(December 05, 2022) --

Here I am holding our toilet brush biofilm sample.
Filamentous biofilm on the outside of South Chamorro CORK

Greetings from the Mariana forearc! 

We are currently en route to our next dive at the Yinazao Seamount. We had a few weather days with larger swells, so we haven’t been able to dive for about five days. The hope is that we will be able to send JASON down today, but we may have to wait until tomorrow depending on the weather. It is still pretty wavy. So, in the meantime, I will share with you a fun story about how everyday household items can be used for science!

During our second to the last dive, we were at the South Chamorro Seamount collecting water, gas samples, and push cores. This site has given us so many cool samples! At the top of the seamount, there is a PVC pipe that allows for the sampling of fluids. Since the last sampling trip to this location, a brucite chimney had formed at the top of the pipe and JASON was able to collect some of it for us!

Operation Toilet Brush is a go! The toilet brush is returned to the bio box after collecting the sample.

On the science camera, we were able to spot some potential biofilms forming on the outside of the pipe. One of the biofilms was filamentous and looked like white hair growing on the outside of the pipe, and we couldn’t help thinking “how can we collect these samples? And how can we do it gently without causing damage to the pipe?” 

So, here is where the household items come in: on the next dive, we asked the JASON team to send down a TOILET BRUSH to scrape along the outside of the pipe at the end of the dive. They strapped it to a metal handle that the manipulator arms could easily grab, and we were off! We were able to successfully collect this sample and we cannot wait to work with this organism.

I have some cultures started already, hopefully, they grow! This isn’t the only example of how we have used household items in our lab on board either. We also use a salad spinner as an easily portable, low-power centrifuge. A pressure cooker also makes a nice autoclave in a pinch!

Thanks for joining me on my journey! Sea you soon 😊.