Daily Journal

June 28, 2010

By David M. Lawrence

Laundry accomplished!

For my first laundry at sea, I cannot say that I'm all that bright about how to go about it. As I write this line, I feel a nagging reminder that "Thou shalt not pile wet clothes upslope of one's stern when sitting on the deck." I've never been one for dogma. Even after a change of what few clothes I had left, my stern remained a bit damp.

We had quite the laundry scramble this morning. Skye Moret started hers first, then Marina Cassio, then me, and finally Ted Snedden. We finished before our 1000 hours station, but several of us had a significant pile to hang and dry. I had 17 days' worth of laundry – my original plan was to stretch it out so that I would not have to wash any clothes while on the ship, but a few days of subtropical heat and sweat disabused me of such nonsense. The, uh, ambiance that resulted from my original strategy reminded me of an old Quincy Jones (I think) song about "funk" and "outta my face," except that I couldn't get the funk outta my face – I was carrying it everywhere with me.

After I finished my amateurish attempt at washing my clothes on deck, I had to deal with the challenge of hanging them somewhere to dry. Skye finished first, taking up prime clothesline real estate, then she handed her remaining clothes pins to Marina. I finished second and scrounged for whatever pins I could find. Between the first set of pins I found, two loaners from Ted's private stash, and five that Marina had after she was done – one of which had to be repaired, which forced me to recall some long-lost skills I had mastered before the days of dryers – I managed to get everything hung to dry.

As I hung the clothes, I saw that I will be bringing some of the SSV Corwith Cramer back home with me. Bits of oil and grease stains, rust from the jib stay that I sometimes lean on while on bow watch, and other add-on colors from substances unknown are scattered over my clothes.

Ah, my stern feels dry now.

A Watch had midwatch last night. The moon put on a great light show as usual. When A Watch came on deck, I relieved C Watcher Wendy Kordesch on bow watch. She had noticed that when the moon emerged from behind the clouds, the light seemed to reach out toward the Cramer, creeping ever closer until it reached the ship and illuminated the sails. I kept my eye out for the creeping moonlight – I was not disappointed. Thank you, Wendy, for the tip.

Yesterday I left a cliffhanger of sorts. I said I was going to talk about some of the microscopic life – the zooplankton – of the part of the North Atlantic Ocean that we've traversed. The primary groups we focus on include cnidarians, molluscs, annelids and other marine worms, crustaceans, and urochordates. The cnidarians are familiar to most of us – jellies, siphonophores (including Portuguese men-o-war), and ctenophores. Likewise, the molluscs, annelids, and crustaceans should be familiar, too. The molluscs include the marine snails, such as pteropods, nudibranchs, and prosobranchs, as well as the cephalopods (squid and octopi). All we generally see of the cephalopods are the larval stage, but there are a range of the other groups of molluscs that we run across in our tows.

The most familiar annelid most of us ever see is the earthworm, but there are many different types we see in the ocean. Polychaetes are widespread – most of us know them as rather spectacular residents of coral reef ecosystems. Some of the other marine worms we see are chaetognaths – tiny but voracious predators of other zooplankton. We also see nematodes – though not many. Many of you may only think of nematodes as animal and plant parasites, but they play other roles in the marine ecosystem.

Most of us know crustaceans as dinner. Arguably, the most important role of zooplankton crustaceans is dinner. According to legend, the biologist J.B.S. Haldane said that God had an inordinate fondness for beetles. For many marine biologists, the "inordinate fondness" may be said to be for copepods. Copepods are kind of the longhorns of the zooplankton world, and are the most common type of critter we encounter in our tows – they make up 47 percent of what we have found in the 100 counts so far. But there are many other types of crustaceans to keep them company – isopods, shrimp, cladocera, among others.

The last group we regularly see in our counts are urochordates. These are tunicates and lancelates. They are our closest cousins in the invertebrate world. While they do not have backbones as adults, they have an embryonic notochord (a precursor to our backbone) and pharyngeal gill slits – diagnostic criteria for the chordata, which includes the vertebrates. Yes, we, too have a notochord and pharyngeal gill slits in our embryonic development, too. The urochordates we routinely encounter are salps, almost ephemeral organisms that form potentially massive floating colonies in the ocean depths.

There is much more to say, but I'm on deadline...