A Little Mud, a Lot of Science: Headed Home, Part 2

Whoo, spa night - always a fun time :)

But first, a recap of the last few days...

I mentioned we had four stations in the span of 30 hours... rather intense schedule, but out here, you learn to sleep when you can (granted, others resort to large volumes of coffee).

At the last two stations, the coring team encountered nothing but sand (no mud u__u) However, we did find some critters in the sand.

At one station, after the multicorer was brought back on board, I noticed something white moving inside one of the tubes. On closer inspection, I found it was a sea snail! He did a few laps around the inside of the core tube before burrowing back in the sand and hiding. We snapped a few photos (on a different camera, unfortunately) before releasing him back into the blue yonder.

At our last station, I noticed another moving object in the core tube, and this time it was a little sand crab. He didn't seem to be very excited about being removed from his normal realm, so he was returned too.

After we finished all the casts for plankton, coring, and water collection, we had a different operation, which was dredging the bottom in search of sea sponges. One of our Brazilian collaborators has an interest in them, but had to wait until the end of the cruise to try to find them.

Lifting up the dredge

In the middle of recovery

Emptying the dredge net

There's some pretty interesting stuff coming up in the net. It is a little sad to see how destructive dredging is though. It really makes you think about fishing practices that use dredging as the primary means of catching fish...

And now after a long day of tearing down the multicorer (I'd never taken it apart before!) Tonight after dinner we had the annual ANACONDAS spa night. The stations included deep sea mud facials, shoulder massages, manicures, and tattooing. Everyone from the science team got involved, and even some of the crew too!

Once again, we are preparing for the equator crossing ceremony day on Friday, where anyone who has not previously crossed the equator must abide by the rules of those who have in honor of King Neptune. It's all in good fun, as one of the requirements is having at least one finger nail and one toe nail painted in different colors, and having a tattoo of a sea creature. It's rather fun with this group, because everyone knows it's all in good fun, and we all have a good attitude about the pending experience.... We'll see how it feels afterwards...

So, my outer leg tat I stenciled on yesterday...