The Hunt for Squid

As I blindly make my way to my bunk in pitch black darkness, the landscape of stars above still covers my vision. At night, I find myself staring up at the ships mast amongst the expansive and vast star scape and picturing the boat as one softly floating through the universe. Being out at night is a time in which I feel so simultaneously connected and disconnected from the world - something I rarely encounter in other environments or journeys.

This trip has thrown so many new firsts, insights and challenges into my life. Reflecting on our five days at sea since Palmerston, I've realized how quickly days are passing by as life on board the Seamans becomes the new norm. The ship has become more of a home to me than I ever could have possibly imagined since first walking through it in Tahiti and thinking "How am I ever going to be able to live on this thing for five weeks." I have come to love my small bunk, eating meals on gimbaled tables always in constant motion, the many bruises I have accumulated from hitting walls and poles as I attempt to move around the swaying ship, and even the hot and cramped engine room checks I will probably miss in some strange way after leaving the ship. This home to me is also waking up in the morning and being able to sit out on the open ocean - a landscape more complex, powerful, and dynamic than I had always pictured it being. Last week as we headed to Palmerston, we were encountering 14 foot swells and dark cloudy swells whereas today and yesterday we've been floating on a flat and glassy blue expanse. It's powerful to be able to live on and directly study what I've been interested in for so long, and to see firsthand how vast this blue planet really is and how it operates so forcefully out of sight from human eyes every day.

After leaving Palmerston, part of me was fearful for our eight straight days at sea. I think this second leg however has been one full of growth, awe, comfort, and knowledge. During these 8 days we have been tasked with more responsibilities and are serving as shadows to the watch officers and lab officers. We have successfully learnt the name of all 83 lines on the boat, from the Jib Downhaul to the Mains'l Halyard, where they live, and what they do. I feel more and more connected to the boat as a whole as I continue to understand why each sail is set or down and how to best stop, slow down, or make speed in the wind. This week we have also been learning how to navigate using the stars and the sun through viewing them with sextants and recording their angle relative to the boat, as well as the time that the sight was taken. In lab, we've still been busy deploying CTD after CTD, collecting neuston nets full of bright blue copepods, man o'wars, myctophids, pteropods, and taking meter net samples at varying depths in the water column. The bioluminescence has been really amazing and can be seen just through looking at the waves formed by the boat at night. It's been interesting to see the change in organisms as we make our way towards the Tongan trench - an area much more nutrient rich than the South Pacific Gyre desert we are sailing through.

Being apart of the squid research time, much of the first three weeks were spent unsuccessfully squid jigging at evening watch during times when our boat is heave-to for deployments. We became so desperate for squid that catching one was written into the night orders made by the captain every night. Soon everyone was out on the edge of the boat at night wearing large colorful squid hats to "become the squid." The night of May 30, to our astonishment, we caught a large purple back flying squid with the help of Barb and Mike, and two nights ago, Bella, Thom, and Dan all added to our growing collection of specimens. When first looking at the squid with UV light, it was crazy to see the 6cm by 3cm light producing photophore on its mantle along with photophores dotting the rest of its muscle tissue like a star dotted sky. We were also able to get great footage of the color changes that each squid produced as it stretched and contacted its chromatophores, from translucent to purple, to half purple, to spotted purple. Now that we have quadrupled the amount of squid data in the last two days, we have just became to conduct our dissections and are excited to be able to hopefully map the photophores that these squid have as well as try to more fully explain its color changes.

One last thing to add: we saw the coolest 6-7 foot blue shark last night at the seamount near Niue island that we sailed by to fish and chum the waters. It was truly beautiful to watch it swim around so gracefully in the crystal clear water as it reflected a bright iridescent blue from the lights coming from the boat -definitely an experience that I will never forget. I think we got some pretty great Go-Pro footage and other photos that may be published :)

-Alex