August 13, 2004
by Morgan Kilgour
Morgan Kilgour is currently a graduate student of Dr. Tom Shirley at the University of Alaska Fairbanks working towards an MS in Marine Biology. She will be looking at how invertebrates vary by depth and substrate on the shipwrecks. After graduating from the University of California, Santa Cruz in June of 2003, Ms. Kilgour worked as a lab assistant to the Salmon Population Analysis Team for the NOAA Fisheries lab in Santa Cruz. During her career at NOAA she worked as a field technician as well as researching historical reports of coho salmon in California. She also volunteered at UCSC’s Marine Mammal Performance and Physiology Project under Dr. Terrie Williams, and participated in Pete Raimondi and Giacomo Bernardi’s marine field quarter in Moorea, French Polynesia.

It has been a great adventure visiting these deep wrecks and discovering what types of life inhabit them.  More than what we are learning from these wrecks is what we are learning from each other.  Though we will not go to the Anona due to the hurricane issues, we have been able to revisit sites and explore a new one. 

So far, we have visited a cold seep, where we were able to collect samples to compare and contrast a natural hard substrate and an artificial substrate (the wrecks).  The Gulfpenn has been revisited three times so far to allow all teams to obtain all of the samples that they could possibly need.  We have revisited the Robert E. Lee to explore the extent of the debris field.  The archaeologists are very excited because now they have almost a full calendar of telegraphs found from this expedition.

I am learning as I view the critters that inhabit the deep.  It has been very exciting to see what our traps bring up, and what we actually collect versus what we thought we collected (via video feed).  Aaron Baldwin and I have managed to obtain some samples which are rare in collections but abundant in the deep.  The progress that we have made has been excellent.

Yesterday was my birthday, and I would like to thank all on board who made it a memorable one.

Bathynomous giganteus have a final snack.