So Just a brief comment since it was brought up to me today not through CNN or MSNBC that today is 9/11, eight years ago I was sleeping in my bed and awoke to my mom exclaiming that "they" are knocking down buildings and bombing the Pentagon. I have come along way since then, today I spent my morning in search of the elusive marine Actinobacteria.
I think that as the days go on I will try and not give play by plays but for now that is how it is going to go down. Starting with my first sleep in on the island. The cabins here are very simple with two beds, a dresser, ceiling fan and light. The most interesting thing I noticed while trying to fall asleep was the sound of things rummaging through the bushes, I am guessing these are the invasive rats. The other thing that is also apparent is the many many birds that live on this island, they apparently do not become quite during the night instead it sounds like a busy city of birds all night. I awoke this morning found some breakfast and then got ready to take the boat Zenobia out to collect sediments from depths beyond recreational scuba diving limits.
My advisor Dr. Paul Jensen set up the entire rig which is basically a mud snapper attached to a deep sea fishing device. We used the device to sample within the lagoon and tried to use it sample outside of the lagoon. Inside the lagoon we found very soft mushy sulfur smelling sediments from about 160 feet. After collecting sediments from inside the lagoon we headed out through the channel which was constructed by the military when they occupied Palmyra in the 1940's. We traveled out to find deep sediments down to 2000 meters but only managed to find approximately 600 foot deep water. However, we did not capture any sand probably due to the coral rubble type bottom found here on Palmyra atoll. If you are at all interested I would like to explain briefly how coral atolls form it is very cool. Basically they start as a volcano that begins to sink into the ocean and as it sinks coral grows around the edge of the caldera forming a ring of coral around a very deep lagoon. Coral also grows up the slope of the volcano. The coral growing on the slope of the volcano gives us the hard bottom that makes it hard to get soft sediment that is very deep.
Since we were unable to collect deep samples we decided to collect sediments from the shallow reef in about 30 feet of water. We simply used our snorkels and fins to dive down and grab some sand and then move on to the next spot. This makes my first experience with the local reef. First thing that came to mind was there will be lots of sharks around and there was, I did not see any on my first entry but on the next 5 or 6 entries I saw at least 2 black tip reef sharks cruising the reef each time. This is a good thing as it is a sign that the coral reef ecosystem here is healthy and is not suffering from over fishing.
The rest of the day was spent processing the collected sediments in order to culture marine Actinobacteria.
I would just like to leave this post with a screen shot of the GPS tracks we made today they include the mud snapping and the snorkeling, can you guess which is which?
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