Reporting from the Road II: Beneath the Waves Film Festival Review

In 2010, the Benthic Ecology Meeting started a new tradition of hosting a film festival of ocean-themed short movies that range from light-hearted music videos to hard-hitting in-your-face documentation of anthropogenic threats to our oceans. The increase in quality and artistry of the films in just two short years is amazing! Props to all the film makers that presented this year!

Here are a few that I think are a must see by my self-imposed categories, enjoy!

Movies with a message

Gloop

Plastic Future: The Midway Story

Manta Ray of Hope

High Cuteness Factor

Are Some Weddell Seal Pups Couch Potatoes?

Just for Fun

R.I.P.

Our Blue

Science explained via art

Trophic Cascades of the Purple Marsh Crab (disclaimer – this was my favorite!!!!)

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Photos

Sand dollar and sea urchin test – pen and ink

A comparison of heatmaps made using some common color schemes: red, black and green (top left), default heatmap colors in R yellow to red (middle left) and red & blue (bottom left), along with their corresponding simulation for red/green deficit on the right.

Tiniest spoon EVER!

Left to right / top to bottom: Make shift field lab in Darling Center Cabin, make shift field lab in the field (!), Maine-ly Meat Restaurant, Acadia NP, Alewife fish ladder in Damariscotta, ME, grass roll, and sunset.

Basic diagram of the neurosecretory system of the American lobster, Homarus americanus. Edited from Skiebe 2001.

Kylla and Me and the Wicked Half Marathon finish last year.

The new Hughes greenhouse, to be completed this spring, just in time for collecting marsh plants!

Traditional New England Clambake

The proportion of megabytes for “Graduate School” and for “Everything Else”

Don’t mind us, just destroying some echinoderm innocence.

Tubes of sperm, eggs, and embryos!

A little marble can make a big difference….

A clear, penetrable membrane seals the body cavity of the lobster, but still allows blood to be taken as needed.

Catherine celebrates the big day with her father and sister.

Snowy sunset at the MSC

Left to right: Week long progression of beautiful weather on day 1 to pouring rain on day 4. Sites: Cranberry Rd, Gouldsboro, ME; Bracy Cove, ME; Marshall Point, ME; and Newagen Seaside Inn, ME

The whelk Busycon spiratum – graphite

Just some of the contents of our lab’s outdoor storage shed… the “scientific equipment” we marine ecologists use.

Asco-fix-em! Quick thinking and improvising are key for successful field work: if your tool breaks, patch it together with some seaweed!

Castle Rock on a calm day at East Point.

Forbes sea star and common periwinkle just chillin’ in the tank

left to right: White Band disease experiment, falcon tubes with coral fragments, the omniscient autoclave

Ice layer in the high intertidal

Hiking in the New Hampshire White Mountains

View of the Bay of Fundy from a beautiful coastal trail in Quoddy Head State Park

Putting your face near poisonous animals is a staple of the 3 Seas immersive experience.

Here’s part of a lobster nervous system pinned out in a Petri dish.

The essentials of Fucus reproduction

… and allegedly some ghosts.

Commemorative stamps released in 2006 representing various pursuits of Ben Franklin (Image credit: http://faq.usps.com/eCustomer/iq/images/AI7546-6.jpg)

Worms!!

Good morning sun!

Filtering water in the back of the MSC van!

Morning in Bocas

Geoff explaining our awesome new seawater system amidst the construction of the new and improved pumphouse.

Holy Man, Mexico. Photo: Jason deCaires Taylor. Unfortunately, this isn’t likely to be an efficient way to grow A. cervicornis… they need more room – but I will be interested to see how this looks in 1-2 years.

Right: Sand covering a head of Siderastrea siderea. Each point is a different grain of sand. (credit: Janine Ledet & Kali Horn) Left: sediment infiltrating the polyps of a Montastrea cavernosa. The arrows show the movement of one grain of sand, proving that corals can direct the movement of foreign substances. (credit: Andrea Burton & Joelle Kilchenmann)

Tony’s Market: your local source of Pringles and cookies

1856 portrait of Mr. Verne. All sea captains should have such a beard http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jules_Verne.gif

It goes on and on and on and on.

My lost and found glasses! Now part of the marine debris sculpture!

Rate of Education Improvement in 49 Countries from 1995 to 2009

An owl helps with oceanographic research! Photo by John Lund, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute

In case you were wondering, this is Comet Pan-Starrs. Thanks to Boston light pollution, it was not visible to the naked eye in Framingham. http://www.space.com/20056-comet-panstarrs-march-night-sky.html

La Jardinera del la Esperanza, Punta Nizuc, Mexico. Photo: Jason deCaires Taylor.

Exploring the expansive intertidal for Marine Ecology class surveys

(Silbiger & Munguia 2008)

Rainbow of colors seen in full spectrum (left) and with two types of red/green deficit: protanopia (middle) and deuteranopia (right). Images from wikipedia.

“What! We have to fit all our stuff into that little thing!”

North Atlantic sea cucumber with feeding tree extended!

Kylla lends her algae expertise to some COSA students

Green sea turtle – not actually an illustration, this is a sand sculpture I made on a beach (one of my more bizarre artistic hobbies)

Jonah crabs and club tunicates

Of course, we had to take a pit stop on our drive for some tidepooling!

A terrific drawing of what I assume is my student, me and the fetal pig we dissected in lab.

Our shiny new lab space at the Northeastern MSC! So many shelves and drawers and windows!

Rachel Carson with Bob Hines conducting marine biology research in Florida in 1952. (Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

Fair-well my old Dell!

Winning marathon times for the Boston Marathon 1933-2004. Open diamonds represent men’s times, closed circles represent women’s times. (Figure 2 from Miller-Rushing et al. 2013)

Chris and Mariah dazzle students with fun facts about lobsters, crabs and snails!

We barely had a boat ride where we didn’t see one or both of these. It was seriously magical. (photo credit: Sam Csik)

This isn’t even base camp… what the $#&% are we getting ourselves into…

Front view of RoboLobster

VW bug, Mexico. Photo: Jason deCaires Taylor.

Returning from a night snorkel tracking octopuses in Bonaire.

Wiring success! Maybe I will start moonlighting as an electrician.

I was moved to tears. (left photo credit: Sam Csik)

Boo!!

The same beach, Canoe Beach, during Hurricane Sandy. The waves are near 10 feet high in this photo

Weighing a sample on the microbalance

Fish printing on t-shirts is a great way to show off your artistic talents!

Left to right: Scuba smurf inspects survey gear, Christine Newton sets up a transect line for survey

First light hits U.S. land each morning here at Quoddy Head Light

Reef research underway

This sign is no joke, those seals are huge! And they can move faster than you think…

NC Analyzer

Photo: news.cnet.com

You can’t understand how good this looks until you’ve spent nearly 2 months living in a field station. They gave us homemade blackberry juice for goodness sake.

Catherine celebrating the big day (right) with her father and sister. Brendan (left) starting his defense presentation.

Ecological relationships between marsh cordgrass, mussels, and fiddler crabs. Published in Hughes et al. 2013.

Also this happened. That’s King Sebastian, our fearless boat driver and all around hero.

Top: Hollis Jones inspects a coral skeleton. That muddy rock has been around for longer than human civilization. Bottom: Bill talks about the history of Bocas reefs and explains how we can use coral fossils to tell us about the natural world of the past. (photo credit: Janine Ledet)

Students reference their self-made field guides to ID species during a rocky shore survey on Georges Island

Frozen tide pool

Waves trickling through polished pebbles before Egg Rock. Nahant, MA, 2012.

No words.

The Vollmer Lab at STRI! I promise that water bottle will be out by the time experiments begin but it’s important to stay hydrated while moving heavy boxes and dodging cockroaches the size of small rodents.

Thanks to research in China, the proteins that make these jellies light up can now make your ice cream glow!

Volunteer Scientist with The Science Club for Girls

A real live nautilus! In the aquarium at California Academy of Sciences

Ode to a microscopic world. (photo credit: Joelle Kilchenmann, Hollis Jones & Janine Ledet)

Heterosiphonia japonica – the alga we were hoping to survey today

Grab sampler (front) and corer ready for use!

Franklin’s 1770 map of the Gulf Stream (Image courtesy of NOAA Photo Library)

Sea surface temperature data collected by NOAA satellites. Notice the dark orange band indicating the warm Gulf Stream. (Image from www.science.nasa.gov)

I thought students might be squeamish about the fish – but they loved it!

Waves like this make diving a bit dangerous

Barnacles entombed in ice

This should probably be marine themed, but… well, feel free to imagine it is a spiny fish…

Massachusetts Sea Level Curve from USGS. Click image to go to source.

One of Maria’s many beautiful illustrations: search her name to see more!

Moose looks on as I filter water samples in the backseat of the MSC van.

I was lucky to glimpse this snail after a wave exposed it, before it quickly burrowed back into the sand.

Professor Bracken and our guide, Deb, deploy the CTD at our open ocean sampling site

Pottery shards are likely from an ancient sieve, used in the step to strain the solid curds from the liquid whey.

Littorine snails congregate on the scarce rocky refuges of the primarily sandy beaches of Costa Rica.

Rasit (my husband) armed and ready to put up his poster on phylogeography of inverts in the Mediterranean and Black Sea.

Geoffrey Mutai finishing the 2011 Boston Marathon. His time of 2 hours 3 minutes and 2 seconds set a new record of the fastest marathon ever. (Photo: http://www.npr.org)

A polychaete worm we found in the mud – check out those parapodia!

Male releasing spermatangia (left pictures) and female releasing oogonia (right pictures). Note the female receptacle (top right) has ruptured and conceptacles inside the recepatacle are visible.

Steps to perfect blancmenge: 1) dry harvested irish moss and while waiting 2) teach an old dog new tricks and 3) take sexy seaweed shots. 4) Gather supplies. 5) Warm milk with chosen ingredients and irish moss. Once the ‘gel’ has been released from the seaweed 5) strain and put into individual serving cups. Let set overnight in the refrigerator and enjoy!

Me and Pinar at the Ankara Half Marathon.

Ice Skating in the Boston Commons

Old-timey maps add gravitas to any explanation.

Canoe Beach on a “normal” calm day

Kylla and Brendan working on the shed – almost done!

Sometimes you meet unexpected friends in the intertidal

Runners stopping for water during the 2012 Boston Marathon. Photo: hunffingtonpost.com

A map of Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. Dots represent right whale sightings, solid lines indicate previous shipping lanes, dotted lines indicate new shipping lanes. stellwagen.noaa.gov

Map of the 11 sites surveyed in the Gulf of Maine

Reef buddies

Our dear Kylla presenting her fancy statistical modeling of intertidal algal ecosystem biodiversity.

Professor Matt Bracken helps students identify some inverts living in the mud

Thanks to research in China, the proteins that make these jellies light up can now make your ice cream glow!

Pit Organs have thousands of nerve endings that can sense temperature changes of less than a thousandth of a degree.

Helpers colored a marine animal or plant to add to our food web, and then we connected them with string to demonstrate links in the food chain.

Even the fetal pig thinks I am a good TA! Thats all the gratification I need….

Top left: whitetip reef shark (Triaenodon obesus) Top right: crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci) Bottom left: Moorish idol (Zanclus cornutus) Bottom right: goliath grouper (Epinephelus quinquefasciatus)

The Sea Education Campus (SEA) in Woods Hole, MA, where the retreat was located. Photo: patricialapadula.com

Thin layer of ice coating Fucus

Lugging these around is my exercise for the day

VW bug habitat plan. Jason deCaires Taylor.

Small (left) gel rigs hold about 1/3 the number of samples of a large (right) gel rig.

A map of Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. Dots represent right whale sightings, solid lines indicate previous shipping lanes, dotted lines indicate new shipping lanes. stellwagen.noaa.gov

In this nutrient-poor bog, these carnivorous pitcher plants subsist by trapping insects in their “pitcher” filled with sweet nectar

Me at work in the Florida mangroves.

Lauren Josephs squirts fluorescein dye into the water column. By measuring the dye dispersal over a time-lapse video you can get an idea of water turbulence around coral reefs.