The USGS scientists are writing their own blog about this cruise while aboard the Hatteras.

http://fl.biology.usgs.gov/DISCOVRE/discovre_2010/discovre_10_cruise_1.html

September 20 - October 3, 2010

Cruise Highlights

This is the first cruise of the final year of a 4-year project funded by the U.S. Geological Survey's Terrestrial, Freshwater and Marine Ecosystems Program provided in support of the information needs of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE). The cruise will examine deep coral sites in the eastern and north-central Gulf of Mexico using the research vessel Cape Hatteras and the Kraken ROV. We will use the ROV to conduct photographic surveys of the deep coral habitats and collect coral and coral inhabitants for genetics, reproduction, microbiology, food-web, and community studies. Considering the recent Deepwater Horizon oil spill, this cruise will pay particular attention to the health and status of habitats and communities encountered and will describe any observed impacts.




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Julie's 1st blog post for USGS

http://fl.biology.usgs.gov/DISCOVRE/discovre_2010/discovre_2010-9-21.html

Cruise Log: 9/21/2010

In science, sometimes the coolest things you find are not what you were originally looking for!

Julie Galkiewicz

My part in the DISCOVRE cruises is to identify and characterize the microbes associated with Lophelia corals and some of the animals that hang out on the reefs. The microbes on Lophelia may play an important role in breaking down food sources, cycling nutrients, and keeping disease-causing bacteria in check. One way of figuring out which microbes are present on Lophelia is to try to grow them up in the lab. To do this, we bring up living coral pieces and smash the branches to bits with a hammer. Then I smear the smashed coral on different nutrient sources.

Different nutrient sources allow different types of microbes to grow. So the trick is figuring out which nutrient sources will help bacteria found on Lophelia to grow! We have some standard nutrients we use, but it's always good to try things we haven't used before. Last year we brought some extremely different nutrient sources to see if we could get brand new organisms to grow. And lucky us, they did! However, instead of just the bacteria we had gotten previously, we also grew up two different species of fungi!

These fungi have been found associated with deep-sea sediments, so they aren't brand new to science. But this is the first time any fungi have been recovered from Lophelia! The coral colonies that the fungi were cultured from were healthy and found on two different sampling sites in the Atlantic Ocean. This suggests that the fungi weren't just randomly associated with a single coral. So the fungi may be performing an important function for the coral host.

Because of this exciting new finding from last year, we've tailored our microbiology experiments this year to focus on finding these fungi in Gulf of Mexico Lophelia. This would tell us whether the corals in the Atlantic have a unique association with fungi or whether it's common in Lophelia from both the Gulf and the Atlantic.

And of course, we're still trying to find new and exciting organisms with diverse nutrient sources! Who knows what we'll find on this cruise?




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Here's a link to the ROV being used on this cruise, Kraken

http://www.nurc.uconn.edu/technologies/kraken.htm