Samhammondus alexloweii

Part of the winter over crew came in on the last ship. Station population is 43, but it seems like much more than that. It is amazing the difference a few people can make in a station this small. It's great to have the new guys, though. They brought a lot of energy and excitement about their stay that will help us carry through to the end of ours. Thursday morning, the last ship north before mine left. Just a couple weeks now, and it is creeping up fast. For now we are grounded inside by a large storm (30-40 knot winds today) that is predicted to bring a couple feet of snow, but as of yet has only brought drizzle.

Yesterday Sam and I were doing the normal krill search when we spotted the only school of the week in a trough between two islands. More out of desperation and curiousity, we decided to try to catch the school. I figured we could come from the shallow end of the trough while letting out the line, catch the school and head back out to deep water while pulling it in. Only our winch is slower than I anticipated and we had gone over the school before our 120m of wire was out, meaning we had to turn around to go thru it. But as I turned, the wire became slack enough to let the net drop to the bottom before we straightened. Fortunately the bottom was sand and no damage was done to the net. Upon retrieving the net, we pulled up a codend full of benthic invertebrates, three krill and a little ice fish. Fascinated by the treasurechest we had unearthed, we brought our catch back to station to have the divers look at it. On the ride home we joked about what we would name the new species of fish we had found (Discoverus byfuckupus, alexus loweus, Samhammondus alexloweii). As we rounded the pier into the parking lot we found an ice berg parked in our spot, with an 11 foot Large Marge of a Leopard seal taking a nap on it. We pulled the boat out of the water immediately... The leopard seal issue was temporarily fixed by pulling the boats whenever not in use, but even in the few minutes that some of the boats spent in the water unattended, the Leopard seals nibbled on them. Spotting the leopard seal sitting on an iceberg in our parking spot was funny, because of the obvious irony, but also unnerving because not 5 hours beforehand 15 of us jumped off the pier right there when the Gould left the station for Punta Arenas. Later last night, Sam and I observed 5 other Leopard Seals around station. I guess we were fortunate to not have seen them earlier in the day.

So we unloaded our buckets of benthic creatures and showed them to the divers. This morning Jim McClintock, the echinoderm specialist of the group, came up to us regarding one very small (couple centimeters wide), very cute starfish. When we pulled it out of the bucket, the starfish was up on all five tiptoes, a position regularly assumed while feeding. But when Jim flipped it over to see what was for lunch, he found 200 larvae, the starfish wasn't feeding, but rather, it was brooding. Having never seen a starfish that small brooding, he immediately trashed his suspicions that it was a juvenile of a larger more common species and started to think it was an as-of-yet unknown species. So he took pictures of it under a microscope.

All the darker orange things in the middle of the starfish are little baby starfish.

Then sent the pictures to an echinoderm expert at the Smithsonian to identify the species, or confirm that it is, in fact, a new species.