Red water & rainbow seahorses (9/7/09)

Vikki Campbell, Josh Manger, and Michelle Maier return from their myrionecta-hunting expedition, beaming from their successes in the north channel of the Columbia River Estuary

The real fun today revolved around Myrionecta rubra, an extremely fun little ciliate that has been creating dense aggregations in the estuary over the last several years capable of turning the water red. But I'll get to that later. Let's start the blog with the start of my day...

Patrick Prahl, Fred Prahl, Missy Gilbert, Natalja Kuvaldina, Michelle Maier, and Caroline Fortunado watch the displays as the CTD is slowly raised through the water column, searching for the right position from which to collect their samples

The day began for me at 0400 hours, after enjoying 3.5 hours of sleep (I wanted to go to bed earlier, but ended up having a midnight breakfast cereal party with Patrick Prahl and Justin Reina, eating yummy kiddie cereal out of tiny bowls and talking about boy stuff). We started a 24 hour continuous CTD cast series the previous afternoon, and my 4-8am/pm shift was up next. It was lovely! Missy and I dropped the teeny-ctd, with hose attached, into the screamingly-fast river, wrestling that darn hose like a 20 meter long rabid anaconda bent on dragging us over the rail. Of course I'm exaggerating a bit, but to say it wasn't fun is an equally exaggerated understatement. Later I found out that our resident technician, the burly Josh Manger, who probably picks anacondas out of his teeth (and is from Jersey) enjoyed a shift spent entirely within the slack tide (grumble). Every couple of hours we would collect water samples from three positions in the water column for analysis. We were particularly interested in finding myrionecta, and despite a great deal of certainty prior to each sampling event that this would be "The One", we never saw more than a few cells here and there. We knew myrionecta were around because red-water events had been reported over the last few weeks, but we weren't finding cells in the water column. Were they really absent, or were we just sampling the wrong parts of the water column? We couldn't tell using the tools we had at hand -- frustrating!

Natalja Kuvaldina adds sample water to the reservoir of the FlowCAM, but fails to find any significant numbers of myrionecta...kurat soikoon!

I don't recall who noticed first, but as the tide started to pick up, the waters around the New Horizon started to show a slight reddish tinge in coloration -- red water! I was immediately impressed with the patchiness of the red water blooms, some of which possessed hard edges, particularly those bordering the deeper water of the north channel. There's a great deal of debate about the mechanisms by which these blooms form; myrionecta are capable of movement and aggregate in lab conditions, but there are also indications that their distribution in the estuary is driven by water motion, concentrating their numbers near channels. It might even be the combined result of both factors, behavior and circulation patterns interacting together to concentrate the cells in discrete patches. Regardless of the cause, we had found myrionecta! But they were all over there, out of reach! Tawnya Peterson, our chief scientist, arranged for the skiff to be deployed so that Josh, Michelle Maier and Vikki Campbell could find the patches and sample those little guys before they dispersed to their mysterious hidey-holes.

Josh gets the skiff prepared, while Vikki and Michelle pull sampling gear together. Missy and Adena Kass standby to assist.

After a brief period of time, the away team returned with tousled hair and myrionecta laden carboys. Samples were deposited in the FlowCAM, and we were soon treated to the following image...

Myrionecta rubra showed up in great numbers in the red water samples (they're the large, roundish blobs)

Closer views of the myrionecta, showing their ring of cirri, arranged like a tutu, and the membranelles that drive their motion through the water.

Of course we are happy that we found myrionecta, but it was a little frustrating to not find them where we expected to in the water column. The possibility that they are actually growing in the nearby shallow bays has been discussed, and if so, that they may form patches as they are washed off the flats into the channels. This might explain why they weren't in the deeper parts of the channel where we expected to find them, but we can't test that hypothesis from the New Horizon. That experiment will have to wait for another day.

Tomorrow we return to the sea! I think most of us are excited, despite the prospect of a rough bar crossing, We'll be spending time tomorrow making sure everything is securely tied down (we've been spoiled by the river's stillness), then head west. I'm especially anxious to get back out there in blue water, where the potential to see some amazing animals exists. I did see a 3-spined stickleback today, but I'm afraid I'd rather hang out with them humboldt squid.

As promised, more pictures of my fellow scientists...

Vikki, Morgaine McKibben and Tawnya consider the CTD data

Colleen Durkin whips out a quick bowline while Josh regales Sara with stories of his glory days crewing tall-ships


Yolanda and Missy handle lines on a CTD deployment with Josh watching on



Colleen, Justin, and Sara'a colleagues sent them to sea with a secret gift for each day of the cruise. The three UW'ers have been extremely generous sharing their gifts with the rest of the science crew, even using some to decorate our labs, producing a certain joie de vivre that the gas chromatographs, wigglers , and FlowCAMs will never achieve (sorry science dee-vices, I love the data, but you're just a little too short on style for my tastes)