Microbial ecologist Ginny Edgcomb, Chief Scientist on this cruise, describes the challenges faced by microbes living in DHABs and by the researchers who study them—and how a new sampling device she helped design may overcome some of those obstacles.
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Geobiologist Joan Bernhard talks about a major strategy protists use to survive in DHABs, and how the remotely operated vehicle Jason will help bring back samples of DHAB sediments.
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During its first dive of the cruise, the remotely operated vehicle Jason moved along and just above the border between the brownish normal seafloor (on the left) and murky black water that appeared to be the Deep Hypersaline Anoxic Basin (on the right).
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The second kind of sampler is the injection core, which looks and works just like a pushcore, except there’s a valve and tubing at the top through which the scientists can squirt various chemicals.
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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.
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The basic sampler is the pushcore, which you can see in action in this video from Jason’s hi-definition video camera. The advantage of the pushcore is that it keeps the sediment layers intact, rather than smushing them all together. 
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Despite the most thorough preparations, sometimes things don?t go as planned. In this video you?ll see two recoveries of the SID-ISMS instrument, one that went perfectly and one that hit a bit of a snag. SSSG Allison Heater shows what happened.
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On its first deployment to a DHAB halocline, SID-ISMS collected water and fixed (preserved) the cells in it. Back on the ship, Maria Pachiadaki stained the cells with DAPI, a fluorescent dye that binds to DNA. Chief scientist Ginny Edgcomb took these photos of the cells through a fluorescence microscope.
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A 3-D view, taken with a scanning electron microscope, of Cariacotrichea, a new class of ciliate that he and Ginny Edgcomb discovered in the anoxic Cariaco Basin off the coast of Venezuela. The single-celled protist is completely covered by bacterial symbionts. It was preserved in situ by Deep SID, the smaller of the two water column samplers used on this cruise.
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