The season is winding down, as the sea ice is starting to soften. The runway will moved this weekend up onto the Ross Ice Shelf. Our field work is done and we are pulling in our fishing huts.

Those fish we didn't use were returned to the Sound...

The Adelie penguin colony at Cape Royds. Many of the birds were brooding eggs.

Emperor penguins on the ice below the Adelie colony.

Open ocean at the sea ice age. The tiny black dots on the ice are penguins headed out to feed.

Freshwater algae. A little meltwater coming from the ice and enough nutrients from penguin guano are enough to allow the algae to grow. The only green growing thing we see down here!

Above is one of our treatment tanks. We are holding fish at 0, 2, 4 and 6 degrees C, and measuring indices of growth and reproduction.

The big fish on the right side of this holding pen are egg-bearing females. These fish are gravid in early spring and will spawn in a month or so. We let the gravid females back into the Sound.

We sample seven different tissues for a variety of measurements.  We can determine what percentage of the cells were actively dividing and how many were in the process of dying. These indices are metrics of growth (actively dividing cells) and a stressed condition (arrested cell division and cell death).

Things are warming up considerably down here. The sea ice is softening and the ice edge, where the open ocean starts is only maybe 20 miles or so north of station. The picture above shows a melt pool of the type that are popping up everywhere. The wall of ice is part of the Erebus glacier tongue. The picture below shows one of the ice caves that opens in the glacier and that we can enter and poke around in. 

We have been holding fish at a range of temperatures (from -1.86C to 6C) for a range of durations. We are measuring indices of growth. Amanda has taken a keen interest in the reproductive state of the animals and we will set up tanks that are kept in the dark to mimic winter conditions. We will compare the reproductive output (gamete production) in these fish to those we keep in the light. We are doing a similar experiment also where we are feeding some individuals and starving others to observe the effect of food availability on growth and reproduction. These will hopefully provide preliminary data on the impact of light and food availability on the metabolism and nutritional value of the fish, and we are hoping to relate this to the status of the seals.

Lenticular clouds forming over Mt. Erebus. 

Here's a series of clips showing our drilling operation. Amanda and Isaac are using a "jiffy" drill. Watch when they pull the drill out and you can get a sense of the thickness of the ice. The feature behind them is Inaccessible Island. We've caught the bulk of our fish at this site, including five different species.

This video shows the characteristic swimming style of the fishes of McMurdo Sound. Called "labriform" swimming, the lobed-shaped fins "scull" the water. This swimming style is common among fish species that live on the bottom and just make short forays into the water column to eat. In the tanks, the fish are incredibly curious and swim right up to say hi. 

The sun has been shining and we've been out fishing 4-5 days a week.

This is one of our exposure tanks. We heat this tank to our experimental temperatures and hold the fish at those temperatures for varying durations. The idea is to get a handle on what the effects of sub-lethal heat stress are on a physiological level. 

Our fish tanks are filling up. We've established a solid fishing operation and are currently fishing at previously productive location called Inaccessible Island. It's located about 12 miles north of the station, across from another key fishing site, Cape Evans. We catch our species in 20-30 feet of water. We've caught five species so far. Four are from the same genus, Trematomus. These species live on the bottom, and are fairly immobile for a fish species. They make excursions up from the bottom to feed on small crustaceans. The fifth species, Pagothenia borckgrevinki (the pale white species in the picture above). This species, which we call borcks, live up in the platelet or "brash" ice, which forms a layer at the bottom of the sea ice. Platelet ice is a very productive area, full of ice algae, grazing crustaceans, juvenile or larval fish, and the adults of at least one fish species - the borcks. These fish represent a key prey species for penguins, seals, other fish and whales.

All of these species produce antifreeze proteins that circulate in their blood, and prevent their body fluids from freezing. These species die at 6-8 degrees Celsius, just a few degrees above freezing. This makes them some of the most cold-adapted vertebrates on the planet. We are interested in discovering the threshold temperatures when these species switch from a normal healthy growth mode to the stress responsive mode common to all fish species. Fishes are acutely sensitive to their environment and so the Antarctic species are excellent bellwether species upon which to study the effects of rising ocean water temperatures.

Trematomus bernacchii (above). The emerald rockcod; one of the most common species in McMurdo Sound. Note tapering body, with reduced muscle mass and the lobe-shaped fins. These are hallmarks of species that live on the bottom and do not spend major portions of their time swimming long distances. This type of fins are common to tidepool sculpins for instance and are good for swimming short distances to forage but not for long distance migratory swimming. Also interesting is that these species lack swim bladders and are neutrally buoyant with seawater. 

A related species, T. pinnellii.

And another, T. nicolai. Note the mottled coloration, grayish fins and the upward looking eyes.

This is Pagothenia borckgrevinki. These are two individuals of the same species. The dark coloration is, to my knowledge, a sign of stress. They were all this color when we caught them and as they settle into the laboratory, they turn pale white. This color helps them blend into the ice in their natural habitat. Note the more narrow head than those characteristic of the Trematomid species shown above, which have a much more triangular shaped head.

A group of Emperor penguins at Cape Evans.

Field operations finally begin!

We finally have finished all of our training and safety classes and are out on the ice getting our project up and running. Above is a picture of our field vehicle, a tracked machine called a Pisten Bully (a PB). Behind it, we tow a "tomato", which is a fishing hut on skis, with a hole in the floor to fish through. We can put a heater inside and stay (relatively) warm while we work. This makes us very flexible and mobile so that we can fish multiple sites.

We fish through holes in the sea ice, which right now is about 10-12 feet thick. We drill with hand held "jiffy" drills or through larger holes drilled for us with diesel powered rigs. We are already catching our first specimens and we are off to a good start!

Snow school! As part of getting our field season up and running, we attend a two day field training course on the Ross Ice Shelf (about 5 miles from the station). The class teaches basic survival skills for working and camping in the Antarctic environment. In the picture above, we are building a snow wall that would act as an windblock during the night. The weather was decent for this time of year...but that would soon change!

Our tent line. The ones in the front are standard mountain tents. The pyramid shaped tent in the back is a Scott tent. It is more or less an updated version of the type of tent that Robert Falcon Scott used on his pushes to the Pole. They're nice because they are tall and vented, so you can cook in them, out of the weather. Having said that, we made a nice little kitchen outside, out of snow blocks. See below.

I slept really well despite the fact that a large storm blew in around 2 am. It turned into a full blown Antarctic storm. We woke up to near white-out conditions, huge winds and plummeting temperatures. Breaking down camp was a challenge. Every task becomes a thousand times harder, as your hands freeze up. Just untying the guy wires on the tents took me nearly half an hour. Pictures were hard to take as my camera kept freezing! Here's a shot I was able to take and a picture of how bundled up we had to be. But we made it, and this may sound strange, but we had a great time. This is the true Antarctica, where weather changes on a dime!

We are just about done with training at this point and should be getting our fishing operation up and running in the next couple of days. More soon! 

Here are some more pics of McMurdo and the surrounding area. 

The McMurdo sign...behind you can see the sea ice. The smudges on the ice are buildings associated with the sea ice runway. This is as dark as it gets this time of year. The sun has dipped below the mountain range (the Royal Society Range) to the west but not below the horizon so there is no true dark. Eventually the sun will be up 24 hours a day.

Today we were signed up for our sea ice training. This is a course conducted mainly out on the ice, where we hone our skills scouting out cracks in the sea ice, drilling to determine their depth and deciding whether they are safe to cross. Our field sites are 10-15 miles from station, and we take either snowmobiles or tracked vehicles called Pisten Bullies to and from out fishing sites. Unfortunately bad weather blew in and our sea ice training was cancelled today, postponing our start to the field season. 

This week, I will arrange with the station's field operations personnel to have our fishing holes drilled. 

At this point in the austral spring, the sea ice is "mature", meaning thick and cold. It may be 10 to 20 feet thick in places, so although we can hand drill holes for fishing, we tend to rely on a diesel powered drill. We place heated fish huts over the holes and can comfortably collect fish for the entire season. I'll post pics once we get that scheduled and in place.

Hope all is well back home! - Brad

The team! From left to right, Brad Buckley (PI), Allison "Sandwich" Barden (Field tech), Amanda Kelley and Isaac Sleadd (PSU graduate students). The parkas and other gear are issued to us in Christchurch at the USAP Antarctic Center. We are required to wear them on the flight to Antarctica (which everyone down here simply calls "the ice"). I'm not sure what good they would do if we crashed into the Southern Ocean, but oh well. They are nice to have on once we land and are greeted with early spring Antarctic weather! 

We made it safe and sound to Antarctica two days ago. This pic was our first glimpse of the continent out of the window of our C-17 cargo plane. We landed on an ice runway and were met by shuttles from the station. The weather has been good, considering. It's been hovering around minus 35 Celsius, with windchill down to around minus 50! We're busy getting our safety training and other logistical work done so that we can set up our fishing operation hopefully by the end of the week.

Getting ready

Our field season officially kicks off on Sunday. The team consists of myself, two graduate students, Amanda Kelley and Isaac Sleadd, and a field technician, Allison Barden. We take a commercial flight from LAX to Christchurch, New Zealand. There, we gear up at the clothing distribution center, which is operated by the United States Antarctic Program (USAP). The next day, the weather in Antarctica permitting, we take a US Air National Guard flight down to the ice. We will be at McMurdo Station on Ross Island, at the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf, for three months. During our field season, we catch the cold-adapted fishes common to McMurdo Sound and take them into the lab facilities to run our experiments. We are interested in understanding the impact of elevated temperature on the biology of these extremely environmentally sensitive species.