Pat Kremer Bio:
My name is Pat Kremer and I have a PhD in Biological Oceanograhy. Since graduate school days (about 30 years ago), I have been interested in working on "Gelatinous zooplankton", a group that includes jellyfish, comb jellies, and the animal of my current interest - salps. There is not a real common name for salps as they are typically oceanic and only occur inshore occasionally where most people would notice them.
Why in the world would a woman older than your mother want to come to the coldest waters of the world to study an animal that most people do not know about? Actually the answer is pretty simple. My studies over the past 15 years have looked at salps in tropical and temperate waters. In these studies, I have found that salps are capable of growing and reproducing rapidly. Because of their interesting life cycle and relatively large size (for zooplankton) salps are capable of explosive population growth which can lead to the formation of salp "blooms". My work on other species of salps (in warmer waters) has
led me to ask how the species that lives here at 0° C in Antarctic waters compares with species in warmer waters. (for more information about salps and our project go to others places on this webasite).
I love going to sea on an oceanographic "cruise". I do not need to go grocery shopping or cook any meals. I only have my own laundry to do, and making my bed amounts to simply pulling up a comforter. My "commute" to work involves walking a few steps down a hallway, down a flight of stairs then down another hallway to the lab, about the distance one might cover in a large house. Most of my experiments are done in an Aquarium Room, which involves going through a doorway with a heavy metal door. There is a high step and locking devices associated with the door to keep seawater from coming into the lab. A few feet of walking down the deck (best to be in rubber boots), and through another metal "weather" door and I am in the Aquarium room, with a seawater supply directly from the seawater beneath the ship. One of my scientific colleagues on board with me said the sound is like being inside a waterfall. For me it is a wonderful place to work, although the water temperature is the same as a drink with ice floating in it. When I am at sea, I work nearly all the time (about 16-18 hours per day). My sleep schedule is often irregular, defined by the availability of animals that I study. Sometimes it is hard to separate night from day and one day from the next.
I want to use animals in my experiments that are in perfect conditions, so I am dependent on getting material from SCUBA divers on our team, who collect the salps underwater in quart-sized plastic jars. In past projects I have been one of the SCUBA divers, but on this project I have decided that because of a combination of the cold water, a need for a dry suit (along with LOTS of additional weight to hold me down), and the abundance of other divers (6) on board, that I will focus my time and energy on the lab work. The past couple of days have been a bit frustrating because we know there are salps in the water around us, but the wind has been so strong and the sea swells so high that it has been impossible dive. Hopefully the seas will "lay down" today and I can get really busy with measuring the respiration, feeding, and reproductive rates for our target species of salp.
Outreach Questions:
Dec. 3, 2004, Kate de Riel’s 3rd grade class at Coopertown Elementary School in PA:
1. From Sarah: Did any of you find a new
species of salp or other animals?
No new salps, but we captured a ctenophore (comb jelly) that we think has never been named, although we know other colleagues of ours have also seen it down here.
Another colony of animals that we’ve been capturing called pterobranchs
is being studied closely and described for the first time in about 120 years,
by Dr. Susie Balser.
2. From Brooke W.:
Did the scuba divers get cold??? Did they see any whales??
Scientist and diver, Dr. Larry Madin answers:
Yes, divers get
cold, but not too cold. Divers wear 'dry suits' that keep the water out
and have layers of warm thermal underwear underneath (called 'bunny suits').
The suits can be filled with air from the diver's air tank for more insulation
and to control buoyancy. Usually fingers get cold first.
Divers haven't seen any whales yet, but neither has anybody else.
Engineer and diver, Dr. Sandy Williams answers:
It is cold on your face where your skin touches the water, especially around your lips. It is like splashing ice water in your face. But the rest of you is warm because it is covered in a rubber dry suit. Still, like being outdoors in very cold weather even when dressed warmly, after about half an hour, the cold seeps into your bones and you are cold. We have not seen any whales while diving but we saw two small whales from the ship in Admiralty Bay on Saturday. Underwater, we sometimes see salps and ctenophores and pterapods (tiny pink or brown flapperdoodles). But sometimes we just see blue water and the other divers looking for things with their jars. It is very quiet down there.
3. From Maggie: What was your favorite animal
you have seen so far? What did you name
it??
I’m rather fond of cephalopods (“head-foot” animals, meaning their heads and feet are together like octopus, squid and cuttlefish), but there may be other preferences in the group.
Regina says it is a three-way tie between the octopus, Chile the squid and penguins as the cutest animals she’s seen yet! The octopus she photographed (Journal 9) has a middle name so far (it is "Oscar" after Oscar the Grouch, thanks to Brennan (a college student on the trip) who saw the octopus scowling in the corner of his tank, (looking particularly surly) but we're waiting to hear from my girls in Boston about a first and last name for "Oscar." (Regina has an Outreach class she writes to in Boston.)
4. From Ben: What do you do in your spare time, IF you have
any?
Scientist, Dr. Patricia Kremer answers:
"Spare time" is an interesting concept aboard a research vessel where life is not at all the same as my "normal" life. As one of the four "Principal Investigators" on the ship (there are two projects with 2 "PI's" each), I am one of the scientists who helped to get funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to work on salps in Antarctica. Dr. Larry Madin and I wrote a "proposal" with 15 pages of single spaced text describing what research we wanted to do with salps, what questions we wanted to asked, and why we thought the work was important in order to understand the ecology of the ocean in this region. Writing a proposal is a lot of work, but even harder is being chosen as one of the projects that NSF selects to sponsor. Each proposal is read by several other scientists who are experts and they write comments about what they think is good and bad about your proposal, giving it an overall score (1 is the best and 5 the worst). Based on these reviews, combined with the opinions of a panel of scientists who have read all the proposals submitted for a single year, the staff at NSF (who are also oceanographers) decides who they will allow to have ship time and go to Antarctica. So you see, it is a long and difficult process, to be allowed to carry out the research you want to do.
Because it is so hard to be allowed to be one of the PI's on this cruise, my time at sea is very precious to me as a wonderful opportunity to do as much research as I can. I can watch movies and play cards when I am back at home at the University of Connecticut, but I have only this month at sea to study salps. The concept of "work" and "play" become blurred when I am at sea, because I love what I am working on, and I love being at sea, working long hours along with other scientists who are also dedicated to what they are studying. So what do I do in my "spare" time? I sleep, so I can be well rested to work on my research. I try to not get too tired, but sometimes my experiments require that I stay up a full night and day. Often my "night's sleep" consists of a series of 2-3 long naps. (ask your mom what it was like when you were a baby !!) Often I have trouble telling one day from the next without looking at a calendar.
Sometimes we are not catching salps (like the past 3 days on this cruise). During these times I make sure that I am well rested, and I try to calculate data from previous work on the cruise to make sure my techniques are giving good results. During these times, I may also or have long conversations with my colleagues on board or watch a movie. Going to sea is also an opportunity to get to know new people and spend time together.
Ellen’s answer: Sleep. Regularly, we are on shift 4 hours, off 8, on 4, off 8. There’s no way to get a whole stretch of good 6-8 hours of sleep in there (you can’t just drop off the moment you go off shift, there are a lot of little things to do), so we usually have a 5-6 hour “nighttime sleep” at some point in the day, then grab another 2 hours somewhere else. There seems to be a movie playing in the lounge during other “downtime” that is open to anyone, and a most of us are on the computer some part of each day. We also ‘hang out’ in the lab areas when there’s a catch being processed, helping out and learning as we can. The graduate students are also in the labs during their off-shift time, working on things that relate to their own research. Then of course, there’s the eating. Those are the most social times of the day.
5. From Maddie L.: Were the penguins cute?
Yes, Maddie, they’re as cute as you’d imagine. The Adelie (pronounced: “Uh-del-lee”) penguins are the only ones we’ve seen so far, and they’re about knee high on an adult person. They look “fuzzy”, but I know that their fuzz is really feathers. They watch us as closely as we watch them, trying to go about their business and yet looking a little nervous. They are wonderful swimmers, but look so out of their element on land, waddle-walking wherever their land business takes them. They seem to be very social, communicating with one another through squawks and head bobbing and wing-flapping. When they lie down, it is along their entire belly with their heads forward – I have not seen them with their heads erect or turned backward like a duck or seagull does when they sleep. They can sit upright, showing their tummies but not their feet, but I don’t think they sleep that way.
6. How is "Chile"?
I will ask Adriene to answer this. Stand by for the answer.
Adriene says, "Chile is doing good. He has been bathed, and changed.…He is quiet and doesn't eat much, but he is enjoying the cruise."
The following questions were submitted by 6 year old Max
Abrams:
How did you get to the South Pole?
[answered by Brennan Philips, UConn graduate student]
Unfortunately, this trip isn't to the South Pole... we've spent most of our time on this trip traveling around an area of Antarctica known as the Antarctic Peninsula. Antarctica is actually very large- roughly twice the size of the US. The South Pole isn't exactly in the center of it, but it is very far inland. And since the scientists on board are oceanographers, marine biologists and marine ecologists, we really don't have a reason to leave the ocean, so we've actually been on a ship the whole time. I'd imagine the South Pole would be a pretty cool place to visit, though! There is an American research station there where people live and work throughout the year.
In order to get where we are, we had to travel a looonnngg way. Basically, we took a plane from one side of the earth to the other, and then took a ship and headed even further south. We first flew out of the United States and into Santiago, Chile. From there we hopped on another flight all the way south to Punta Arenas, which is a city at the very bottom of South America. There we met our ship, the Laurence M. Gould, which we've been on for the past three weeks as we travel around the Antarctic Peninsula and the series of islands that surround it.
Have you ever helped a penguin into the water?
[Story by Dr. Thomas Dahlgren of Sweden]
I once heard a funny story on that theme. John, the seal researcher, was riding his Zodiac back home to the base after studying a seal colony together with his college. They had to cross an area with quite a few penguins around but maneuvered the boat slowly and with care not to harm the birds. Suddenly the penguins came shooting up from the water and sure enough, shortly after that, they saw the shadow of a leopard seal in the water. (Leopard seals are the polar bears of the Antarctic waters and are really dangerous, mostly for penguins but can also harm a man.) When leopard seals hunt penguins, the penguins try escape by jumping out of the water, and if they are near the ice edge, get on the ice and run as far from the edge as possible. So there they were sitting in their little Zodiac when it suddenly started to rain down scared penguins into their laps!! When the coast was clear, John looked at his friend, nodded and started to help the penguins back into the water.
[Editor’s note]
Actually, Max, the penguins are protected down here, and there is a heavy fine to pay if you are charged with harming or disturbing a penguin. “Disturbing” means, if you are near penguins and they start to move away, or behave as though they are upset (stand up, squawk, look disturbed in any way). So, helping them into the water would not usually be allowed. They have to be left to go their merry way in any way they please. And they’re so harmless and seem so uninterested in any kind of conflict, you just sort of want to leave them be.
Is your ship an icebreaker?
[Answered by Captain Michael Terminel]
Good question, Max. First let me give you a little history on the R/V Laurence M. Gould. The LMG was built in Larose, Louisiana in 1997 by Edison Chouest Offshore. Raytheon Polar Services charters the vessel, which in turn provides support to the United States Antarctic Program through the National Science Foundation.
The LMG first set sail from Galliano, LA to Punta Arenas, Chile taking 27 days, and included going through the Panama Canal. The vessel is 230 feet long, 56 feet wide and drafts (how deep the bottom goes under water) 19 feet 4 inches fully loaded. It has approximately 6000 horsepower, which is equivalent to 2 locomotive train engines. Our gross tonnage, or the total weight of the ship is 2966 tons. [How they measure this is easy. Let's say you have a one gallon bucket of water filled to the top. Put a small model of a boat in the bucket. If you can catch the water that is displaced out of the bucket and weigh it, that is how much the vessel weighs. For ships as large as LMG, they do it mathematically.] She can carry 53 persons on board including crew (boats are referred to as "she"). It has a full service galley to feed everyone. On board we have a large TV room, conference room, gym, sauna and jacuzzi tub. On the Science side, we have 3 labs, an electronics lab and a main deck that can support many different operations. The LMG has a 12,000 mile range and can deploy for expeditions for up to 70 days without stopping.
The vessel is United States flagged and is inspected yearly by the United States Coast Guard and the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS). ABS is the governing agency that says what Class we are. We are Ice Class A1, meaning we are required to be able to go a speed of two knots in the "first year ice" or ice that is up to 1 meter thick. There are three ratings of Ice Breakers, A1 is the lowest, so LMG is not made to break very heavy ice. An Ice Class A3 can push through ice over 3 meters thick. On this voyage we have not encountered any ice. However, we are planning to head south today (December 11), which will bring us into heavy ice. I have attached a photo to show the capabilities of the LMG in multi-year ice.
We hope this has helped Max and others learn something about Tacky the Penguin's homeland.
These questions will appear on our website, too!
Ellen