With the start of the diurnal tide on November 21, Kim and I have gone out sampling every day that we can. We have had several successful days, completing all 26 GPS points on our sampling grid. In addition to good sampling, we have been able to see lots of wildlife. Minke whales have surfaced several times off in the distance, penguins often swim past us, and the other day we saw a leopard seal napping on a piece of ice! It was too bad neither of us brought our camera that day.

The Laurence M. Gould pulled into station on Saturday, and left on Sunday taking with it some fellow Palmer Station members from the University of San Francisco. We will miss them here on station and in their honor completed another polar plunge!

The Spirit of Sydney amongst the pack ice.

In addition to the Gould, we had some other exciting visitors at Palmer Station this weekend! The Spirit of Sydney, a 60-foot Antarctic expedition support yacht, pulled into Arthur Harbor on Saturday. The crew of the Sydney has several things on their agenda. In celebration of the 100-year anniversary since Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole, the crew will be skiing onto the Antarctic continent and being the first to set foot on several mountains. The crew is also supporting an environmental campaign to “Sing for the Penguins” of Antarctica, where everyone is encouraged to give a tone to the penguins. All the tones will be put together into a grand choir and played for the penguins in a concert.

A few of us were able to take a Zodiac out to the Spirit of Sydney to meet the crew and see the ship. It was a really neat experience getting to see how they live, hear some stories, and learn all about their mission.

The other day I went out with the phytoplankton group from the Rutgers University Coastal Ocean Observational Lab to release one of their Slocum Gliders.

The Slocum Glider

Gliders are released in harsh environments (like Antarctica) to make real-time observations when it is too dangerous to send out a human. They measure things such as dissolved oxygen, temperature, and chlorophyll (a measure of phytoplankton biomass) over large spatial domains. As the glider travels it dives up and down taking measurements, surfacing to send its coordinates back to the lab.

To release the glider we loaded it into a Zodiac and head for Outcast Island, one of the outermost islands surrounding Palmer. We then continued on for about a mile to give the glider a wide berth; you have to release them far away from land because they take a very long time to turn (rudder on the tail). We then attached a buoy and rope to the glider for a test dive, after its successfully completed that (with instructions sent via satellite from Rutgers) it returned to the surface and we took off the rope and let it go for good.

Sadly, that day the glider didn’t do so well, it was swimming backwards and the phytoplankton group had to retrieve it. However, since then it has been released again and is successfully navigating itself around Palmer Canyon.

Several things were in the works at Palmer Station this week. The RV Laurence M. Gould docked at station to bring two new scientists who are studying birds down here in Antarctica. The Gould only stayed for a day, as it needed to continue on to conduct a research cruise with scientists on board.

The arrival of the ship meant a busy day here at the Station; several of us formed an assembly line across the ship and gangway to help unload cargo. And of course, everyone was excited to have new “freshies” (fruits and vegetables)!

Domi Paxton prepares to launch the towfish.

There was a bit of a setback with our Towfish—a piece of plastic where the cable connects to the echosounder broke off. However, we had the part on Station and thanks to our Instrument Tech the Towfish was ready to go the next day! Kim and I took it out for a test run and found that everything is working smoothly once again.

This Sunday we had great weather, which allowed for lots of recreational activities on everyone’s day off. Here at Palmer you can go boating, hiking up the glacier, skiing and snowboarding, camping, or just explore around the rocks in the backyard.

This week several groups went out recreational boating. My group went around to different points, getting a good look at the glacier and the Bahia Paraiso (a sunken cruise ship). We hoped to see some leopard seals, but instead were able to see a family of elephant seals on Torgersen Island.

An Adelie penguin watches over its egg.

In addition to elephant seals, Torgesen Island is home to several penguin colonies. I was lucky enough to see some eggs, which look like a pale yellow tennis ball under the penguin. We also saw several skuas, birds that prey on the penguin eggs and young.

Now it’s time to hope for additional great weather and sampling days! Starting November 18, Kim and I need to sample everyday as the diurnal tide rolls in.

Our first stop was Père Lachaise Cemetery, an amazing and dizzying array of tombs on top of tombs, probably best known (at least to some) as the final resting site of the Doors singer, Jim Morrison. However, we were here to see the graves of two early French naturalists: Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire—the first chair of Zoology at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, and his colleague, Georges Cuvier (though, of course, we do stop by Morrison’s graffitied head stone).

The grave of Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire

Geoffroy, beyond his other claims to fame, formulated a theory that all animals are formed of the same parts, just different sizes and shapes, and that this showed “connection” between animals. We have come to know these concepts and events as homology and evolution. Of course there has been much refinement since the time of Geoffroy, but these are basic tenets of what we do, and what this trip is all about.

Cuvier, while brought to the museum by Geoffroy, did not accept his colleague’s views (Lamark, of Lamarkian Evolution fame, was also on staff at this time) of evolution, but made his name in other ways, namely formalizing and “proving” extinction as a phenomenon, and by being the pre-eminent comparative anatomist of his era.

The grave of Georges Cuvier

Oh yeah, he also wrote 22 volumes describing all fishes known on the planet at that time, including describing about half again as many (or at least he initiated the project, as he died part way through its completion).

The names engraved on the buildings around the Jardin des Plantes offer the continued appreciation of these 18^th and 19^th century naturalists: Buffon, Lamark, Geoffroy, Cuvier, Dumeril, and the list goes on and on. And we are here to photograph, handle, and scrutinize the sturgeon specimens they collected, handled, and scrutinized.

The Grande Gallery of Evolution, Jardin de Plantes, Paris.

The collections at the MNHN are stored in a 5-story underground bunker at the northeast corner of the Jardin des Plantes, under the Grande Gallery of Evolution (I like this: the collections metaphorically, and in this case literally, providing the underpinning for evolution!). A small, arched gate, looking much like the entrance to a sewer system, guards the collection, but once inside, we encounter a labyrinth of poured concrete tunnels.

The lab that we worked in is on the second floor down, with nothing but the sound of the air handling systems in the background, spilling forth the cool (ok, cold) conditioned air (good for the specimens, but makes us appreciated the 55° air outside). There we continued our quest – measuring and photographing. Got two more type specimens this visit, including the one for Acipenser dabryanus, from China, one of the few sturgeon species with an original type specimen, described by the original author, still in existence. We also went to look at the oversized collection – the large, stuffed specimens prepared often in the early 1800s, which set on compactors and are neatly arranged so they interdigitate when the shelves are closed!

The entrance to the collections.

Inside the bunker.

The oversized specimen room (the sturgeons at the bottom of the picture are about 10 feet long!)

After work on Monday, we had dinner at Les Deux Magots, a now-touristy café frequented in earlier days by the likes of Picasso, Hemingway, and other literary and artistic heavyweights of their days who would argue about and discuss the state of the world, and, at least in the case of Hemingway, fuel these discussions through volumes of alcohol. While we didn’t attempt to discuss the state of the world, or other such lofty topics I like to think we fit somehow into this continuum. We had some good conversations about the state of comparative anatomy, and systematics generally, as a science, the difficult funding climate for such projects, and the need for institutions and agencies to consider that even though we continue 18^th and 19^th century science, we are applying 21^st century technology to these problems that will continue to captivate people like us. As we have told each other so frequently this trip, “there’s a paper in there somewhere!”

OK, so that messes with our plan a bit.

There is another train that leaves Bucharest for Tulcea at around 3:30 p.m., meaning we won’t get in until after 9 p.m., and we will lose the half-working day that was planned. Eric emailed Radu Suciu of the Danube Delta Research Institute (DDRI) to let him know that we would be very late. After breakfast we decide to work in our hotel until check out and then head to the train station to wait for the afternoon train. After breakfast Eric says Radu just emailed and that there is a speed bus at 11, 1 hour from now, leaving Bucharest for Tulcea, and it will take about 4.5 hours. We jump at the opportunity to be moving again.

We arrived in Tulcea around 3:30 p.m. on Monday afternoon after driving through what basically looks like Iowa at this time of year. All of the fields were bare after the harvest. The landscape changes from flat farmland to hills as we near Tulcea. At first only a few hills appeared, as did a very large number of new windmills for power generation. The hills become much more frequent the closer we get to Tulcea, and now, up close, we can see that they are covered in vineyards, which stretch from the top to bottom of almost every hill.

We are here, just as we have been everywhere on this trip, for sturgeon. Specifically, we are here for Acipenser stellatus. More specifically, we are here for their heads, in an odd nod to Vlad Tepes. Though there would be no pikes for these heads, only razor blades for removing the valuable gill arches. As luck would have it there has also recently been a shipment seized of numerous sturgeon of a different species, Acipenser gueldenstaedti. These were from aquaculture in origin, but Radu has arranged for us to take possession of two of these to further our anatomical studies on large adult individuals while here.

This is how we spent every day of the week: dissecting two large adults, down from more than 1 meter in length to less than 12 inches total length, as well as dissecting the heads of two A. stellatus. All of this for continued detailed anatomical study throughout the entire development of sturgeons on return to the VIMS museum. The sturgeon crew at DDRI were amazed at our dedication, and our turning one of their offices into a wet lab, as we disassembled these sturgeons – and they all looked on and learned a bit about the insides of the fishes they had been tracking in the river.

Back at the Danube Delta Research Institute with our frozen sturgeon

Our accommodation in Tulcea is a houseboat hotel that is owned by the DDRI. Mama Lili, and husband Victor, oversee the establishment and are fantastic hosts. A hot breakfast is served at 8 a.m. and a packed lunch is waiting for us when we leave to head up the hill to the DDRI. In the evening we have a feast, 3 courses with homemade soup, a main course, and a dessert. More food than I could honestly dream of eating, but I do my best.

The houseboat on the Danube River that served as home during our stay in Tulcea.

Radu Suciu and his crew at the DDRI are sturgeon kings. There are four extant species that use the Danube River for spawning. That is down only one species from what was historically known to use the river. Acipenser nudiventris – the ship sturgeon (or as we have come to call it, the “humpback sturgeon” because of its extremely large first dorsal scute)– was widely regarded as extirpated from the Danube, although apparently it is still seen occasionally (Radu had a program of interviewing local fishermen, and they have reported seeing this fish as recently as this year; the last photographically documented ship sturgeon from the Danube was seen in 2005 in Hungary). Radu and his crew have worked tirelessly for more than 15 years to try and understand what species are where and why, when they are there and how they move, as well as myriad other questions. They recently began working on the genetics of several of these species – including the giant Beluga (Huso huso) – and I enjoyed discussing my experiences with the genetics of sturgeons with them as we all learned from one another, and discussed our interests in these amazing fishes.

We leave Romania tomorrow for Paris, back to the museum environment, for two days of examining historical collections – including two more type specimens. On to the City of Lights!

Due to some of our sampling destinations being outside the normal 2-mile boating limit this year, Kim and I were required to participate in additional boating training.

We have the boating limit here at Palmer Station because of the amount of time it takes for help to reach you in the event of an emergency. Inside the normal limits, the Ocean Search and Rescue (OSAR) team can reach you within 10 minutes. However that amount of time lengthens the farther out you are, and extended training allows you to know what to do until help arrives.

For training, Kim and I took turns putting on an immersion suit and jumping overboard into the water to await rescue. For the first jump, the person in the water is conscious and able to help you get them back into the boat. The second time, however, the person in the water pretends to be unconscious and the person rescuing them has to try to get their body as high up out of the water as possible and lash them to the boat with rope or bungee cord. Since it is only Kim and I boating together, we needed to feel prepared to rescue each other and know what to do in that situation.

I feel much more comfortable now driving the boat right up to the overboard victim and getting them onboard. We will both be very focused on staying safe and inside the boat!

After a week of work, we celebrated Halloween at Palmer Station last Saturday. It was really fun to have everyone together and to see just how creative everyone was with their costumes.

Luckily, there was a break in the high winds and sea ice, so Kim and I were able to accomplish several things this past week! We were able to go out sampling a few times, allowing me to learn more about our equipment and earn some boating experience.

Antarctic krill Euphausia superba. Photo courtesy of Uwe Kils.

So far we have seen several krill aggregations on the echo sounder, and yesterday we were lucky enough to see the krill themselves swimming around under the brash ice! At the moment there are only juvenile Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) in the area, but later on in the season we expect to see more of the large adults. Antarctic krill can live for 6-8 years and can grow up to 60 millimeters in length.

A group of scientists from the University of San Francisco studying phytoplankton, led by Dr. Deneb Karentz, actually caught some krill in one of their net tows and much to our appreciation, brought them back for us! We measured the krill lengths, which we then use with the acoustic data to calculate krill biomass and abundance. All of the krill measured were smaller than 20 millimeters, which means they are most likely a year old. We have also seen a lot of foraging activity from the penguins and seabirds in the area, it looks like it might be a good year for krill!

When we arrived at the museum in Moscow on Monday, our contact and host, Dr. Ekaterina Vasil’eva, herself a specialist on the morphology of fishes (and who has worked extensively on sturgeons), said to me, “My mother would like to talk to you.”  I thought this was an odd statement, and perhaps this slight hesitation was detected on my face, because it was quickly followed up with, “You know that my mother is Emilia Vorobyeva.” I had met Dr. Vorobyeva once at a meeting on Mesozoic fishes, I think in Serpiano, Italy, just on its border with Switzerland, many years ago. At least I think I did – If I remember correctly we had just been introduced and we did not speak for very long. However, I know of her very well through her papers on the anatomy and relationships of fishes near the transition between the fishy side of the family tree, and the tetrapod side of the tree. It was flattering to have her wish to speak with me. Unfortunately, she did not feel well enough this week to meet, but she asked that I talk with her on the phone. We had a very pleasant conversation, discussing everything from my current work on sturgeons with Casey, Katie May, and others, to remembering various colleagues, to the state of our science. She had thanked me for the copies of my papers that I had sent to her recently, and promised to send some of her more recent ones (even in, or at least near, her 80s, she is head of her department at the Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution, Russian Academy of Sciences, here in Moscow). We ended the conversation with her asking that I give her warm greetings to mutual colleagues in the US and elsewhere to whom I might speak.

[Incidently, the Severtsov Institute was founded by a famous comparative anatomist, A. N. Severtsov (also sometimes transliterated as Sewertzoff) who also worked, and from Katerina, lived – in the curator residence wing – at the Zoological Museum. Severtsov was an expert on the developmental and comparative anatomy of sturgeons. His mark on the field of anatomy is lasting, and is commemorated by a stone plaque on the side of the Museum; on Saturday morning I went for a walk to find his grave in the Novodevichy Cemetery here in Moscow).

Left, commemoration of A.N. Severstov (1866-1936), a comparative morphologist who worked extensively on sturgeons at the Zoological Museum of Moscow State University. Right, Severstov's grave in Moscow.

It has always been interesting to me how close to a family affair the study of the systematics of fishes can be. As in all families, there are familial squabbles, individuals that don’t necessarily get along, and those that don’t play well with others. However, by and large, we are all bound by our interest in the evolution and biology of fishes, and an appreciation of the natural world generally, much in the same way that families are bound together by genetics. This has been reinforced to me during this trip. Not just the very literal connection between Vasil’eva and Vorobyeva, but more generally. The support and generosity offered by all of those we have been in contact with on our trip has been tremendous. In St. Petersburg, in addition to Arcady Balushkin, the department head, who oversaw hosted our visit, it was Boris Sheiko, an expert on North Pacific fishes, Viktoria Spodareva, also a worker in the collection, who took care of us during our visit. But everyone we met there, including all the other researchers and colleagues, were wonderful and it was good to trade stories and remembrances of mutual colleagues. We found (or, really knew ahead of time, but only through citations in published papers) that we have mutual interests in other groups of fishes, and – who knows – this trip may lead, somewhere down the road, to more fruitful collaborations on non-sturgeon projects.

In St. Petersburg, we were the “sturgeon experts” for the week, with no researchers there currently working on this group of fishes. In Moscow, Ekaterina Vasil’eva shares our research interest in sturgeon morphology, genetics, classification, and biology, and we had corresponded in the past, though we had only actually met face to face once before at a meeting in Wuhan, China. Therefore, we had a particularly good time talking with her during our stay. We wrapped up at the museum on Thursday, again by sharing a bottle of wine and over lunch with Ekaterina, and her colleague at the museum, Dr. Valentina Orlova, a herpetologist who specializes on lizards.

Lunch at the Zoological Museum of Moscow State University. Left to right: Dr. Valentina Orlova, Dr. Ekaterina Vasil'eva, and Dr. Eric Hilton (top), Dr. Casey Dillman (bottom).

On Friday, we worked our way through the Moscow subway system (with only one misstep, and that was due to a misprint on the pullout map of the subway system from the Lonely Planet Moscow guide – we are getting better!), and we met with a colleague, again who I had met in China very briefly, by the name of Nikolai Mugue, a geneticist who is based at the Russian Federal Fisheries and Oceaonographic Institute in Moscow. Casey had set up the meeting, following the recommendation of another colleague who has worked on the genetics of sturgeons, Phaedra Doukakis, who is based in California. We spent four hours talking with Nikolai and members of his lab about their work on the genetics of Caspian Sea sturgeon – in particular Acipenser gueldenstaedti, the Russian sturgeon, and Acipenser persicus, the Persian sturgeon. During the course of the conversation, it became clear we had complementary approaches to the study of sturgeon, and it was left with the possibility of the three of us collaborating in the future, perhaps writing joint proposals to the US National Science Foundation and the Russian Federation counterpart, to increase the cooperation between our two groups.

These are just a couple of small example of how small a world it can be. A brief conversation among colleagues at a meeting can lead to an introduction by email, which can lead to possible collaborative works. To work on sturgeons, by default, means to cooperate and to collaborate internationally, and this is again, one of the many exciting aspects of our research on sturgeons. With that, we flew to Romania yesterday, to spend the week at the Danube Delta National Institute, working with our colleague Radu Suciu. This is also a connection established through another colleague, Boyd Kynard, based in Massachusetts – it truly is amazing how close-knit of a network we live and work within!

Kingdom           Animalia
Phylum             Chordata
Class                  Actinopterygii
Order                Acipenseriformes
Family              Acipenseridae
Genus               Acipenser
Species             stellatus

Pretty great in its simplicity, really. And through worldwide usage it allows a common language for communicating a specific set of ideas. Specifically, when any one individual anywhere in the world is talking about Homo sapiens, everyone else in the world would know that they are talking about human beings.

So with this short recap in mind, we thought it would be fun to ask “What is in a name?” Specifically what is in a scientific name, like the ones outlined above for a given level of information (e.g. Homo sapiens or Acipenser stellatus)

Not surprisingly, there is actually quite a lot! And this importance of names is everywhere: On our first day in Moscow we were to meet at the Zoological Museum at 10 a.m. We were told to go to a green building on the corner of 2 streets. We thought that we were in the correct place, but we were, in fact, several blocks off. We knew the name of where we were supposed to be, but we are unable to read the street names. As such, we were late. Indeed, names have quite a lot of importance!

Two green buildings on the corner that both look remarkably like museums. Left, the Zoological Museum of Moscow University. Right, the first green building we went to, which we found was a movie theater... if only we could read Russian!

First, like all scientific endeavors, the name given to an animal (or any form of life) is a hypothesis. Meaning that it is a strict and explicit proposal that, as formalized, becomes available to others for further testing.

These formalizations occur through rigorous scientific inquiry. There is the scientist, working on a group of organisms (in our case sturgeon) that is his or her specialty. Their job is to painstakingly and meticulously document every detail that they can (e.g. external and internal morphology, skeletal anatomy, DNA sequence information) to provide data for comparison to other closely related species to determine if what they are seeing is unique or not. Names are given to species based on the fact that they are discernable from other species that they are closely related to. So, for example, if you have two fish in your hand, and you can tell them apart based on some characteristic(s) there is a chance that with a lot of work you can fit the animal into the hierarchy, provide a formal description and designate the new organism as a species.

Ok, so we know there is a hierarchy of information for every species known (Kingdom, Phylum, etc.) and that there are people working diligently to assign species and higher category names to groups that are their specialty. So why then a post about names?
Well, essentially, science is a human endeavor, and humans can and do make mistakes. The same then must obviously be true for taxonomy, species names and the hierarchy. In short, sometimes people get their (species) hypothesis wrong.

Pseudoscaphirhynchus kaufmanni ZMMU syntype

So, let’s think about sturgeon (the focus of this trip). Sturgeon are taxonomically assigned to four genera: Acipenser, Huso, Pseudoscaphirhynchus, and Scaphirhynchus. Let’s say for simplicity in this argument that these four units are easily diagnosable at a level that corresponds to the Genus. There are 25 species of sturgeon recognized today. They are assigned to the four genera listed above as follows: Acipenser (17), Huso (2), Pseudoscaphirhynchus (3), and Scaphirhynchus (3), with the number in brackets indicating the number of species assigned to each genus.

The number of species assigned to the genus Acipenser is a bit misleading. If we look back at the taxonomic history there are no less than 115 species names that have been given by people to individual animals they saw. These names also resulted in the designation of type material – the reference specimens for a species diagnosis – that was cataloged in a natural history collection and is stored for future reference by naturalists. Through hypothesis testing the number of valid names has been decreased to 17, which if you’re keeping score at home, means that a full 98 species that were once diagnosed are no longer (currently) valid.

So that is a part of what we are doing. Looking at these individual specimens (or collections of specimens) from a given point in time and space to help determine if what we are seeing should be regarded as a valid species, or if the specimens of Acipenser baeri from Lake Baikal we looked at on Wednesday, for instance, are different from specimens of Acipenser baeri from the Volga River we examined in St. Petersburg, and should be given different names, as some researchers have proposed in the past. This is part of the detective-work aspect of what we do as taxonomic and systematic scientists.