Diving After DRM

Even though our Diving Research Methods course has come to an end, many of us are putting our AAUS certification to good use and are continuing to do more "scientific dives". A lot of us have been going on dives outside the class just to simply be in the water, and some of us have been using our dive time to collect algae for either our herbariums or botany project experiments. Yesterday, a few of us went on an afternoon dive to Canoe Beach and it was possibly one of the best dives we've ever been on since the start of our program. The seas were calm and according to my dive computer, the air temperature was a unusually comfortable 72 degrees. The water, however, wasn't quite as warm but was still bearable nonetheless. The visibility was extremely good, which made our diving objective (testing out camera/video skills) quite enjoyable. As you will be able to tell, my video skills need a fair amount of work...

Where's the kelp?

We have officially concluded our Diving Research Methods class. This means that we have successfully completed a scientific diving training program, this in conjunction with the 12+ scientific training dives means that we are recognized by the American Academy of Underwater Sciences as certified scientific divers up to 30 ft!

This certification allows us to conduct scientific research on dives up to 30 ft and take other open water certified, non-scientific divers on scientific dives up to 30 ft. The journey leading us to this new title was certainly very exciting. We conducted many underwater projects including mobile benthic invertebrate surveys, topographic complexity surveys, and everyone's favorite, kelp blade length measurements. Along with these fun dives we also received training in first aid, CPR, AED, and oxygen administration as part of the program.

We are all very excited to move forward in this new stage of our diving careers and try out our skills on Panama's coral reefs soon!

Mangroves as foundation species

John Bruno, East West VI alum and Associate Professor at UNC Chapel Hill, posted this awesome video highlighting the role of mangroves as foundation species:

Murderers, cartoons, and costumes: the MSC Halloween party

Although the Three Seas program can be a lot of work, we as college kids have not forgotten how to party. Every year the students in the program throw a Halloween party with themes for each individual lab or house. This year the party was thrown at the Pleasant Street house, an old Victorian with a "Clue" theme. The members of the house dressed up to match this secret theme, and members from the Vernon Street house dressed up as Pixar movie characters. Family and friends also joined in on the fun and it turned out to be a very fun night away from homework and school.

The Vernon Street house in their outfits. Each person dressed up as a character from a Pixar movie.

The hosts of the party, the Pleasant Street house. They all dressed as their favorite member from the popular game "Clue."

The Bracken Lab had the same idea and also donned costumes from "Clue."

Just one of the many decorations at the Pleasant Street house.

Each room had a name and matching decorations. This was the entrance to the "Billiard Room."

Development

One of today's lectures was on larval ecology and development and featured the following video, filmed by Bruno Vellutini (2010) as part of his Master's thesis work on the sea biscuit Clypeaster subdepressus:

Polychaetes, sipunculans and clams, oh my!

Today we took a field trip to the mud flats of Nahant for some invertebrate hunting! The flats are full of worms and clams, and seeing as we just took an exam on Annelids/Arthropods and are starting Molluscs, this trip was quite appropriate. And also gave us an excuse to play in mud.

A very large clam.

Some cone worms (Class Polychaeta), sans their cone homes.

Small holes are a tell-tale sign that creatures are lurking about.

Catch of the day! A longggg ribbon worm!

An old, new world

We're about a month and a half into our first semester of Three Seas and so far it has been a lot of hard work but so much fun. The other day I was talking with some of my peers about how they were feeling about open water diving compared to their previous experience in aquariums and I thought I should share. Everyone seemed to have different aquarium experiences whether it was a hookah system (hookah diving systems have a compressor at the surface that delivers air to divers below through long hoses and a demand regulator similar to the kind used in scuba), to the animals they fed, the crazy incidents in front of guests, aquarium romances, and so on. One thing that was the same for all of us though was that we thought we would be rock stars in our Research Diving Methods class because we had 50-500 + dives. We have all been humbled at some point now. Going from a controlled environment with "domesticated" animals that swim right up to you to the open ocean really opened my eyes again to what being a good diver means.


This doesn't mean that we aren't enjoying it; on the contrary, we're having a great time. We are re-learning old skills and some new ones during this semester like CPR, filling scuba tanks, attaining neutral buoyancy, how to be a good scientific diver, etc. We've been tagging kelp for growth labs and surveying benthic mobile invertebrates for density analyses with transects and "T" bars and collecting algae for botany projects. It's similar to terrestrial surveys except that you have to be mindful of many other factors like your dive buddy, your air, your buoyancy, your equipment for your scientific purpose, etc. This is no easy task on top of currents and other oceanographic processes but so far everyone is doing a great job and having a good time. I love underwater photography and try to take my camera on dives for when I see something that I don't know about so I can identify it later. We also spend a day working with underwater photography and video. When we hit our 12th dive (next week), we will all be AAUS Scientific Divers! I look forward to more diving adventures and being able to say, "I am a scientific diver." (Which also means we can legally play with the sea critters).