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DISPATCH 6: "Cold. Dark. Hungry." - 6.05.2006 | Mark Carroll 
Cracking the refrigerator door on the ship's icy environmental room, Marsh Youngbluth's
glasses immediately fogged as he stepped out into the warm, humid air. Youngbluth,
a marine scientist specializing in soft-bodied deep-sea organisms at the Harbor Branch
Oceanographic Institution, had been working in icebox-like conditions for the last hour
setting up an experiment. Outside in the Florida sun, he looked considerably out of
place wearing his down-filled vest.
"Any experiment is best to do right where an animal lives," Youngbluth said, as he pulled up a plastic chair on the aft deck and sat down. "In lieu of that, you want to make conditions as natural as you can," he continued. For Youngbluth's work aboard ship with deep-water coral that meant emulating the dark, frigid conditions found at depth (conditions he was familiar with having collected several of the samples himself in the Johnson-Sea-Link submersible). That was exactly what he had done in the environmental room, created a deep-water space for his coral guests. In particular, he was studying the respiration and feeding of a dominant species on the Miami Terrace called Lophelia. 
Shallow-water corals have the luxury of having a portion of their food supplied by a symbiotic organism living within them called zoozanthellae. Like solar panels, the zoozanthellae harness sunlight and convert it to energy for the corals. Deep-water corals, however, are not so lucky. Sunlight does not penetrate down to their habitat. As a result, the zoozanthellae are absent, leaving deep-water corals to forage for themselves. But, forage on what? With such an inaccessible habitat, no one is really sure. Although corals in general are considered filter feeders, they actually capture their food using a retractable, crown-like array of tiny stinging tentacles. Corals, at least the shallow-water ones, then pull the prey into their centrally located mouths. In theory, their deep-water relatives do the same. That was one of the things Youngbluth was looking at in his experiments. However, he was interested in not only how Lophelia eats, but what. Earlier in the mission while studying a specimen under a dissecting scope, he had already (and quite surprisingly) discovered a copepod in the stomach of a Lophelia polyp. 
Back in the red-light glow of the environmental room, Youngbluth's experiment clicked away analyzing coral respiration. The results would help determine, on a quantifiable level, Lophelia's requirements for life. The results, hand-in-hand with information on what and how much the corals eat, would help Youngbluth and others address the question of how fast they grow. And, should this environment prove fragile enough to require protection, that would be a fundamental question to answer. Blog 6: "Sunset" - 6.05.2006 Every evening, as the sun sets, the sub crew launches the Johnson-Sea-Link into the sea for its nightly dive. Usually, the sub sinks and everyone quickly returns to their work, busying themselves with the pressing matters of maintaining a ship at sea and multiple active science labs. But tonight, everyone was stopped by a dramatic evening sun as it sank behind a line of buildings so distant that they were almost invisible. Everything was silent with each person lost in their own thoughts for one of those moments that seemed to go on for a hour, but in actuality was only a minute. We all need more times like that in our lives. Suzanne Wentley, a reporter with the Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers and Sarah Grille, a photographer working with her have joined the team of researchers onboard the ship. Read their first report about this mission on Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers. Read dispatches from the R/V Seward Johnson from Suzanne Wentley on her At Sea Blog. 
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