Why do I love mud? Well, doesn’t everybody love mud?
A box core is a contraption that consists
of a box on a frame and when it’s deployed
it goes down, and when it hits the
ocean floor, the actual box is able
to sink into the sediment.
And then when it’s lifted out,
there’s a triggering mechanism
that releases a spade that goes down
and covers the bottom of the box.
And, so, what you get is a box full of the mud
and it stays undisturbed so it keeps
the layering that it had at the ocean floor
and we’re able to look at the different layers for different organisms.
All the things that are living in the mud
are very important to all of the things
living on the mud because that’s what they eat.
A lot of the infauna, the critters that live in the mud,
they’re eating the leftover nutrients.
They’re eating the things that are falling
to the ocean floor that the other critters have missed
and so they serve a really important purpose
of just recycling those nutrients to become food for other trophic levels.
When the box core gets on the deck is when our real work begins.
We do three replicates at each station.
We remove the box and put on a fresh box and redeploy it.
And then we go through and start dealing with the samples, so,
depending on the depth and the type of substrate,
we end up with anywhere from twenty to forty
centimeters of mud but we’re just actually
taking that top ten centimeters.
And so we take that and sieve it in a
300 micron mesh sieve and 300 microns is pretty small,
so we’re keeping most of the small critters still.
Then we also end up with any types of
little pebbles or shells or anything like that
and then that’s all that we keep.
We put those in containers with formalin
and then those get boxed up and that’s what I’ll be looking at at home.
We’re trying to look at the community
structure of the Chukchi Borderlands.
The benthic team is comprised of the box coring,
and the trawling, and then the ROV also did benthic dives.
And so with those three very different methods
we’re able to come up with a bigger picture of what’s going on.
So, the box core’s actually taking a
cookie cutter chunk of the sediment.
It’s a quarter meter square so it’s not a very big area,
and we’re studying what’s living in the sediment,
and so although we do get some stuff that is living on top,
we’re actually able to look at what those
critters are that are burrowing into the sediment
because they’re really important.
They keep oxygen flowing into that top layer.
Once you get down to those lower layers,
and those worms aren’t down there burrowing,
it just becomes very anoxic and there’s
not really very much life down there.
So we’re looking at what’s in the mud and also
looking at different nutrients that are in the sediment.
And then the trawl, they’re doing a larger area
and just scooping all the critters off
that are living on the bottom and so they’re
able to look at a broader scale what’s living down there.
And the ROV’s really neat because
it’s able to actually cruise around
and see what those animals are doing in their natural habitat.
It’s a lot of mud.
It’s an insane amount of mud.
Everybody calls us the mud girls because
we end up completely covered in mud head to toe
and then the whole deck is just covered in mud.
They love us here.
But thankfully we’ve had lots of help and
usually there’s a bunch of people
that are willing to come out and help us.
They make it fun.
It’s a good time. We have a good time.
What’s better than playing in the mud, I mean, really?