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The Research Vessel EDWIN LINK (RVEL) motors towards home on a slow ride down the Indian River Lagoon, just east of the HBOI campus.
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Captain George Gunther radios Harbor Branch Marine Operations during the RVEL's final approach to its home port.
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Wilderness photographer Mark Carroll, the correspondent from our Shark Mission to Brazil, returns to bring you the action from the Keys. Click below to learn a bit more about Mark...
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Learn more about the R/V EDWIN LINK, our floating home base and lab throughout the mission.
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Do you have a question
about the 'Keys to Cures'
expedition?
Send an email to
AskAtSea@hboi.edu.
We'll forward selected
questions to our
correspondent, and post
the answers online. |
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The list goes on...sustaining viable deep-sea sponges in the lab, finding potential new species from the deep -- the kind of day to day discoveries and moments of insight that draw adventurous spirits to the frontiers of science.
Each step of the medicine-hunting process has its own depth and intricacy. For all of these daily dispatches, there are an equal number of stories that remain untold...and other stories that will continue to unfold in the coming months and years as researchers delve into their newly collected specimens. They will, no doubt, return to this setting -- waters that have yielded scientific successes and stories beyond anyone's expectations. Every submersible dive was a dive into the unknown; each bizarre tale from the deep was an inspirational fusion of leading-edge technology and wild, impossible places. This expedition constantly challenged and enriched my fundamental perceptions of the ocean...or at least, on the very slowest days, of sponges.
August 25, 9:00am, Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, Ft. Pierce, Florida -- Through the night and into this morning, the EDWIN LINK steamed north toward its home port at HBOI. Last night, on her port side, Miami and Ft. Lauderdale and West Palm Beach filled the sky with a haze of light, obscuring our nightly show of stars.
By 8am the end was near. The ship had moved past the Ft. Pierce inlet and onto the Indian River Lagoon -- the same estuary that saw us off three weeks ago. The scientists, with their shipboard labs packed up and their mainland labs still an hour away, watched the scenery. There is not a soul on deck who wouldn't agree that this is the longest leg of the entire mission.
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Claudia Harper faces the mission's final sunset after a successful 20-day cruise.
The last sunset of our cruise was the most spectacular yet...a fitting sendoff for an expedition that met with greater success on every passing day.
Dr. Claudia Harper, a veterinarian from the the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came on board three weeks ago in hopes of pulling off a difficult feat--keeping deep water sponges alive in captivity. Usually, these animals live no more than 24 hours after being removed from their natural environment.
"We successfully maintained a population of 18 deep-water sponges (Corallistes typus) for the entire 6-day duration of the experiment," Harper reported, obviously very encouraged by her results. "We duplicated various parameters of their natural environment and used 2 therapeutic agents. This preliminary work established guidelines for assessing the health of these animals, potential therapeutic plans, and will eventually lead to larger scale projects. The goal here is to provide scientists with a source of biomedically important sponges which can only be found in the wild today. This would make these animals more accessible to research and also would contribute to conservation efforts."
Keep checking back on @Sea...we'll soon be hearing from other expedition scientists. We'll keep you up to date on all of their scientific success stories and continuing research results from the "Keys to Cures" mission.
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