Hi everyone, I’m Yasmeen Smalley, the 2014 National Park Service Submerged Resources Intern! This amazing opportunity stems from the generosity of both the Submerged Resources Center (SRC) and the Our World-Underwater Scholarship Society.

My summer adventures began last Saturday when I flew from Boston to the SRC office in Denver, Colorado. I had spent most of the previous night packing frantically, so I arrived in Denver bleary-eyed but excited to meet the people who would be helping and coaching me throughout my travels. Brett Seymour, the Deputy Chief and Photographer at the SRC picked me up at the airport, and we made our way to Boulder, where I would stay with Dave Conlin, the Chief at the SRC, his wife Michelle, and their energetic dog Luke.

Normally all of the SRC staff convenes for a barbecue, but because half of the staff is currently doing work in Florida we had a small get together at Dave and Michelle’s, which was a great way to be welcomed to Colorado.

Since I arrived on a Saturday, we had all of Sunday to explore the natural beauty of the area and for me to get settled in. Since I grew up in Houston, Texas and attended school in Rochester, New York, I’m used to living in a very urban environment. While Denver and Boulder are both cities, they’re very close to beautiful foothills and rock formations, including one called the Flatirons. Being able to drive by these beautiful mountains each day is a wonderful change from skyscrapers and pavement!

Doing a morning hike in the Flatirons!

My first day “on the job” was spent driving around Denver with Brett to different medical appointments; I got a chest x-ray as well as several blood tests, with a physical and audiology test scheduled for later in the week. Being poked and prodded is necessary to ensure safe diving, but it’s certainly not my favorite part of the process! The second half of the day was much more enjoyable- I got to try on gear that I’ll be using in the field! My travels will take me to Yellowstone, Biscayne, Dry Tortugas, and Channel Islands National Park, as well as the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument. Because of the variability of water temperatures in these parks, my exposure suits will range from rash guards to a drysuit.

That neck seal sure is tight!

The rest of my week has followed the same format; medical tests in the morning, and then gearing up in the afternoon. Brett and I also went to a local dive shop to use their pool for some dive tests. My current residence in New England doesn’t allow for much diving during the winter months, so it was good to get in the pool and become familiar with the new gear. Besides a fin floating away during a “ditch and don” exercise, all went smoothly!

The next step was to prepare all of my gear for our two-week trip to Yellowstone. We leave on Monday, and will be loading our gear into a truck and trailer. Due to the equipment-heavy nature of underwater photography and videography, none of the SRC staff can “pack light.” For myself I have a large dive bag, a bag containing my drysuit and thermals, a Pelican case full of camera gear, a dry bag full of my clothes, and a backpack with electronics and personal items. Whew!

My new and improved camera housing! Sweeeet.

Since yesterday was Friday the 13th and a full moon, I decided to take my camera gear and explore some of the Rockies in search of some magical pictures. After a few hours driving around in the dark I found the perfect spot to photograph.

And as if my week wasn’t eventful enough, I had a minor trip to the ER yesterday! While loading gear into the trailer I accidentally dropped a 75 lb tank on two of my fingers, resulting in a small “Tufts” fracture of the tip of my index finger. I’m not superstitious, but fracturing my shutter finger on Friday the 13th definitely makes me a little more wary of things that go bump in the night! Luckily I’ll still be able to dive (I verified this with Dave multiple times in the ER) so I just have to wait for it to heal and use my middle finger for the camera shutter in the meantime.

Hopefully the next couple days go smoothly, and pretty soon I’ll be diving in Yellowstone!

Until then,

Yasmeen

I arrived in American Samoa, my last stop of the internship, the night of Monday, September 30^th. The next morning, the federal government shut down. Forbidden to enter the park, use park boats or equipment, or even enter the park office, I had to instead enjoy a two-week vacation on this beautiful island in the South Pacific.

Had Congress agreed on the budget, I would have been helping the American Samoa National Park marine resources team address an outbreak of Crown of Thorns (COTs for short), coral-eating sea stars. Although native here in the Indo-Pacific, occasional population explosions can devastate coral reefs. Historical data suggests that such outbreaks occur naturally every hundred or so years, giving reefs time to recover, but recently outbreaks have occurred across the Pacific every twenty, ten, or even five years, with detrimental consequences for coral reefs already staggering under the burden of pollution, overfishing, ocean acidification, and ocean warming. I had learned about the role of COTs in “natural” destruction of coral reefs from a particularly formative episode of Kratt’s Kreatures, but it wasn’t until now that I found out that there is indeed an anthropogenic contribution to COT outbreaks. COT larvae fare best in plankton bloom conditions, which have been happening more frequently due to increased nutrient input to coastal waters from agricultural and wastewater runoff. Three or four years after a large plankton bloom, COTs reach maturity and a huge outbreak overwhelms the corals. In an attempt to rescue American Samoa’s reefs, the NPS and other natural resource agencies have been focusing on COT removal for the past several weeks. They kill them by injecting them with sodium bisulfate, which disrupts their internal pH balance. So far these agencies have killed thousands of COTs in crucial sites.

With the government shut down, all COT removal activity was put on hold. This was distressing because each day we weren’t removing COTs meant the loss of corals that could take over a hundred years to grow back (if they can recover at all, given additional stressors like warming and acidification). It’s sobering to consider that our two-week government shut down will have consequences on the scale of decades and even centuries, as far away as American Samoa.

Crown of Thorns sea stars.

The furlough crew made the best of the situation by reveling in the natural resources American Samoa offers outside of the national park. I stayed with NPS Marine Ecologist Tim Clark, the island’s Chief Instigator of Adventure, and merely by waking up each morning and agreeing to whatever he had planned, I managed to fill the days with hiking, snorkeling, kayaking, diving, and general island exploring.

Vai’ava Strait, a National Landmark

Palagi beach

One fun and educational excursion was a tour of the NOAA weather station. American Samoa is home to one of four baseline observatories for parameters like atmospheric carbon dioxide; its fellows are in Barrow, Alaska; Mauna Loa, Hawaii; and the South Pole. It’s from these stations that we get estimates of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, which recently made headlines when CO₂ hit 400ppm. I’ve seen the Keeling Curve (link to http://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/)  in every one of my environmental science classes, but had never heard of the station in American Samoa. Station Chief Jesse Milton was still at work, so he gave us a tour of the instruments and sampling that goes on at the station.

NPS Marine Ecologist Tim Clark and I explore the weather station.

Other highlights included kayak expeditions to explore caves and fun snorkeling sites, a game of island golf, and checking out a flying fox roost at sunset. The National Park was created largely to protect these fruit bats, the only native mammals on the island. We saw both species: Pteropus tonganus and Pteropus samoensis.

Kayaking the north side of the island

Taking a break from kayaking to unwind in my newfound Jacuzzi.

Diving in American Samoa was fantastic. This was my first time diving in the southern hemisphere, and I was thrilled to see so much coral: unbelievably diverse, and the colonies were enormous. I was also particularly excited about the giant clams and anemonefish, which I had never before seen in the wild. Our diving adventures included persuading a local ferry driver to drop us off mid-ride so we could dive around Aunu’u island (it’s not everywhere that you can book a $4 dive boat!), and diving via kayak, towing them as we drifted. Tim’s neighbor Nick Saumweber, a soil conservationist with the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, took advantage of the time off to complete his advanced open water diving certification with Tim, and I tagged along for his certification dives. I was especially eager to join the night dive, for which we left directly from the beach across the street from their front yards. We peeked at wide-eyed squirrelfish and parrotfish asleep in coral cubbies, listening for theremin echoes of whalesong.

Many thanks to Tim for hosting and entertaining me for two weeks! Thanks also to Nick Saumweber, Alice Lawrence, Wendy Cover, Mark MacDonald, Adam Miles, Christine Bucchianeri, and the rest of the Palagi crew for spending time with me, joining our adventures, and making my island furlough experience so fun and memorable.

Coconut Point Sunset

I returned to the mainland for a brief freshwater interlude at Crater Lake National Park. At the Medford airport I hopped into my rented VW beetle and together we traversed the Oregon countryside, leaving farmland for forest to reach the lake by mid-afternoon. The research boat had already gone out for the day, so after getting settled in the quaint and charming Naturalist House, I drove the 33-mile crater rim, checking out various hikes and viewpoints. Returning home after sunset, I was pleasantly surprised to find USGS ecologist Bob Hoffman, his wife and all-star volunteer Susan, and USGS fisheries biologist Mike Heck in the house with dinner on the table. They’re from the Corvalis research group and are continuing a long-term dataset on Crater Lake, and I would be working with them to collect water samples the next day.

Crater Lake

Checking out the sunset from the Watchman Lookout Station.

The next morning, we all reported to the ranger station, ready for a day out on the water. Aquatic ecologist Mark Buktenica, fisheries biologist Scott Girdner, and biological technician Drew Denlinger were packing up sampling gear, and we piled into the park van and drove to the Cleetwood Cove trail. The park does have a dive program, but they’ve finished diving for the season, and I was actually joining them for their final days of fieldwork for the year. Although I’ve heard it’s incredible to dive in Crater Lake’s perfectly clear waters, I was grateful we weren’t diving this week: the forecast for the day was 35 degrees and raining! As we hiked down the trail, the one legal means of access to the caldera wall, the clouds started moving in. We boarded the RV Neuston, the park’s research boat, and set out for a day of water quality sampling. We tied off to the permanent weather buoy in the middle of the lake and began to set up the sampling instruments. Clouds and fog poured over the rim of the caldera and across the surface of the water, shrouding Wizard Island in mist. Famously sapphire, today the lake was pewter. Crater Lake was a mid-game addition to my schedule, and I had only packed clothing for tropical climes. Fortunately they had survival suits and bomber jackets on the boat, since my six layers of t-shirts and assorted dive gear weren’t quite cutting it.

We collected water for sampling with niskin bottles, just as I had done in Kalaupapa. They collect water at depths ranging from 0m to 300m by attaching open bottles to a line, which is raised and lowered with a crane and winch. The bottles are set up so that by attaching a weight to each bottle, one can send down one messenger weight to trigger the shallowest bottle to close and release its weight, creating a chain reaction to close each bottle at its designated depth.   From the niskin bottles we collected water samples in specific bottles to measure parameters like dissolved oxygen content, nutrient contents, and primary productivity levels. In order to measure primary productivity (essentially photosynthesis), we collected water in both clear bottles and identical bottles that had been blacked out with electrical tape. Radioactive carbon-14 is added to each bottle, and then the bottles are put on a line at their original depths and floated in the lake for four hours before being placed in an opaque box and brought to the lab for testing. The idea is that the black bottles will block light and therefore photosynthesis, so only respiration will occur in those bottles. Both respiration and photosynthesis will occur in the clear bottles. In the lab, they can measure the uptake of the C14 tracer, and, by “subtracting” the black bottle from the clear bottle, approximate primary production. Sampling complete, we filled our water bottles with Crater Lake’s clear and clean water, collected at 300m. It’s too early to confirm reports of its life-lengthening properties, but it certainly was cold and delicious.

Susan and I toast longevity after filling our bottles with water from the lake, collected at 300m.

Niskin bottles

Bob, Mike, Mark and I then set off in a smaller boat to take stream samples. They’re collecting long-term water quality data from a few of the streams that feed the lake, comparing streams at varying distances from the visitors center and lodge on the crater rim. So far, Bob and Mike told me, they haven’t seen much of an effect of the center and lodge, but keeping tabs on the streams will allow them to address any potential pollution. At the end of the day we hiked back up the caldera, and as we drove back to the station, spotted patches of the first snow of the season.

The next day, Mike, Scott, and the Hoffmans stayed in the lab to process the water samples, while Mark, Drew, and I packed up the boat for zooplankton tows. They do vertical tows, raising and lowering a fine mesh net through 20 and 40m increments, down to 200m. As with the niskin bottles, sending a weight down the line triggers the net to close, so they can sample through, for example, 160-200m without collecting any more plankton on the way up. Crater Lake’s clear waters are indicative of low productivity, but we found a surprising amount of goop (scientific term), especially at the 40-60m layer. Yesterday a distant memory, the weather was sunny and clear, wisps of clouds reflecting in the absurdly blue water.

Since this was the last field excursion of the season, we also stopped at the dock on Wizard Island to collect gear and equipment to bring back up the trail. The park service has a storage facility on the island that also serves as a dive locker, so we brought the niskin bottles in to stay through the winter, and packed up dive gear and tanks to take back to the ranger station.

Bald eagles are a common sighting around the lake.

It was a brief visit, but well worth the opportunity to spend time in this spectacularly beautiful park. It was a pleasure to meet and work with Mark, Scott, Drew, Bob, Susan, and Mike—thank you all so much for everything.

I enjoyed my final sunset at Crater Lake along with about twelve other couples.

Wizard Moon