Today's really quite an interesting day. Winds are howling at 50 to 60 knots, picking up speed as the day goes on. Rain and huge waves abound. The pressure keeps sinking, which is to be expected with a storm. Around 11:30 A.M. our time (10:30 A.M. Boston time), Dr. Detrich, Urjeet, and I had a teleconference with the NSF. It was bring your child to work day at the NSF, and they were having a few Antarctica presentations for the elementary, middle school, and high school students present. I got to speak to each of these groups via a video conference. I basically told them about how I got here, my day to day work, our project, and general life in Antarctica. I got some cool questions from the middle schoolers. The high schoolers were typical high schoolers - trying to be cool by being uninterested in the presentation in front of them. Oh well....
After lunch today (1:30/2:00 for us three today due to our conference running late), we had an unexpected fire drill. Normally we would muster in the boat house, but since it isn't heated right now due to boating for the day being cancelled because of the storm, the boat house is freezing cold. We instead mustered in the garage in the other building (GWR - garage, warehouse, recreation). This meant that I had to grab my red windbreaker/raincoat that the ASC provided me and venture off into the cold windy rain to get to the muster location. From there, we came back to take our mid-day temperature readings in the fish tanks. Everything is looking great for our fish. No mortalities today! While this is awesome for our research purposes (getting them to breed....you need live fish for that!), it makes our days a bit boring and lazy. Normally when we have mortalities we do dissections and collect tissue samples. With no mortalities, we can't dissect them. I suppose we could euthanize a few fish that are in our outdoor tanks, but let's be real here: nobody wants to go outside today. Even taking our O2 and temperature measurements was difficult enough with this weather.
We also fed N. coriiceps a dead octopus from our touch tank. The poor fellow jumped out of the tank, probably trying to escape from our captivity. We found him on the floor this morning, and we put him in a bucket in preparation for chopping into bits for coriiceps. Instead, we just threw him into their tank whole. It took some lighting and nudging to get them to notice it, but once they saw it, it was really cool to witness. They counter-rotate the food, unknowingly helping each other as they battle for the flesh. They ended up rotating the octopus' body so much that it formed a spiral rope-like structure. Then the other fish took notice of what was happening and joined in by trying to rip off the legs of the octopus. Finally it became a bit of a feeding frenzy, and within a matter of a minute or less, the entire organism was gone. They're certainly quite the animal. Whenever I stick my O2 or temperature probe into the tank, they try to go after it and pull it in.
Today we also have two birthdays: Urjeet and Craig. Urjeet turns 21 today. Mike the chef is making sangria per Urjeet's request. A girl from the other research group and a few from ours are planning to prank Urjeet too. I'm not totally sure what the prank is, but I saw them sifting through the buckets of fish bits so I'm going to go ahead and guess that it involves that. Urjeet's supposed to move over to the ship tonight to prepare for fishing tomorrow, but if the weather continues like this then I doubt the ship will be able to make it out tomorrow. They'd probably have to leave on Saturday.
Well, now I'm off to go and see if anybody would like some help. Our incubators are all set up. Now we're just waiting for the plumbers to make the connections and start the flow. Everything seems to be coming together nicely now. It's great for the research, but bad for keeping us busy.
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