also did some diving to get a direct observation of the bottom conditions in certain areas. Here they are waiting for the smaller boat to be set in the water to take them to the dive site.

They also had a cool camera thing that they could send down to the bottom that would take video footage of animals within the sediment using refraction, but it's a sensitive piece of equipment and opted not to work this time, although much of the last day was spent staring at it in an attempt to bend its functionality to our will. This picture was taken when we had nearly accepted defeat.

So we had a great time and saw a lot of really interesting stuff! We also found some animals that are new to the collection. Thanks to Anamar and the EPA for including us (hat tip to Jason). Hopefully we can get in on another trip in the future. In the group shot below that's not the OSV Bold in the background; it's just a boat that happened to be at the same dock.

:) Mandy

Jenna and Mandy on a Boat (Part 1 of 2): Life at Sea

So this week (Sunday through Friday) Jenna and I accompanied a team of scientists from Anamar, an environmental consulting firm in Gainesville, who had been hired by the EPA to do a survey for a future site for dredge dump materials. Part two of this post series will describe the work we did, but first I want to describe our life at sea on the OSV Bold.

Any sailor knows that safety is of the utmost importance on a boat. If something hits the fan it's important to know that you can remain calm, get to your muster station, and look good doing it. Enter the Gumby Suit:

The Gumby Suit (or Immersion Suit if you're a stickler) is designed to keep you alive if you are so unfortunate as to find yourself in the water for any length of time. I personally felt like I was drowning in the suit itself and was grateful they didn't feel the need to add water for this particular exercise.

In addition to the safety briefing, during our first day at sea we also got our shift assignments. Jenna and I were on the trawl team and our shift was from 8-12 both a.m. and p.m., additionally chipping in when extra help was needed or when people needed relieving at meal times which were from 7-8, 11:30-12:30, and 4:30-5:30. Of course food was available in the galley and break room 24 hours a day as Jenna and I quickly discovered.

Several crew members told us about the ice cream available in the freezer. We thanked them, but didn't feel the need to tell them that we had discovered at least one of the ice cream stashes within a few hours of our arrival.

Also within a few hours of our arrival (or rather our departure from the dock)...seasickness. I did not capture on film the image of me vomiting over the side of the boat (collective sigh of relief), but afterwards I lay down for a few hours and was fit as a fiddle for the rest of the trip. Unfortunately my bout of seasickness did cause me to miss one meal, but I more than made up for it over the course of the trip. Throughout the day Jenna and I made frequent trips to the galley for what we termed "fortifying cookies," candy, coffee, and water. This room really was central to our seafaring life. The chef was amazing and we didn't want her to feel unappreciated.

In fact, Jenna and I probably spent more time in the galley and the wet lab (where we did most of our work) than we did in this room.

And it had nothing to do with the fact that over the course of the week the room became filled with clothes covered in fish scales and invertebrate goo, and the cryptically named "vomit sweatshirt." We were just really busy! The room was actually very nice and pretty spacious for a ship cabin. To the left of the above picture there was even a desk where we could catch up on some informative reading.

As you can see Jenna and I took our new roles as sailors very seriously. I'm thinking of getting a subscription to WorkBoat to add a touch of the sea to my landlubbing existence. I think that the rest of the crew could tell how committed we were, because after a brief tutorial...

They let Jenna and I drive the boat! Although I think the engineers in particular were unimpressed with our driving. During my turn at the helm they called up to the bridge to make sure that everything was ok and that the chief mate (who was on shift at the time) hadn't been hijacked or drinking on the job.

Also during our last days we did manage to grab a few moments of downtime on the steel beach on the bridge deck. In this next shot, the part of Jenna and I will be played by our echidna traveling companion.

We had a great time, but we also worked hard. Next post I'll talk about the work that we and the other scientists conducted during the trip. In hindsight, maybe I should have posted about the work part first, but I was just trying to set the stage. I promise we did work Gustav!!

:) Mandy

Invertebrates in the news #4 - Speciation in reef hermit crabs

The journal Science has a section entitled "Editor's choice" where they feature recent papers that caught their attention. This week, they chose to highlight a paper written by Machel and Gustav that looks at the patterns of speciation in the genus of hermit crab Calcinus.

Calcinus lineapropodus (photo by Gustav Paulay)

By combining information about the genealogical relationships of 56 species (almost all the species known in this genus as well as 9 undescribed species) and information about the color of the species and where they live, they were able to discover some interesting facts about the evolution of this group.

• Closely related species have similar shapes but they can have very different color patterns. This means that color patterns evolve rapidly and that they can be used to tease species apart. This also suggests that the hermit crabs themselves use these color patterns to recognize the members of their own species. So, the apparition of new color patterns could lead to new species. To illustrate this rapid evolution in color patterns, compare these closely related species that live most of the time on branching corals: Calcinus minutus (from Guam), Calcinus rosaceus (from Oman) and Calcinus nitidus (from Moorea).

Calcinus minutus from Guam (photo by Gustav Paulay), Calcinus rosaceus (photo by Machel Malay), Calcinus nitidus (photo by Gustav Paulay)

• Isolated islands and archipelagos such as Hawaii have several endemic species of Calcinus, which suggests that the formation of new species (speciation) happened on the edges of their geographical ranges.

• Most species of Calcinus are found in oceanic areas in particular in the Western Pacific and in Polynesia. This is different from what is known for other marine invertebrates. Indeed, in corals, fishes, and various groups of mollusks, most of the diversity is found in a more continental area called the "coral triangle" (from northern Australia to Indonesia and Papua New Guinea). To illustrate this difference, compare the 2 maps below. The first one shows the distribution of the diversity for the hermit crabs of the genus Calcinus whereas the map on the bottom is the same kind of map for the cowries. The unusual diversity pattern found in Calcinus highlights the importance of the ecological and historical processes characterizing each group of organism that have led to their current geographical distribution.

Distribution of the species richness of the genus Calcinus. Contours represent 4, 10, 13 and 17 species. (from Malay & Paulay 2010)

Distribution of the species richness of cowries. Orange to red colors represent high number of species (above 64), green to yellow colors represent intermediate number of species (between 40 to 64), light blue to dark blue represent low number of species (between 1 and 40). (from Paulay & Meyer 2006)

Links:

• Editor's choice. Science. 327 (26 March 2010): http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol327/issue5973/twil.dtl#327/5973/1555-c
• Malay MC, Paulay G. 2010. Peripatric Speciation Drives Diversification and Distributional Pattern of Reef Hermit Crabs (Decapoda: Diogenidae: Calcinus). Evolution. 64-3:634-662. DOI: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2009.00848.x
• Paulay G, Meyer C. Dispersal and divergence across the greatest ocean region : Do larvae matter ? Integrative and Comparative Biology. 2006;46(3):269-281. DOI: 10.1093/icb/icj027

AAUS Training

In order to dive under the auspices of the University of Florida, divers must undergo training to become AAUS certified Scientific Divers. Art, François, and Nat all needed this training for their future field endeavors. In order to keep your status current you must complete 12 dives a year. Jenna and I had fallen short (way short) so we needed to re-checkout with Cheryl, the Dive Safety Officer (DSO) of UF, so we tagged along on some of their dives one day.

Here are the three trainees (Nartçois) preparing to descend to 100 feet. We were diving in a spring that day and the water was quite cold, so they're all rocking a hood.

Although AAUS certification is not a NAUI-card-having designation of diver, there are several aspects of the training, one of which is to become a Rescue Diver. Below, Jenna plays the role of a tired diver and François gives her a hand with a fin push.

Although it it seems pretty clear from this next picture that François is attempting to drown Nat, he is actually practicing getting them both out of dive gear while towing him to the exit and administering rescue breathing.

Below is a short video of Nat performing the same exercise on Art, either saving his life or drowning him. You be the judge.

Also key to scientific diver training are navigational skills. Here Art and Nat prepare to navigate an underwater square at a depth of 30-40 feet using a compass for direction and a pre-determined number of fin-kicks as the distance.

You know what dive training means...more fieldwork! And hopefully some more blog posts from the field, replete with showy animal photos and calendar-worthy scenery.

:) Mandy

...but we've been really busy

I know it's been way too long since my last update, but just wait till you see all that we've had going on and I hope all will be forgiven.

The Shrimp Mafia has disbanded with Ivan and Sammy returning to their respective countries of origin leaving Art to describe new species on his own. But not to worry, Magali Honey (Maggie) is visiting and will be here for a few weeks. She came just in time, I think that by this point the hotel we use has started factoring our visitors into their monthly budget. Here are Machel and Maggie bonding over talk of barnacles and sea cucumbers.

Also during the month of February, prospective grad students came to visit the department. One of the women who came to interview with our (Gustav's) lab is Christine Ewers. I didn't capture her on film this time (I was sick, another reason for the lack of posts, do you forgive me yet?) but she has been on a R/V Bellows field trip with us in the past. Here are she and Julie patching up a trawl net.

Another new arrival who is here to stay (at least for a few years) is Hsiu-Chin Lin. The newest member of the team, she is joining us a post-doc. She has a lot of genetic expertise that we are anxious to add to our collective knowledge.


In addition to all the arrivals and departures. We also participated in the 2010 UF Marine Biology Symposium. Many of us presented talks or posters of our various and sundry research interests. My data were a mess and needed a lot of time and attention to polish up enough in time to present at the symposium. Other things that I might have been meaning to do (i.e. posting to this blog) may or may not have fallen to the wayside as a consequence, but I'm sure you understand. At the conference, the cuke team swept the undergraduate awards with Julie, Laura, and J.D. all winning prizes. Here is a glimpse of Julie's first place presentation with some nice ossicle pictures. Try and soak in the knowledge.

So in addition the the grant-ending other-work-neglecting catch-up to do, we now have our symposium-readiness other-work-neglecting catch-up to do. Sarah has been doing a lot of cataloging and label matching. Here she is shelving a freshly labeled box of something. This is the shelving where we keep the wet (ethanol preserved) collection. It's not as creepy as the lighting makes it look. You should see the herpetology collection!

Jenna has also been tackling some label matching, but it seems like there's always someone wanting a Geneious tutorial. We've been getting back so much sequence data from the Smithsonian that everyone wants to get to work on building some trees for their study group. One of the latest petitioners is Sea.

Fred has also begun work on his Thailand collection and has spent some time in the range this week sorting through trays of land snails that's he's collected to prepare them for cataloging.

Also doing land snail work, Chelsey and John have been working on the many, many (many, many) lots from Madagascar. Chelsey may be employed full time over in the shark range, but she keeps coming back home to Invert Zoo, feeling the pull of the Acavidae and their messy taxonomy, and possibly the snack drawer and its ever-changing bounty.

I'm also pleased to report that I've made serious inroads into the desk blockade that has been constructed around me. I would say that things are returning to normal, but I realize that I really have no standard for comparison. What can I say, we're a happenin' joint.

:) Mandy

Invertebrates in the news #3 - A new tree of life for the Arthropods

You may not have heard of the word "arthropod" but you are certainly familiar with at least some members of this group: the insects. While insects make arthropods the most diverse phylum, arthropods also contains many other groups. Arthropods can be tiny (fleas) or fairly large (lobsters). They live in a variety of habitats: from the polar waters (krill) to the top of the trees (beetles) through arid deserts (scorpions).

On top of this diversity, arthropods are also economically important. For instance, mosquitoes carry the parasite which causes malaria, bees pollinate many of the fruits we eat, and the fruit fly is a model organism for genetic and medical research. Understanding how different groups of arthropods are related helps understand their evolution.

Scientists have been trying for a long time to understand how the different groups of arthropods are related to each other using morphological characters. This is not an easy task because arthropods are an ancient group. They appeared some 550 million years ago and all the extant groups were formed at least 200 million years ago. This is plenty of time to accumulate morphological differences which may mask the true relationships among extant groups.

This week, the journal Nature published a study that used an unprecedented amount of information found in DNA to understand how the major groups of arthropods are related. The results elucidate some long-debated issues about the relationships among various groups of arthropods. I highlight here two main findings.

Simplified Arthropod phylogeny based on Regier et al (2010)

First, the authors confirm the results of previous DNA-based studies showing that the myriapods (the group which includes the centipedes and the millipedes) are not directly related to insects, and thus, that these two groups invaded land independently. It has been proposed that myriapods and insects were closely related because they both used special organs to breathe air. Furthermore, the myriapods are not directly related to the Chelicerata (spiders, scorpions, horseshoe crabs, mites, ticks) but belong to the Mandibulata (all the other arthropods).

A pycnogonid from Lizard Island, Australia

Second, the closest relatives to the insects are a group of rare arthropods that the authors grouped under the new name of Xenocarida ("strange shrimps"). This new group unites two classes of arthropods that have only been recently described. In particular, the Remipedia were described in the 1980's and are only known from a few places (the Bahamas, the Canary Islands, Mexico and Cuba) where they live in caves. This illustrates the issue of what is called "taxon sampling" when scientists try to infer the relationships among organisms. If the authors didn't include these groups, the conclusions of their study would have been different, and some other arthropod group would have been mistaken for being the closest relatives of insects. Furthermore, it also illustrates the importance of habitat conservation and field work to preserve and discover species that can help unraveling the tree of life.

Link to the study:

• Regier et al, 2010. Arthropod relationships revealed by phylogenomic analysis of nuclear protein-coding sequences. Nature.

More blog articles about the study:

• The most ambitious arthropod phylogeny yet -- by Alex Wild at Myrmecos blog
• Blind Cousins to the Arthropod superstars -- by Carl Zimmer at The Loom

New Arrivals

After the grant report was due, we all heaved a sigh of relief but didn't stop to rest on our laurels. Instead we hit the ground running. Sarah and Jenna pitched in to help me take care of some of the stuff on and around my desk, mostly the ever-growing piles of re-IDs. Thanks goodness for their help...

Am I laughing or crying behind subsample mountian? It could go either way. Oh the humanity! But we finished the grant right? Why is my pile of re-IDs still growing? Pictured below is why.

Art has abandoned the Nart consortium and joined the Shrimp Mafia. He has recruited Sammy DeGrave and Ivan Marin to work with him on shrimp identifying. They will be visiting us for several weeks.

Remember that little trip to Heron Island that Rob, Sea, and François went on? Well those specimens (seven buckets worth) arrived from Australia to make the week more interesting. Since it was so long in transit without ethanol it needed our immediate attention. Jenna did the lion's share of the unpacking and rehousing.

But I (along with Sarah, not pictured--don't worry, I make up for it later) totally helped.

There was so much material that we had to make multiple trips to the offsite ethanol storage facility (hereafter known as the Ethanarium) to refill our supply back at the range. Here is Sarah multitasking by refilling our ethanol carboy and getting a tricep workout.

Sarah has also been doing some work in the lab with Jodi, a grad student in Entomology/Nemotology who is doing some land snail work with John. Even though we send much of our DNA work to the Smithsonian, for our more immediate and smaller-scale needs we can still do extractions here. Sarah has been showing her our procedures.

Plus, we also rested on our laurels. In the picture below you can see the celebratory feast we prepared and a portion of the celebrants (from right to left): John, Nat, Gustav, Sarah, Sea, Mika. But what's that poking out from behind the tree?

Puppies! It was also Mookie's birthday on Feb 1st. End of grant and puppy birthday, what better reason to feast! Gustav, Sarah, and I all brought our pups: Puka, Motu, and Mookie.

Now back to work!

:) Mandy

Invertebrates in the news #2 - David Liittschwager's images in National Geographic

For this second edition of invertebrates in the news, I chose to follow up on a previous post. In early December, Seabird reported on David Liittschwager's visit in Moorea. As announced at the time, the pictures he took during his visit are published in the February issue of National Geographic.

The photographs illustrate a feature article written by E. O. Wilson that emphasizes how important -- and yet little known -- are the small organisms that live in the soil, in the sea, around us. To unravel some of this diversity, David Liitschwager went to six different ecosystems around the globe, and carried with him a green metal-frame cube. At each location, he observed and took pictures of all the organisms he found in his one cubic foot cube. For each location, there is also a video showing how he proceeded.

If so many forms of life can fit into one cubic foot, it means that in order to fully appreciate the diversity of life one must also look closely for the smaller organisms.

Grant-ed

We (meaning Gustav) had a grant report due on January 31st so we have spent the past few weeks making sure that we had dotted and crossed our i's and t's respectively. A grant report is often required at the end the term of a grant, and it is our opportunity to show the funding agency how the money was spent and how we kept all the promises that we outlined in the original grant application. In our case this called for some last minute plating just to make extra sure that we would have as many as we promised. Lots of people got in on the act. Jenna is a veteran plater, and you've already seen her mad skills immortalized in digital format. Less accustomed to plating, but still lending much-needed manpower to the task, is the Nat/Art consortium which we have named Nart. Nart tag-teamed several arthropod plates.

Because mollusc shells are sometimes broken (either accidentally or by necessity) to get a subsample of the animal's tissue, we photograph the specimen before sampling so we have a photo voucher of the intact animal. Sarah is the speediest photographer in the west so she often manned the photo station.

While some of us spent countless hours plating, it wasn't the only activity in the range. It's a new semester so Gustav put out the call, "CUKE TEAM! ASSEMBLLLLLLLE!" is what I'm sure the email said. And assemble they did. Here they are meeting to discuss strategy. I'm pretty sure that the strategy involves a lot of ossicle slide preparation on the part of Julie, Laura, and JD.

Several members of our lab also went to the Florida Union of Malacologists meeting in Sanibel this past weekend. John, Gustav, Fred, Jim, and Chelsey all presented talks. They are also featured in the group photo, along with several people whom you might recognize from their visits to the museum.

In the face of the plating challenge, I have been neglecting my desk for the past week. Emails with work requests have piled up as well as boxes of vials and supsample tubes to be cataloged or renamed in the database. This is what faced me on February 1st.

To those who would be tempted to suggest that my desk always looks like this I would argue that flinging accusations around doesn't empty my desk any faster, and if you're not part of the solution then you're probably part of the problem. Even though February has just begun, we have quite a month lined up. Stay tuned.

:) Mandy