Image

Stronger Than it Looks

October 14, 2013

Postdoctoral investigator Maria Pachiadaki (left) and Shipboard Scientific Services Group (SSSG) technician Allison Heater deploy Deep-SID, a sampling robot, during a cruise to the Mediterranean in 2011 aboard R/V Atlantis. Despite its fragile appearance, Deep-SID is designed to collect microbes living at depths of more than one-half mile. Before deployment, researchers load the top half of each sample tube with a yellow fixative. The instrument collects water samples and mixes them with the fixative, preserving any organisms they contain. Deep-SID was developed at WHOI by microbiologists Craig Taylor and Virginia Edgcomb and engineer Ken Doherty, and by McLane Research Laboratories in Falmouth, Mass.(Photo by Cherie Winner, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)