Image

Life in Seafloor Mud

A petri dish holds seafloor sediment from Buzzards Bay, Mass. Each year WHOI Summer Student Fellows spend a day aboard R/V Tioga learning about oceanographic instruments and sampling. This year’s instructors—Bruce Tripp, Cindy Sellers, George Hampson and Hovey Clifford—showed students how to collect and sieve sediment samples to find animals living in the sea floor, among other things. This summer’s samples showed a continued trend of declining diversity and number of deep bottom-dwelling invertebrate animals in Buzzards Bay. Hampson and Clifford have tracked these changes for more than six years, though they are not sure of the cause. (Photo by Jayne Doucette, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)