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| | 1. A smooth dogfish shark swims in a testing tank in the Environmental Systems Lab at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution where biologist Jelle Atema and his students are working to understand how sharks use their senses to locate food. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) | | 2. In a significant step toward a new era in the collection and understanding of ocean science data, WHOI received a grant in 2010 of more than $2 million from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for work in imaging informatics in oceanography. The WHOI study—to be done in collaboration with the Tetherless World Constellation group at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)—is an interdisciplinary project that will develop new tools for ocean scientists who work with underwater imagery. Heidi M. Sosik, a senior scientist in Biology is a principal investigator along with WHOI Information Systems Specialist Andrew Maffei. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) | | 3. Scientists Aran Mooney lowers an anesthetized squid into a shallow tank, where it is exposed to a range of sound frequencies coming from a speaker. Through electrodes attached near the squid's ear-like organ, Mooney records the animal's responses to each frequency. His study was published Friday, Oct. 15, in the Journal of Experimental Biology. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) | | 4. Assistant scientist Ann Tarrant dissects coral fragments and scans microscopic images for signs of egg development. Tarrant is working with research specialist Anne Cohen and postdoc investigator Neal Cantin to assess coral health in the Red Sea through a project sponsored by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) (Photo by Neal Cantin, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) | | 5. WHOI Senior Scientist Cabell Davis, together with MIT/WHOI Joint Program graduate student Nick Loomis, this week deployed their holographic plankton camera on a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) from the M/V Jack Fitz in the water above the well leaking oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The holocamera (visible on the right side of the box-like ROV above) was originally designed to identify and measure minute plants and animals such as copepods and fish eggs in the open ocean. The team has adapted their system for use in the Gulf and have discovered that it is also suited for measuring the size and distribution of oil droplets in the water column. This information is important for their collaborators at Applied Science Associates, Inc., to model the oil plume more accurately. (Photo courtesy of Cabell Davis, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) | | 6. WHOI Biologist Scott Gallager leads a team developing a new tool to keep drinking water safe, by watching how single-celled organisms (protozoans) react to toxins in the water. Toxins typically disrupt the operation of protozoans’ swimming structures (cilia), altering their speed and direction. The instrument, called the Swimming Behavior Spectrometer (SBS), mixes a continuous stream of drinking water with cultured protozoans while a video computer system analyzes their swimming behavior and the water’s chemical and physical characteristics. The new system will securely transmit data over the Internet, allowing continuous, remote water quality monitoring—in real time. Working with Gallager are WHOI and independent researchers and engineers Phil Alatalo, Norman Vine, and Steve Lerner. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) | | 7. At rest: A multicorer, an oceanographic sampler that drives cylindrical tubes into the seafloor to take multiple sediment samples at once, sits on the deck of the R/V Thomas G. Thompson at the sunset of a long day. WHOI biologist Carin Ashjian led a cruise in the Bering Sea in May 2010, accompanied by WHOI researcher Phil Alatalo and scientists from several other institutions. The cruise, funded by the National Science Foundation and the North Pacific Research Board, was part of a continuing program to discover if the Arctic ecosystem is changing as its climate warms. (Photo by Phil Alatalo, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) | | 8. WHOI Senior Scientist Cabell Davis (left) and Joint Program graduate student Nick Loomis flank an ROV mounted with a small digital holographic camera before a rapid research trip in the Gulf of Mexico on the R/V Jack Fitz. Davis and Loomis used their imaging system on the ROV to measure oil droplets in undersea plumes spreading out from the Gulf oil spill. They worked with Debbie French-McCay of Applied Science Associates, Inc. (ASA) who needed the data for a computer model of the plume, and at sea with ocean chemist Jim Payne (also collaborating with ASA.) The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration funded the work. (Photo by Yong Kim, Applied Science Associates, Inc.) | | 9. To learn more about what whales do when they dive beneath the surface, scientists use a digital acoustic recording tag, or D-tag. The small device, designed and developed at WHOI, attaches via suction cups and records the movements of whales and the sounds they make and hear in the ocean. In April 2010, a research team — Susan Parks of Pennsylvania State University (PSU), Alessandro Bocconcelli and Michele Pelletier of the Applied Ocean Physics & Engineering Department at WHOI, and Kelly Slivka of the Whale Center of New England — headed out in the small boat Balena to tag whales in the waters off Provincetown. The study, led by PSU, Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, and Stony Brook University in collaboration with WHOI, is comparing daily trends in movement and vocal behavior of right whales and humpback whales in relation to prey in the Gulf of Maine. (Image collected pursuant to NOAA Permit No. 775-1875) (Photo by Ed Dow, III, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) | | 10. The ocean is full of life—most of it too small for us to see. Marine life ranges from bacteria and viruses, at nanometer scales (10-9m), to whales and other very visible animals tens of meters long. But the bigger the organism, the fewer there are in the sea. In general, creatures tend to prey on the next size category below them. Recently, however, WHOI and MIT scientists discovered that the feeding nets made by animals called salps catch much smaller prey than previously thought, including the some of the tiniest, most abundant cells in the ocean. (Illustration by Amy Caracappa-Qubeck, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) | | 11. Problem: how to find small drifting animals (zooplankton) in the ocean. Solution: tow a net to catch them. Bigger problem: how to determine which animals live at what depth without mixing them in one sample. Solution: Multiple Opening/Closing Net and Environmental Sampling System (MOCNESS), a large frame with several nets that scientists open and close independently at chosen depths to capture separate samples. First designed by WHOI biologist Peter Wiebe and now built by a local company, Biological Environmental Sampling Systems, scientists worldwide deploy MOCNESS nets to study zooplankton. (Photo by Ellen Roosen, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) | | 12. This tiny (1mm) larval snail with a swirled, sculpted shell was collected in 2005 from a hydrothermal vent site 2500 meters deep, where adults of its species reach 7 cm. The ChEss (Biogeography of Deep-Water Chemosynthetic Ecosystems) research project, co-chaired by WHOI scientist Chris German, aims to understand the distribution of vent species, and enabled WHOI researchers Susan Mills and Stace Beaulieu to create and print a guide to vent larvae. ChEss is part of the Census of Marine Life (CoML), a ten-year global program initiated by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation trying to answer the question, “What lives in the sea?” The final CoML report was released October 4, 2010. (Image courtesy of Stace Beaulieu, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) | | 13. The shiny black skin of a long-finned pilot whale reflects the image of researchers working from an inflatable boat in the Alboran Sea off the Spanish coast. The researchers studying these animals use long poles to affix a non-invasive digital tagging devices that record the animals' vocalizations, as well as data on their movement, including depth, pitch, roll, and heading. Long-finned pilot whales are found around the world and, although they are often visible at the surface, scientists don't know how many exist in the wild. (Photo by Rebecca Jewell, taken under US Marine Mammal Permit: 14241=01, issued to Peter Tyack, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) | | 14. Officials from the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) toured the Marine Research Facility recently with WHOI Senior Research Specialist Michael Moore (foreground, left). They discussed the role the CT scanner facility (shown) has played in fundamental studies of the morphology and physiology of marine mammal hearing by Dr Darlene Ketten and colleagues, and of the behavior of gases in marine mammal physiology under the pressures encountered when the animals dive. They also talked about the role WHOI has played in submitting marine mammal tissues to the National Marine Mammal Tissue Bank, which is operated partly by NIST. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) | | 15. Scientists collected this 8mm crab larva at a deep-sea hydrothermal vent site where an eruption of lava had recently covered the site. Adults of this species (Bythograea thermydron) were common before and after the eruption, but their planktonic larvae were more abundant afterwards. This image is from a guide to larvae at hydrothermal vents, created by WHOI researchers Susan Mills and Stace Beaulieu with funding from the National Science Foundation, the WHOI Deep Ocean Exploration Institute, and the Biogeography of Deep-water Chemosynthetic Ecosystems (ChEss) project of the Census of Marine Life. (Image by Susan Mills, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) | | 16. The A-frame of the R/V Tangaroa frames Mount Maunganui, the dormant volcano that welcomes mariners to the port of Tauranga, New Zealand. Tauranga was the departure point for Associate Scientist Tim Shank's May expedition with Joint Program student Santiago Herrera to investigate biological communities on the Kermadec Arc seamounts as part of a “Deep-Sea Mining of the Kermadec Arc” program, a collaboration between Shank's lab and the National Institute of Water and Atmosphere in New Zealand. The project aims to provide baseline data, including how the composition and distribution of chemosynthetic and non-chemosynthetic fauna vary over a range of volcano habitats, that can be used to assess and mitigate the potential environmental impacts of future seafloor mining. (Photo by Santiago Herrera, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) | | 17. WHOI biologist Ann Tarrant looks through her microscope at cultured larvae of the starlet sea anemone, Nematostella vectensis, which lives in salt marshes in the Gulf of Mexico and along the eastern Atlantic seaboard of the United States. After the Deepwater Horizon blowout in April 2010, Tarrant was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to study the anemone and its response to petroleum-based pollutants. Although invertebrates like the anemone are vitally important to estuarine food webs, almost nothing is known about how they respond to petroleum-based pollutants or the combined exposure of oil and dispersant. (Photo by Stephanie Murphy, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) | | 18. WHOI biologist Gareth Lawson and MIT/WHOI Joint Program student Wu-Jung Lee talk a little krill in the congested lab aboard the R/V Endeavor during a September 2010 cruise. Krill are small, shrimplike crustaceans that are eaten by larger marine animals and predators. While much is known about krill in the Antarctic, their role in the ecosystems of the Northwest Atlantic Ocean is less understood. On this cruise, researchers studied the interaction of krill and herring near Georges Bank. (Photo by Nick Woods, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) | | 19. In response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, WHOI scientists and engineers contributed a broad range of expertise and equipment to investigations of the oil and its impact on the environment. Biologist Cabell Davis and Joint Program PhD student Nick Loomis used their holographic imaging instrument, the Holocam, to image and measure oil droplets and living plankton in the hydrocarbon plume that formed deep beneath the surface. On a June night aboard the M/V Jack Fitz (above), Davis mounts the Holocam on a frame that will carry it and other sensors down to the plume's depth. (Photo by Nick Loomis, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) | | 20. At Crab Spa, a diffuse-flow hydrothermal vent site on the East Pacific Rise, Alvin’s manipulator arm holds a sensor developed by Nadine Le Bris that measures temperature, pH, and sulfide in situ. WHOI microbial ecologist Stefan Sievert and colleagues are using the site to gain insights into chemosynthetic processes at deep-sea vents. With Ramunas Stepanauskas, the group recently obtained single microbial cells directly from the environment and are sequencing the DNA of the abundant, yet little-known microbes to get information on their physiology and metabolic potential. (Photo courtesy of Stefan Sievert, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) | | 21. A manta ray, Manta birostris, opens its mouth wide to engulf zooplankton and other tidbits in the water. The dark marks visible inside the mouth are its gill slits. Manta rays, which are filter feeders and have vestigial teeth, often appear to be curious about human divers. WHOI biologist Simon Thorrold photographed the ray while studying fish on and around coral reefs in the Red Sea in May, 2010, as part of WHOI’s research collaboration with King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. (Photo by Simon Thorrold, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) | Last updated: June 8, 2011 |
