Oregon students explore the ocean floor -- personally -- in the Bahamas

By Kaya Hardin, Summer Intern
Office of Communications

Craig Young, director of the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology and trip leader

In mid-May 2008, as the school year was winding down, 14 graduate students, including 12 from the University of Oregon and one each from Illinois and the United Kingdom, joined five professors to explore the depths of the tropical Atlantic Ocean in the Northern Bahamas Islands.

The Bahamas are popular among recreational scuba divers and snorkelers, but greater depths in this region remain poorly studied and inadequately explored. This expedition used a large scientific research vessel with a submersible to study deep-sea animals in and near the Tongue of the Ocean, a deep-water basin near the Bahamian capital of Nassau.

(View a video narrated by Craig Young about the 2008 expedition into the Atlantic Ocean -- See Below)

The research cruise was organized by the UO's Oregon Institute of Marine Biology and funded by the National Science Foundation. An additional grant from Oregon Sea Grant, a program administered through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, paid all travel expenses for the student participants, making it possible to offer an accredited course in "Deep-Sea Biology" during the cruise.

Students enrolled in the class used laboratories on the research ship for required class projects, and each student made at least one submersible dive in one of the famous Johnson-Sea-Link submersibles. Most lectures took place at night and on deck, with the ship adrift under the tropical skies.

The course, taught by professors Craig Young of the UO and Professor Paul Tyler of the University of Southampton in England, provided not only hands-on research experiences for university students, but also on-line adventures for elementary school students back in Oregon. Most of the graduate students on the cruise teach elementary-school science through the NSF-funded GK-12 program based at OIMB in Charleston, Ore.

Members of the summer expedition head off on a snorkeling adventure

While at sea, the teacher-students maintained contact with their land-bound pupils by blogging about their experiences (using a satellite internet connection on the ship) and answered questions posed by the children in Oregon. Questions ranged from naïve to clever and sometimes humorous. "Has anyone been bitten?" "How do the animals in the ocean live without being squished by the pressure of the ocean?" The OIMB Kids web site, where these communications are logged, was designed and maintained by Andrew Young, web designer for the Hillsboro school district.

Two submersible dives were made daily, generally with one faculty member and one student on each dive. The Johnson-Seal-Link submersibles were invented by Edwin Link and built in the 1970s for undersea research. Each sub carries a pilot and a scientist in a five-inch-thick Plexiglas bubble and another pilot and scientist in a separate aluminum compartment with small portholes.

When not diving or working on their class projects, students snorkeled on reefs, helped collect water and plankton samples with equipment deployed on long wires over the side and attended lectures. They also enjoyed the tempo of life at sea. "All is well at sea," blogged UO graduate student Katie Bennett. "No pirates, no scurvy and no one has yet gone overboard. …"

The goals for the trip were to collect deep-sea echinoderms such as starfish, sand dollars and sea urchins for studies of larval feeding and nutrition, to collect samples of marine larval forms from deep water and to analyze microscopic bacteria and algae in the water column. Under faculty supervision, the students got to spawn echinoderms from deep and shallow water, cultured their embryos and larvae and made extensive observations using microscopes.
Other faculty members involved in the expedition were professors Michelle Wood and Richard Emlet, both of the University of Oregon, and Will Jaeckle, a professor from Illinois Wesleyan University.

The cruise departed May 13 from Ft. Pierce, Fla., on the research vessel Seward Johnson, a 204-foot steel ship built in 1984 as a dedicated submersible support vessel. It carries 11 crew members, two marine technicians, eight submersible crew and up to 20 scientists. While fully outfitted for scientific studies, the Seward Johnson also provides workshops, a gym, a galley and a lounge with DVDs for recreational diversion.

Bottle-nosed dolphins and flying fish awed the researchers from the deck, while stingrays, sea urchins, lionfish, sharks and barracuda greeted students snorkeling on the shallow reefs. The deep-water animals were even more exotic; they included carnivorous sea squirts, huge chains of gelatinous salps, a dazzling array of starfish, and living fossils such as stalked sea lilies.

"Every day we are out here, I am reminded that marine biologists have the coolest job in the world," Bennett blogged, perhaps sowing seeds of excitement for a new generation of young scientists from elementary schools in Oregon.

YouTube slideshow narrated by OIMB Director Craig Young: