Then there are the chamberpots. They have much larger diameters than pushcores and they sit front and center on the Jason basket. They receive big scoops of sediment from ice scoops wielded by Jason’s arm. In these samples the sediment gets all stirred up, so you can’t do the thin slices you can with pushcores and injection cores. But you get more starting material. On this cruise, some chamberpots will get a dose of RNALater, which we talked about in Dispatch 2. Others will receive fixatives that will preserve cells for examination with different kinds of microscopes.