Huh, now that's odd...

Today we reached Brazilian waters, 4º 49'N, 50º 00.1'W, where we dropped what will probably be the last 'deep' multicore of the cruise.  The rest of the stations will be up on the continental shelf in water depths of < 100m.

I announced a last opportunity for people to crush cups on the multicorer, and we filled the mesh bag yet again.  All of the cups made a return, and we got 8 beautiful 50-55 cm cores!  We also got a couple surprises too.

The first was a deep sea fish, which had its lower jaw caught onto the laundry bag holding the cups!  It is perhaps a gulper eel, but I have yet to talk to the fish specialist as to what he thinks it is.

Probably one of the oddest things I've ever seen caught by the multicorer~!

Or at least... that's what I would have said until we started processing and discovered something else...

This station happened to be in much more shallow water than we've cored at previously.  Over last two cruises, all of the coring stations occured in waters deeper than 3500m.  This is because in shallower waters, there is enough carbon deposition at the sea floor to support larger organisms like burrowing worms, which move sediment and water 'artificially', or in a way that is different from diffusion alone.

Pumping water through the sediments, as burrowing organisms do, changes the chemistry of the pore waters, and makes it much more complicated to model, and explain the processes occurring there.

However, since this is probably our only opportunity to get cores from this area, we are coring at every opportunity, and will learn a lot about the sedimentary carbon cycle even though I will be utilizing a different modeling approach than I am using at the deeper sites.

Now, back to 'burrowing macrofauna' and our weird discovery.

While measuring the cores in the cold van, I happened to notice something odd protruding from the bottom of the core tube, which kind of looked like a sausage shaped balloon (or something else, but we're being PG here...).  

After calling in the nearby biologists for consultation (and much laughter), we determined that it was a type of tube worm.  There is a phyla of worms called 'Sipuncula', commonly known as 'peanut worms'.  They are bottom feeding, burrowing worms. http://www.seaslugforum.net/find/sipunculid


Hilarity was ensuing for quite awhile.  Why? well... here's the photo of it sticking out from the bottom of the core tube.  *laughter*

And now to get that image out of your head, here's a few photos of the coring team at work in the cold van... their natural habitat...

Nick and Jake, monitoring the Whole Core Squeezer.

Me with my Rhizon samplers...

Don't ask...weird things happen in the cold van... I think it was the beanie... ;)