Brrrrr, its getting cold down here now as we approach winter! It was -5°C and blowing 30 knots yesterday. It definitely feels like I’m in Antarctica, as if the icebergs and penguins were not enough!The starfish and clams are still happily feeding away at there respective new diets. However, one starfish has taken a fancy to the air stones in the tank. Resulting in one very gassy starfish, as its’ body cavity fills up with oxygen and it floats to the surface. A gentle squeeze removes the excess air; hopefully the starfish will learn its lesson and stop this flatulence.

Sperm survival

An interesting observation I have made during the gender determination of the starfish is the resilience of their sperm. During every dissection I make a gonad smear on a microscope slide to identify whether egg or sperm cells are present. This not only indicates the sex of the specimen is, but also shows whether the individual is sexually mature or not, an important consideration when investigating specific cell metabolism. On one particular smear I forgot about a slide I had made, only to remember about 15 minutes later. Microscopic inspection showed un-motile sperm cells, which I assumed to be dried out and dead. However with a little drop of seawater under the coverslip and the sperm cells burst into life! Indicating that the sperm are not only resistant to 15 minutes of drying out, but also, as they were left at room temperature, they can cope with being warmed up well above there natural limits. The picture below shows a microscopic image of the gonad tissue from a female starfish, with the large yolky egg cells obvious.

Photo of the day award

Everyday there is a ‘photo of the day award’, which gets the privilege of being displayed on the information screens in the dining room for the day. So far I have been given this honour twice for some expert wildlife photography. The first was an Adélie penguin I captured wondering across the brash ice on a very cold morning.

The second was a snoozing Weddell seal in a deep sleep displaying perfectly curled whiskers, probably dreaming about catching a nice big Antarctic cod. These placid seals are amazing divers, capable of reaching depths of 750m during which their heart-rate reduces by 75%! They are also incredibly cute when asleep, often twitching and stretching their flippers.

Other research at Rothera

In between my dissection days I’ve been helping some of the other scientists with their projects. This has included monitoring the local south polar skua population; there are around 25 pairs of skua which breed at Rothera. However this year it seems that very few of their chicks have survived. The nests are checked once a week and during the last survey no chicks were present. During tough times, these opportunistic feeders will eat the chicks of neighbouring pairs. At one nest we visited, the parent skuas were being very protective even though no chicks were present, indicating that the chick must have only recently died. Not all the research is doom and gloom, I’ve also been helping with the “Antarctic fish photo shoot”! Fish species from around the area are hand collected by divers and photographed in the lab. Making a fish pose is no mean feat and basically involved tickling it with cable tie until it stays still for long enough to snap a picture! A fin clip is also taken for DNA barcoding then the fish are released back to the dive site from where they were found. I was amazed by the diversity of the fish species down here. The picture below shows the beautiful colours of the striped-eye notothen (Lepidonotothen kempi), it looks more like something you would find in the tropics, not Antarctica!

Antarctic ski resort…….with added crevasse risk!

Finally last weekend I had the opportunity to go snowboarding! No ski lifts in Antarctica obviously, so you really do earn your runs. Being a snowboarder I was not afforded the luxury of skinning up with large skis to displace my weight evenly so had to trek up though waist deep snow which soon takes it out of you. The experience was made all the more exciting by the field assistants warning you of the risk of falling down crevasses, as such for the first few treks up the hill we wore harnesses and roped up in pairs just in case! The field assistants are incredibly knowledgeable of the mountains and snow conditions, one is known as “the Bear Grylls of Antarctic”, so I felt I was in safe hands!Ant(arctica) Crook

Contact info; Twitter: @AtCrooky

What a fantastic week I’ve had! Antarctica is just like you see in the David Attenborough documentaries but 88,000 times more glorious!  

Diet switch experiment progress

The diet switch experiment is going smoothly, with both the clams and the starfish feeding on their new diets. I feel the starfish are being rather spoilt on their new diet of “Princes tinned ham”; they seem to be enjoying it! Since the last blog I have completed both the ‘day 0’ and ‘day 5’ dissections. The clam, Laternula elliptica, dissection is relatively simple, although they do tend to squirt you with water from their! I remove their gills and mantle tissue and determine their sex by microscopic inspection of their gonads. The starfish, Odontaster validus, are slightly more difficult, especially as I am removing their tiny delicate tube feet, which they retract into a (ambulacral) groove and are protected by a row of spines. I don’t remember such difficulty when carrying out Asterias rubens dissections back in first year. These hardy Antarctic starfish seem to me to be more robust than there northern relatives in general! I’ll have to remember this when getting into ‘northerner’ vs ‘southerner’ debates!

Daily routine

My daily routine involves getting up at 7.30, breakfast at 8.00, followed by the boat meeting at 8.30, during which all the days dives and boat activity are discussed. There are about 12 designated dive sites in the surrounding area and each day the scientists, dive officer and boatman discuss where they need to survey and collect samples. I am not diving during my time here, but boat meetings are when I can sign myself up to either help out on the boats with CTD monitoring or volunteer for “seal watch’. ‘Seal watch’ is a 30 minute lookout for leopard seals (or Orcas!) prior to any diving activity. I personally am still yet to see either of these top Antarctic predators, but a pod of 12 Orca were seen in the bay the other day so fingers crossed! Other whales that frequent this area of the Peninsula include Sei, Minke and Humpback whales, but apparently it has been a particularly bad year for these sightings. The rest of my day involves tending to every need of my beloved starfish and clams. When I am not pampering them I get involved with other research in the lab, so far this has included sediment sorting, DNA extractions and thermo-tolerance experiments of various benthic species.

In my free time, one of my favourite things to do is walk around ‘the Point’, about a 45 minute walk around the headland of the island which takes you away from all the hustle and bustle of the base. On a calm afternoon, all you can hear is the odd Elephant seal sneeze (or snore), Adelie penguin squawk and the occasional bone-chilling crunch of icebergs colliding. The wildlife is incredible, with Weddell and Crabeater seals often hauled out snoozing on the ice. South polar skuas dive-bomb you if you approach their nests too closely. A few Antarctic fur seals have started to arrive too; they like the Elephant seals are adolescents who have come here to moult before moving north for winter. They always seem to be angry, as they roar and growl at me as I walk past, but they are getting more comfortable with my presence recently.

The icebergs that surround the headland are so beautiful. They contain so many different shades of blue and when the sunlight catches them in a certain way they appear to glow (see photo for evidence)! I’ve been here only a week and I must have taken around 200 photos of these colossal ice goliaths, and even the best photos don’t do them justice!

The Antarctic people

The diverse range of people down here is amazing; every one of the 60 or so people down here has a purpose to keep the station functioning. Most of them have been here for the last 6 months, some for the last 12 months. There are electricians, mechanics, plumbers, pilots, a carpenter, a boatman, two doctors, and most importantly for the moral of the station: two excellent chefs (fresh bread is baked on station)! Then of course there are the scientists, or ‘beakers’ as we are referred to, and all the field assistants! A strong sense of community exists between all Rothera’s inhabitants, and almost everyone down here has beards (apart from the women obviously). I am trying to join this trend, but my ginger whiskers and neck fluff cannot currently be classed as a beard! I’ll keep you updated none the less with beard growth progress!

BAS traditions

There are a number of BAS traditions that seem to have stemmed from Naval roots. Everyday one person gets put on ‘Gash’; this is basically cleaning duty and also involves helping the chefs with cooking. The person who is on ‘Gash’ then gets the privilege to choose the film that gets played on the projector, last night’s film was Disney’s ‘Frozen’ ironically, and yes the scientists did sing along!

Then every Friday at 5pm is ‘Scrub-out’, where everyone gets given a task and the whole base is given a big clean up! Every Saturday a formal evening meal takes place, often with a theme. Last Saturday was ‘folk night’ and we had live music from the various bands that get put together during the long dark months of winter.

I’ll give you another update in a week or so (providing the internet still works!).

Ant(arctica) Crook

Twitter: @AtCrooky

13^th February 2015

Hello,

My name is Anthony Crook, I am an ex Newcastle University student having studied BSc Marine Zoology and then MSc Ecological Consultancy in the fine city of Newcastle Upon Tyne. During my time at Newcastle I have been fortunate enough to study marine biology in many different countries and in a range of ecosystems including such delights as the rocky intertidal in Millport, Scotland and Monte Clerigo, Portugal and coral reefs in the Wakatobi National Park, Indonesia.  Now I find myself, a ‘southerner’ by nature, having journeyed further south than most! I am studying benthic marine invertebrates in the coldest, driest, highest and windiest continent on Earth….Antarctica!

I have just arrived in Rothera, at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) Research Station, located on the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula (67° 34.5’ S, 68° 07.0’ W). I started my adventure in my hometown of Eastbourne, where on the morning of my departure I visited the house of the great Antarctic explorer, Sir Ernest Shackleton. As I walked down the path from his house, I was literally walking in his footsteps! My journey here took 38 hours of continuous travel on 5 different airplanes! Still slightly quicker than Shackletons’ voyage I imagine!

After an incredible final flight over the Antarctic Peninsula from Chile, the first thing that struck me on arrival to the station, besides the stunning views of icebergs and snowy mountains, was the smell of the elephant seals!  Around 6 adolescent males were piled up seeking shelter next to the sewage treatment plant ironically. Immediately the resident plumber blamed the smell on the seals, but I’m not sure as the sewage system was apparently experiencing some technical difficulties!

My purpose

I am working as a research assistant for my previous tutor (Ben Wigham) who has an on-going research project with BAS. The research will go towards the Rothera Oceanographic and Biological Time-Series (RaTS) which is a key component of the BAS Ecosystems Programme and has been collecting data on seasonal and interannual variability in reproductive biology and feeding activity of selected marine invertebrates since 1997.

Whilst there has been a lot of research related to food-web structure in Antarctic shallow-water benthic communities there has been less research focused on the trophic relationships and linkages within these benthic communities especially with regard to specific isotopic turnover rates for these often endemic organisms. Understanding carbon flow and trophic linkages in the context of a food-web is a fundamental requisite in determining future ecosystem-wide changes to community structure and function.

The Science-y bit!

I am in charge of running a 45 day long diet-switch laboratory experiment to determine the isotopic turnover rate in the tissues of two functionally different taxa, Laternula elliptica (Clam – suspension feeder) and Odontaster validus (Starfish – predator/scavenger). I have 72 individuals of each species in aquarium tanks in the state of the art marine laboratory down here in Rothera. I am feeding the Odontaster on a diet of tinned ham and the Laternula on a diet of phytoplankton. At specific time intervals (5d, 10d, 15d, 20d, 30d, 40d, 45d) 6 animals of each species will be sacrificed, specific tissues will be dissected and frozen. These frozen tissues samples will then be shipped back to the UK where they will undergo stable isotope analysis. By knowing the isotopic signature of the diets it is possible to infer the isotopic turnover rates of the different tissues in the organisms.

The dive team have already hand-selected my specimens from the local dive sites and the marine assistant has set up my experiment layout in the aquarium, so the 2-day acclimatisation process is well underway! I will be dissecting my control (day 0) specimens later on today!

Next update will be about what it is like to live in Antarctica on a scientific research station and reports of my progress with the experiment!

Hope all is well up North!

Ant(arctica) Crook