(Click on the images to see them full size)

Until this morning, the weather has been calm and beautiful. At the moment though it's absolutely pouring buckets of rain.

This is from an experiment that is being run by Sandra Brook from Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution. About the incubators...

One of the nice parts of working on deep-sea hydrothermal vent cruises is the diversity of research that is conducted on board. In addition to the research looking at the adult biological community, there are two people on board who are focusing on the developmental biology of Riftia pachyptila. Allison Green from the University of Southern California and Sandra Brook from Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution spend their days working on tubeworm young that are anywhere from a few minutes old to thirty days old.

Adult Riftia that have reached sexual maturity are collected from different sites in the vent field and brought up the surface. Allison and Sandra dissect the worms to remove eggs and sperm from the tubeworms. The eggs and sperm are mixed together and allowed to sit long enough to just begin development into embryos.

From there, two things happen to the new embryos. Allison puts the embryos into small, pressurized containers that are kept at 2-degrees Celsius in the lab. At set intervals she removes the embryos to check on their development. Sandra puts the embryos into tubes that are sent down to the vent field with the sub. The tubes are floating about 6 inches off the bottom in an area a few meters away from the active vents. Every two or three days, two of the tubes are retrieved and returned to the surface to check on the progress in the development of the embryos.

As new embryos are pulled up from the bottom or removed from the shipboard incubators, even the geologists and chemists can be coaxed to look through the microscope to see how they are developing. I'd say that the consensus on the ship is that growing Riftia is exciting.

This is one of the markers that have been deployed in the area to let people know where they are within the vent field. Look at the Marker itself and you will see serpulid worms have attached themselves to the Marker. The serpulids live within the white shell they secrete for themselves.

This is one of the vents that I think is nice looking as it vents fluid with a temperature greater than 100-degrees celsius

The Rusty Riftia story.

Some of the questions surrounding deep-sea hydrothermal vents concern the lifetime of a hydrothermal ecosystem and what are some of the governing factors surrounding the demise of such an ecosystem. The picture shows a site that is now known as Rusty Riftia because of the coating of ferric iron (rust) that covers what remains of the tubeworms. In 1993 this site was a thriving community of tubeworms. However by 1995 the sulfide concentrations in the vent fluid bathing the area had decreased and the iron concentrations increased. Without sulfide, the bacteria in the tubeworms could not survive and their condition deteriorated. In the meantime, the exterior of the tubes was covered in rust. The decline continued in 1997 and now there are only the empty tubes remaining with no live worms left inside at all.

In 1991, a research expedition visited 9 North and discovered that they had arrived on location within days of a volcanic eruption. In the years that followed, Tim Shank and Rich Lutz have followed the evolution of the biological community and linked the biology with the geological and chemical changes from data and research by Dan Fornari, Karen Von Damm and Marv Lilley. Since 1991, the community at 9 North has changed over time with some areas growing in size and others deteriorating as the vent fluid flow changes.

One of the questions that I am interested in is how the microbial community at Rusty Riftia has changed since 1997. Perhaps the microbial community has changed as the Riftia community has declined.