Firstfruits

After about a 2-day steam north, we arrived last night in the port of Longyearbyen, Svalbard. When we first arrived, we were unable to dock for a few minutes because reportedly two SCUBA divers were underwater near the dock. Can anybody guess who the divers might have been? Yep, that’s right – it was Peter and Daniel, and they were picking up my settlement plates from the Longyearbyen city pier. They had apparently waited until the very last minute to complete the dive and were just finishing as we pulled in, even though the ship was 6 hours late. I wanted so badly to roll my eyes at their incredible procrastination, but to be honest, I have no right to complain. The settlement plates got to the ship in time. No harm; no foul. Furthermore, Daniel and Peter are helping me out on a volunteer basis, even though they have their own projects to worry about. I owe those guys so much beer.

When the dive leader handed me the plates, he warned me not to get my hopes up. “We thought about just leaving them there,” he said, “I’m not sure there’s anything on them.” I held up a settlement plate to the light. Sure, they look completely uninhabited to the untrained eye. Most people would conclude that my experiment had utterly failed, but if you look closely enough, you would notice hundreds of tiny spots on the plexiglass. I might not have seen them, either, if they hadn’t interrupted the flow of water down the vertically-suspended plate. Tiny spots. That means life.

One of the spirorbids on my settlement plates. 

I cut the settlement plates from their frames and stored them in seawater in the ship’s walk-in refrigerator overnight. I spent most of today staring down a dissecting microscope, counting and trying to identify the inhabitants of the plates. The most common recruits were tiny worms, called spirorbids. They live inside a calcium carbonate tube and eat by filtering the water around them. Some of the spirorbids on my plates were as small as half a millimeter in length and a quarter millimeter across. I also saw a number of different bryozoans, also known as moss animals. Bryozoans live in colonies with many individuals, and they can be either upright and branched or flat and encrusting. Most of the colonies on my plates had only one or two individuals, indicating the colonies were very young.

I was elated to get my settlement plates back – and then to have successful recruitment! I think an important lesson to take away from these firstfruits of my data is that there is recruitment of benthic invertebrates happening during the polar night, at least at one location. Previous work by another group of scientists showed the same thing. You know, we often think of winter as a time when everything shuts down, the weather is cold, there’s not a lot of food, and basically life comes to a screeching halt. But even in the coldest part of the world, in 24-hour darkness, there is new life taking hold, metamorphosing, and recruiting to my settlement plates.

What an optimistic metaphor!