I PEER out into the dawn mist. It is snowing softly and the sea is flat calm.
Then they appear, three great grey shapes cruising powerfully alongside our
ship. They take steady short breaths, briefly engulfing us in a fishy cloud of
steam, then turn and dive under the hull.
鈥淎-frame in!鈥� shouts Josh into his radio, and the whine of hydraulics snaps
me out of my whale-watching trance. Above, the bright orange confusion of steel
struts and levers that is our precious box-corer swings wildly on its tether.
Dave DeMaster, chief scientist, gives me a timely reminder to stop staring out
to sea and to 鈥渉aul in the tag lines鈥�. The swing is brought under control and we
land the corer gently onto the deck. 鈥淕ood core!鈥� he shouts. We whoop with
excitement. Our combined efforts have brought yet another beautifully
undisturbed lump of green deep-sea mud onto the deck.
Myself and 16 other scientists from around the world are aboard the Antarctic
research vessel Laurence M. Gould. The rugged mountains and ice sheets of the
Antarctic Peninsula, just 50 kilometres away, contrast with the fertile seas we
have come so far to study. During the summer months, bathed in sunlight 24 hours
a day and fed by deep-water nutrients, these waters support a teeming array of
marine life. But in the winter, the sunlight is gone and the energy pump that is
the Sun鈥檚 rays is switched off. Nowhere else in the world is this seasonal
effect more dramatic, and this is what we have come to study.
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Two months previously, I was explaining to friends back home that I was off
to Antarctica. 鈥淲ow!鈥� they would exclaim: 鈥淲hat are you doing there? Studying
penguins, or killer whales, perhaps?鈥�
鈥淓r, no. Worms actually,鈥� I would reply enthusiastically. 鈥淭hey are amazingly
diverse in the Antarctic and no one has worked out how they feed in the winter.
Part of our project is to鈥︹��
At this point their eyes would glaze over and I knew the conversation was
over. But marine worms, the diverse group known scientifically as polychaetes,
are the subject of the PhD thesis that I am working on at the Natural History
Museum, London. So when Craig Smith of the University of Hawaii invited me to
join him on an Antarctic research trip I jumped at the opportunity to collect
some more. And of course, if there just happened to be a side order of humpback
whales breaching, beautiful ocean sunsets, penguins leaping off icebergs and
teeming fur-seal colonies, then they would be a welcome bonus.
So here I am found, on the back of a heaving ship, shovelling thick, oozing
mud from one bucket to another. Our 鈥渂ox corer鈥� is cleverly designed to bring
back an undisturbed section of the seabed 500 metres below. Once on board, the
job of sorting the mud from the animals falls to that endless source of cheap
labour that is the PhD student. But I am soon rewarded with plenty of wriggling
polychaete worms. Craig has estimated that there may be up to 20 000 per square
metre of seabed, a density possibly unmatched elsewhere in the world.
Under the microscope, a wondrous variety of forms is revealed. Giant pink and
purple scavenging scale worms dwarf tiny burrowing types. Predatory 鈥済lycerid鈥�
polychaetes extrude their tiny jaws from mouthparts that are almost as long as
the worm itself. An agitated 鈥減hyllodocid鈥� polychaete swims aggressively around
the Petri dish, laying thousands of tiny pink eggs as it moves. They do not live
for long. Having survived a huge change in water pressure, it is the heat that
finally kills them. Soon I add formaldehyde preservative and the rest are
quickly finished. The collector鈥檚 job is often a cruel one. Bound and packaged,
they are shipped home to the Natural History Museum, no longer for the greater
glory of the empire, but just my small contribution to a huge international
programme of research.
This is the winning essay in the Wellcome Trust/New 杏吧原创 2000
Millennial Essay Competition for postgraduate students.