e e e hello everyone thank you for joining us to take a special look at what our restoration teams are doing in the Gulf of Mexico my name is Aaron Spencer and I am the communications manager for the Misa photic and deep benthic communities portfolio and I will be your host today uh we will get to talk to some of our friends on board a ship called the OSB Island intervention a 300 94t ship located about 132 miles off the coast of Galveston Texas they are at a place called bright Bank located in the flower garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary the only National Marine sanctuary in the Gulf of Mexico we are so excited to have you here to see what it's like on the ship for the last couple of days or in this case uh the last couple of weeks um where they've been conducting important science and restoration work uh today we'll be taking a deep dive into rovs or remotely operated Vehicles tools that are critical for conducting work in these depths so please share any questions or comments that you have in the chat I will pause for questions and make sure it gets to the team as we go um so in just a few minutes we are going to connect with the folks on board uh but first I want to talk a little bit about why they're out there and what they're doing uh so let's check out what's underwater in the Gulf of Mexico as you go deeper into the ocean like this underwater robot you see here or the remotely operated vehicle or ROV less and less sunlight is able to penetrate the water eventually you will reach the mesophotic Zone which literally means Middle Light and is sometimes referred to as the Twilight Zone as you travel even deeper you will eventually reach a point where there is no sunlight at all and in addition to this change of light the water will also get much colder and there's a much higher pressure at those depths but despite the low light cold temperatures and high pressure environment there's an incredible ecosystem that calls the seafloor and these depths home you see colorful corals and sponges which are the foundation of these ecosystems and they provide habitat for many of the fish and invertebrates you see here these deep sea ecosystems are found all over the world including in the Gulf of Mexico which is where all this beautiful footage that you're seeing right now is actually from there is so much that we still have to learn about the deep sea because exploring these depths can be difficult and requires help from expensive and highly technical equipment some of which we're going to learn more about from the science team today on board however what we do know is the deep sea is one of the is the largest habitat on earth and the number of species and the abundance of life that depends on the deep sea habitats may actually rival the colorful Coral wreaths found in Shallow Coastal Waters or even the tropical rainforests on land unfortunately the deep water Horizon oil spill that occurred in April 2010 dealt a heavy blow to these Gulf of Mexico communities on land and at Sea 11 people lost their lives and natural resources wildlife and habitats across the northern Gulf were severely impacted restoration is particularly challenging for the deep sea coral habitats that were injured because of how far they are from Shore and how far underwater these ecosystems are but uh so there's a lot that we still have to learn about them and as a result uh following the Deep waterer Horizon oil spill four restoration projects are currently underway um within the uh Gulf of Mexico H to look at these restoration of the seafloor at ecosystems below 160 feet the four projects are first mapping new areas and developing better maps of the seafloor in the Gulf so we know where exactly these Coral habitats are found second learning more about the species that live in these habitats and how they might be connected across the Gulf of Mexico third testing different methods to help corals grow and reproduce in the wild and in labs in order to help replace the corals impacted by the oil spill and finally working to reduce the threats that these ecosystems face and connecting this restoration work to the public this work is made possible by the Deep waterer Horizon open ocean trustees and a number of Partners including a large number of academic institutions and non-governmental organizations and the three main Federal Partners the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or Noah the US Geological Survey and the Bureau of ocean Energy Management now there are a lot of projects going on in the Gulf um but this particular project is really interesting and special because it's one of the first significant Noah Navy collaborations in the Gulf of Mexico it represents the deepest dive by humans for a Noah science and restoration Mission and is one of just a handful of times that saturation diving has been used for at se for a NOA Mission so enough from me I'm being boring here on land let's get to the ship and meet some of the folks that are currently at Sea okay great hi um thank you all so much for joining us I know that you guys are busy uh running these operations all day but I'm so excited that you're going to get to share some with our viewers here um so first before we get into the nitty-gritty um would you mind going around and introducing yourself um I know there's a lot of different jobs on board so if you could not only introduce ourselves but tell us a little bit about your role specifically in this Mission hi uh I'm Jake I'm the ROV guy um we are here to support Noah and the Navy and any kind of operations in sampling and collecting things subc that they need and in some of the deeper water that the divers can't get to hi everyone my name is Kelly Martin I'm a project manager for Noah and also one of the co- field party Chiefs for this Mission so uh dealt with a lot of the planning and now execution of this Mission so uh excited to share what we're working on with y'all hi everyone my name is Kyler Sloan and I'm a PhD student at UNCW and I'm looking at a couple of species of corals and seeing what types of food that they might be eating to help them grow in the future hey everybody I'm Megan laugher I'm also a student at the University of North Carolina Wilmington I'm a master student here so on this Cruise I'm going to be collecting ROV data to evaluate Trends in B think abundance so we're looking at like you said those habitat forming corals and sponges how they differ across depth gradients and also what food is available in the water near those communities awesome thank you all so much um I'm going to jump in with a couple of questions to get us started um but if you have questions please feel free to put them in the chat uh and I want to start actually with Jake because being an ROV Pilot that is not a job that many of us run into on a day-to-day basis so Jake could you tell us how you became an ROV Pilot and what it's like to be kind of behind that joystick uh using such an amazing piece of technology yeah it's a it's a really interesting field of work uh I got into it I was a saturation diver like your Navy guys and I was on the commercial end not with the Navy and um the company that I worked for at the time they bought the very first two Shilling uh rovs uh that were built and those are the ones that we're using now and uh I just kind of transitioned over from the diving world into rovs because it was you know a lot more opportunity in deeper water awesome um and then if you wouldn't mind I want to jump next to Kelly and I'm hoping Kelly you can introduce us a little bit to uh how we've been using these rovs on this particular mission to support restoration work yeah definitely so you can see one of the ROV uh that's on the ship right behind us here this is actually not the one we're using on this Mission the one that we're using is probably about to go in the water to do some work um but these are work class rovs they're much bigger than what our teams are typically used to working with and they're they're very capable um they typically are doing oil and gas industry work so when we started working with this team um on this Mission and planning this Mission we started talking to them about the different science tools and instruments that we could add that are not sort of standard on these types of vehicles so we added things like a suction sampler which is basically a giant suction tube that can um be used to sort of suck Critters off of the sea Flor into canisters that our teams can then use to sort of collect those individuals and study them um we added a really high resolution camera that faces down towards the sea floor so that we can take really um incredible images of the sea floor as we're sort of transacting over which I think Megan will get a chance to talk about in just a sec um yeah just lots of tools that we added worked really hard with the team uh to get this vehicle ready to to be a science machine entally rather than an industry machine and it's been a really exciting experience to to work with them um and one just other thing to mention sort of in addition to the science tools um sort of as you alluded to this these vehicles can also support all of the work that we're doing with the duration divers so um a lot of this mission is focused around the work that we're doing with those divers and I think one of our other live streams uh later this we'll talk a little bit more about that diving um but some of the major objectives have been installing moing buoys and removing Marine debris and so those are objectives that the divers are primarily tasked with but the rovs have been a huge help because they can get to the site before the divers get in the water scope things out make sure everything's safe um just sort of get all the information we need to make sure the divers are getting into a situation where they can accomplish those tasks um so that's been really crucial and then they've also actually helped us deploy some of the morines as well some of the morines we've used large weights on the bottom to sort of anchor them to the Sea Flor um and the the ROV has been really crucial in in helping to deploy those so it's been yeah a very cool collaborative sort of joint effort between the science team the ROV team and the Navy diver team uh it sounds like there is a lot going on um and I want to jump real quick again to Jake Jake do you have a specific one of those missions or objectives that you think has been the most interesting well so far um helping deploy some of those the larger buoys that the divers uh can't really swim with the vehicles have they're they're pretty capable they can carry a lot of weight and uh so we've been able to install some of these heavier buoys with more buoyancy on them than the divers can can handle and we can use our uh very specific spatially controlled arm to actually tie knots and uh put some shackles together and do some work that uh a lot of people didn't think we could do without human hands so it's been pretty neat I'll add on really quick we've been uh trying to practice some of those knots ourselves and even just with human hands yeah it is tricky so the fact that two ROV arms can do it is amazing um and just to sort of provide a little more context as to why we're deploying those Morin and removing Marine debris it's all part of the an effort to protect that seafloor habitat so the ideas if we can get these morines installed using you know the skills of the Navy divers and the skills of our ROV team uh folks will hopefully be less inclined to drop an anchor on the seaf Flor that might damage corals um so yeah it's been really great to see the team come together and get these Morin installed get the buoys installed so that you know hopefully these areas are protected into the future that is awesome it sounds like a win see one of these uh I was gonna say you can see one of these pyramids being lowered here by the crane um underwater the ROV is working to sort of untie that get it ready to be free and then the crew on the deck tosses the buoy in and then we have a new morning I'm still stuck on the idea of trying to tie a knot from hundreds of feet away um but that that is all so fantastic and I want to uh jump also now to ask Kyler and Megan a little bit about how they are planning or have been using the ROV to do some of their research as well um Megan can I start with you uh we heard that these rovs one of the things that they're able to do is help us run transects uh can you give a little background of what a transect is and how does that help us uh better understand the habitat yeah of course I'd love to so transects are a really cool way to really get eyes on these people our habitats um so we're using the rovs to get to a certain location that we have we give GPS locations and before we get down there we don't know 100% what's going to be there um so the point of this running this transect you know is to get Eyes On The Ground run a straight line we are running 100 meter transects for our project and the Hae team is also running about 300 meter transects for theirs so we're just running a straight line at a constant depth or whatever the aim is here and we're taking pictures as we go along so we're taking about every 60 seconds we're going to take a downward facing picture and that really gives us a good snapshot of what the seafloor looks like so we can quantify the abundance of those sponges the corals what we're looking at and what that habitat is like and that gives us a great chance to compare between sites when we could really put numbers on this and quantify what we're seeing down there and this is footage that we have right now of a transect they were running just on this Mission I think that's great um and now I also can see you had the forward I just wanted to mention you can see the two lasers in the screen there um that's how we're really seeing what distance we're looking at in these images as well so it's cool that we have those lasers available on these images um and then I also want to hear um you know I hear that we're also collecting samples from the ROV um Kyler can you tell us a little bit about what these samples are and then what we can learn from these samples yeah so there's a lot we still don't know about what's living in the Gulf so going down with ROV and being able to take these samples you can identify what some of these species are and then we also are able to take water samples and so we're using that to try and figure out what food is available in the water and then we can take it a step further and see if there's specific species that are using specific sources of food to help them grow and especially with the restoration efforts we have several Labs that are trying propagate and grow grow these corals on land and then bring them back out so knowing what food can be most effective at growing them is going to really help us move forward and every time we send an R down and every time we get another sample it's just more information that we can use to push this project forward and for some of us that might not be familiar uh what sort of food are we talking about here or we're not talking about big fish right no we're definitely not um so oh well one of the things about being at C is that sometimes the internet is not always the most reliable um I think I just lost connection with our team here right as we were about to get to the juicy stuff of what to corals eat um so we are going to work on this technical difficulty um and for I'm sorry so you can actually you're stuck with me for the time being um but what I will say is I am currently calling from land but as of two days ago I was also on board the island intervention um so I was actually there getting to see these two rovs and I can see some questions in the chat um that these ROV samples are quite large um or the ROV is quite large and that's true there's a lot of really different types of rovs and um these ones that we were working with are particularly large that means that they can do quite a number of things um you can see uh we've got the arm over the side here of how they're deploying and retrieving this ROV um you heard mention about the bottles that they were using to collect water samples um those niskin bottles we had about nine of them set up on the side and you can think of it almost like a really large long Malene bottle that if you were to just screw on and take a water sample um then they're able to take that to the lab and look at all sorts of the little invertebrate or animals without a bath bone Critters that are in the water column um and even though a lot of this work is focused on the sea floor you heard Kyler mention that the food that's in the water column is really important to the animals on the sea Flor um the other thing we can do with the ROV is you heard about those ROV arms and there are two different types of arms one is like a kind of the classic robotic arm that you can picture um and then the other one is actually really cool it's super dextrous and it feels it looks like when you watch it like a human and so when you're talking about doing the tying things for example underwater um picture like how hard it would be to hold like two pairs of scissors and try to like tie a knot together but when you have those super malleable arms it allows you to do much more um so one of the things that those ROV arms can do is they can take biological samples like for example a little sample of uh Coral or Rock and they put it in these boxes um that you can kind of see in the picture here that then can come back to the surface and be used by scientists on board and that's one of the really cool things too about this ex Expedition is that you have so many different people on board you have people for example from USGS who are taking sediment cores and sediment samples back to the lab you have people from the Smithsonian who are looking at the invertebrates I think I saw someone asking in the chat what are the coolest invertebrates you find with the ROV now I can say that I saw and I'm so sad to miss this this happened the day after I left um they did see an octopus a small octopus on the ROV cam um we've seen all sorts of different species of coral um we do see a lot of fish and I am partial to the fish um but they are not the invertebrates you're asking about um we see some huge sponges uh that are able to filter the water some of these big big barrel sponges which are really neat um and then so some of that is what you can see on the cam and then when you take those little sediment samples you can see even fine finer scale um so unfortunately I can't answer the question about how a student can learn to operate an ROV hopefully when we get back um we can uh ask that oh yeah this is a cool cool cool footage of in the flower garden Banks which as we mentioned is a national Marine sanctuary and this area is protected and one of the real interesting values of studying of doing these restoration activities within the sanctuary is that even though these particular uh Coral communities weren't affected by the Deep waterer Horizon oil spill they can serve as a reference habitat in order to or reference community so that we can compare how to better um restore the injured uh areas as well oh and we're back okay as I just time because I'm sure everyone was getting tired of me uh just talking about the ROV um so let's jump right back in um we were just about we were on the edge of our seat Kyler was going to tell us what kind of animals or what kind of uh food that you were looking for in the water column yeah so the part that I was specifically looking at with the corals is to solved organic carbon uh So within that it could be amino acids carbohydrates so we're trying to see if there's anything specifically with that that they might be eating um and then Megan also has some water samples that are looking at picoplankton populations so it's still really small but a little bit bigger than the dissolved Oran carbon awesome um thank you all so much um I want to jump back I'm seeing some questions in the chat and here was one that I was definitely not able to answer and I'm wondering Jake people are asking where can one learn how to operate an ROV what are what if you had someone that is in the beginning of their career or even still in school what advice would you give them about how to pursue that career path well there's several different ways um they actually there are ROV schools in the like Gulf Coast Area uh there's some in Houston Texas I believe there's a few in around the New Orleans area um a lot of companies like C Innovation we have our own training department so we'll you can come and put in a resume and and an application and we will do on the job training well we have a whole training program and course that we'll put everybody through before they get out to the vessels and then uh once you get here you get trained up by the guys that have been doing it for quite some time like me I started doing this in h 2004 and probably before some of you guys were were even around you know and here I am still um we also see in the chat that apparently uh UNCC Wilmington also has a special program for becoming an ROV Pilot so it sounds like there are a lot of really cool opportunities um on the job and at different universities um Kelly I have a question for you uh so one of the things we talked about um was that working within the flower garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary can actually be a really good reference Community to look at uh communities that were injured by the Deep waterer Horizon oil spill and we have a question in the chat essentially what are what are we seeing you know this many years out from the oil spill what is the status of the health of the coral ecosystems um and are we still seeing any damage yeah so I think it obviously depends where in the Gulf you go um here in the flower gardens as as far as we know there was no damage from the oil spill as I think you said Ain um so yeah it's it's really great to be out here and see this really thriving healthy healthy habitat we did have a team on a different ship the Noah ship Nancy Foster earlier this year I think in March or April um and they were actually doing ROV surveys of the the wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform um and so we don't really have any conrete answers on sort of what the status is yet we still need to take all the data they collected all the video footage they collected um and sort of analyze it and and draw conclusions from there um but it definitely I mean it's a lot deeper than where we currently are working at the end of this Expedition we tend we are planning to go to sites that are are closer in depth uh to where the the deep water Horizon wreckage is found um but yeah we still have a lot of work to do to sort of take all this information take everything we've learned and and sort of figure out what it all means and what it all tells us about how the habitat is doing now uh almost 20 uh sorry 14 years later and thank you Kelly and I was just thinking also um you know we had this little technical difficulty that happened in the live stream which we talked about can happen when you're at Sea when you're in the middle of the ocean um and I think it would be Al interesting to share if anyone has ideas of times you've had to troubleshoot something in the field it can be related to the ROV or anything else because I think anyone that has spent time in the field and especially out at Sea knows that being able to adapt to challenges and troubleshoot things when they arise is a really important skill um so does anyone have any examples of that they can share um did we lose it again or is it just me because I feel like if that's the case I almost jinxed Us by bringing up troubleshooting at c um okay well I will give an example of a time I had to troubleshoot at C uh which is one time we set up an experiment where we did not where everything was dependent on a computer and uh we were all set up and after 24 hours someone accidentally knocked the computer into the ocean and we couldn't run the experiment and we were 24 hours away from the port so uh after a moment of stuned silence uh the guy in charge uh my former boss uh decided to look and see who else was available oh good I was just telling a story of the time that I had to troubleshoot at Sea where we knocked a computer in the ocean and my boss had to go to a fancy yacht and ask them to borrow their internet um so yeah I think we heard your question and just as to answer you went away so we'll I think we'll try to jump back in um yeah actually I think something that's been really cool working with the ROV team is as they've sort of gotten more familiar with our science objectives they've been really creative and things that they can sort of tweak or add to the ROV to help us with that so we have um a few folks from the Smithsonian National Museum of natural history on board with us and they're trying to collect a very wide range of different invertebrates different Critters from the seafloor to take back to the museum and study um but a lot of them are sort of like stuck to the seafloor and so if you just try to sort of grab them they won't really come off so uh there is now a spatula hanging on the ROV that the arm can grab and go use to sort of pry these Critters off the seafloor uh to collect them so we can again sort of as we've been talking about get a better understanding of what species are down there so that's been a really cool sort of uh teamwork troubleshooting how can we get these Critters back on board with just you know the things that we have available to us here on the ship because obviously we're pretty far and can't go to the store and buy new tools so just make and do with what we have and I think it's been pretty successful so far we've gotten some really amazing samples I don't know if yall have any any to add the question is did you have to go to the kitchen and ask them for a spatula for deep I think yeah I think we did have to get permission I don't think we just took that without asking I think they had spares so this one was allowed to come out to the the ROV yeah Keith the chief steward wants to keep track of his stuff but he was kind enough to let us take one any other stories because we also we have one more other question but I don't want to cut anyone off from any TR good troubleshooting stories um so I want to uh I know we're getting kind of low on time and also I want you to know in the chat there is a request for a picture of the spatula in the ROV so we'll have to follow up on that um but I do want to uh end this in kind of in the spirit of communication and you know you were talking about what it's like as a scientist and as someone that's trying to reach these specific objectives or deploying a moing buoy or whatnot it requires a ton of communication and collaboration amongst all of these teams many of people many of which probably aren't located in the same place at the same time so can someone talk a little bit about what that's like to be communicating across so many different teams and also how you make that work yeah I can start off um planning this mission was was definitely a challenge because we were planning between sort of like I said earlier the science team the the sea Innovation ship team as well as the Navy Team but then even within that there's sort of sub team so you know Megan and Kyler are from UNCW and they're just one sort of part of the science team we also have the folks from the Smithsonian we have folks from USGS so I should know a list of the number of Partners we've been working with the top of my head but it's hard to keep track um so yeah it has been a lot of coordination and communication but it it is very cool because everyone you know is working towards the same goal so I think everyone is very willing to make things work sort of you know get the spatula out of the kitchen figure out how to how to get done what we need to get done sort of no matter what troubleshooting and problem solving it takes and it's yeah I think that's been one of my favorite parts of this Expedition is just seeing the different teams work together and you know I didn't know Jake before the last couple of weeks and now I feel like we know the ROV team pretty well we spent a lot of time you can see the control room there on the screen we spent a lot of time in there with them so I think we all know each other pretty well at this point uh and yeah that's been a really fun part of this Expedition and uh oh go ahead Megan yeah I was just gonna Echo what Kelly has said and it's really amazing to see how Kelly's organized all of this communication as well because being outside University Partners um there's a lot for us to learn of being part of this Mission and being prepared and knowing the right things to do so Kelly's really been awesome at being able to communicate that and also just like the excitement and the enthusiasm for these projects of if you have a goal everybody's just figuring out okay what can we do to make that happen where can we get these niskin bottles from where can we get the downward lasers from across our partners um to make these objectives happen which has been really amazing to be a part of especially at the University level coming from UNCW yeah I think pulling all the different tools together for the r that we're using some were some were shipped from Washington DC some were driven in from Mississippi some were shipped from New York like the it really was like a cross-continental effort to get that ROV all the science tools we needed to to do this really amazing restoration work so yeah very cool to see it all come together oh my gosh someone has brought us the spatula oh the famous spatula and it genuinely is spul confirm a spatula confirm hangs on the ROV and yeah then the clock can grab it and go scoop up some Critters for use in the kitchen and misophonic and deep benthic habitats um and speaking of that I just want to also wrap this up and and ask um kind of two things you can answer one or both which is remind us how this work is supporting restoration of deep sea coral habitats in the golf and also what gives you hope as you are going through this work about the future of the habitats yeah I can kick us off um so this mission in particular is really cool the the four projects that Ain talked about at the beginning that all sort of have unique goals that help us restore these habitats um they're all represented on this Mission there's something we're doing on this mission that sort of feeds into all of those projects whether it's installing these moing buoys to protect the seafloor um conducting transects to learn more about what we find on the seafloor the species and the types of habitats um and then the corals that some of our teams are collecting to learn more about how they grow how they reproduce and if we're able to sort of fragment them and propagate them to to help more of them grow so all of that work that's happening on board is is really feeding into that restoration um and then I think in terms of what gives me hope um something that I've really enjoyed is again working with the ROV team and seeing how excited they are about what we're doing um and maybe you can speak to this but it sounds like this has been very different than what the the work that they typically do is I think they've gotten to look at a lot more exciting fish and and other Critters than they typically get to on their sort of oil and gas industry jobs um so seeing their enthusiasm for sort of discovering how amazing these habitats are just really shows like what an impact it can have to to connect people with these habitats so we hope you know people tuning into these live streams get that sense of you know sort of wonder when they see these habitats and then all of the video footage and things that we bring back from this Mission will help us connect to other folks back on Shore as well so just sort of seeing that excitement and you know just Joy at these incredible habitats once folks realize they're there is is really you know gives me a lot of hope that we can bring that to more people yeah I think um speaking from our point of view and coming from like the industrial side the oil and gas side and doing a lot more science work with this group we we work in this environment every single day and we don't know very much about it and this gives us an opportunity to really see the environment that we're working in and how everything affects it and what we can do to help uh with moving everything forward with preservation and and learning for everybody else so it's been a pretty cool uh pretty cool experience for all of us the level of collaboration really gives me hope um for a lot of these projects as Kelly was saying just seeing how everybody brings their individual expertise to this project and then also having opportunities like this to communicate with all of you guys back home um to really bring this to different areas because it's really rare to have the opportunity to get out in the Gulf be at the flower gardens here learn more about these habitats but being able to talk talk to you guys back there and have people engaged with what we're doing it's been really cool and exciting then I'll just say for me what gives me hope is just that we're we're always learning more and there's always more to do um and there's just a lot of levels to this that we can continue to pursue and a lot of different avenues that maybe weren't even thought about at the start of this um that we can hopefully figure out the best way to restore this habitat well I think that's a beautiful way to wrap up thank you all so so much for your time I know it's really busy out there but really appreciate you sharing a little bit more about your work um and for everyone who's tuned in thank you for joining us um if you enjoyed today's event please feel free to spread the word because we have a lot of other really interesting live streams that are coming throughout the course of this Expedition we're going to be talking about the saturation divers we're going to be talking about women in Marine Science we're going to be talking about all kinds of things so we do have a schedule um that they're going to share in the chat um we have a couple left and so you have plenty more time and then stay tuned for some more later this year um and to also uh learn more about the projects uh there is a link that has been pasted in the chat where you can read up about more of this work not just on this Expedition but throughout other trips in the Gulf of Mexico um and lastly if you wouldn't mind we would love it if you could please complete a little feedback form um so that can help us have uh make these even better moving forward um but with that we'll say thank you all so much for tuning in and hopefully we will see you again soon good luck guys
2024-08-12