海洋生物學(xué)原稿

?Let's do it. Two, three. So it's the end of our roughly two week trip in Greenland. I'm sitting because I can barely stand. This has, without a doubt, been the toughest tripexpedition I have ever been on. The dives are brutal,they're exceedingly cold. It's crazy in a way. My name is John Sparks, andI'm a curator of ichthyology at the American Museum ofNatural History in New York City. My name is David Grueber, I'm a marine biologist here at theAmerican Museum of Natural History, and a professor of biology at Beirut College,City University of New York. And we were on an expedition to lookat the prevalence of biofluorescence in the Arctic. Biofluorescence is the process ofanimals absorbing blue ocean light and transforming that light into other colors. We had been looking atfluorescence in the tropics, where you get pretty much year-roundeven amounts of daylight and dark. So we wanted to see iffluorescence was as prevalent or as common in areas where there are verydifferent amounts of daylight. At certain times of the year in polarregions you get sunlight almost 24 hours a day, and other parts ofthe year it's dark all the time. >> Yeah, it was a littlebit like a detective story. We were sititng over a coffee herein New York where it was like I wonder how does that affect animalsunderwater when there's just 24 hour light some parts of the year, and thenzero light Light other parts of the year.. And we were surprisedthat no one had looked. We targeted Greenland because therewere groups there like the scorpion fishes that we'd found elsewherethat fluouresce so we could directly compare it totropical or temperate regions. For this trip we had tofly to Iceland first, and then we took a small plane to Kulusukon the east coast of Greenland. And they have just a tiny airport there. And from there we took about a twohour boat ride to Tasiilaq, and that was our first diving site. We did a lot of interesting day divesaround there, but when we went another few hours out to this really remote ice camp,where we had a cove that we could just dive anytime we want As soon as we got to Greenland, we realizeboy, we might be in over our heads. This is really cold. Whose idea was this? And Yeah it was one thing sitting in a nice, cozy little cafe in New York andjust kind of pondering these topics and then once we're in the water,in 30 minutes my hands were just freezing. But as soon as you get under,your face gets numb, and you've got very limited time to do your work becauseof the cold and it just, it burns. But I actually got frostbite in my fingers. But I want to stay longer becauseit's like we went through so much effort to get out here. This is our ice camp. We've got our huts here that we sleep in, we've got a makeshift lab we'veset up in a storage room, yeah we've got fresh watercoming here from the glacier and it's delicious These are our dry suits that make diveying possible here. There was so much kelp,kelp with enormous frons, and there'd be little fish swimming orlots of shrimp swimming amongst the kelp. It was very, very beautiful underwater. On land there's almost nothing living, nothing dares to grow more thana foot off the ground up there. But all the life is really in the ocean. We did dives in several differenthabitats, we looked in fjords, we looked in the kelp forest, and in severalof the dives we actually looked for specimens in the ice among the icebergs. And what's really interesting aboutthese icebergs is they are a refuge for lots of little creatures. Crustaceans live right among the icebergs, there's even fish that can kind of dartin among the crevices of the iceberg, so they're like floating habitats forlots of these Arctic creatures. We would have to position ourselves onthe part of the icebergs that didn't have a chance of ice falling on top of us. >> We got a warning, we got back to theboat on one dive that we were too close. But you can't,the underwater you can't tell. He was like, that was kind of dangerous,you were pretty close there. We both didn't know what to,expect, I think in general, we both thought there would be lessfluorescence there just because for a large portion of the year,there's not enough, we thought ambient light to stimulate a fluorescence in theseorganisms, so it would be of no use. But then I went up, we got up andthere and I thought, eh, we'd find it just asmuch as anywhere else. But we didn't. Groups that we found all fluorescentmembers elsewhere like scorpion fishes, not a single member up there wasfluorescent which really was kind of startling. In the tropics,almost all hard corals are fluorescent. Many of the anatomies are fluorescent. And when we get to Greenland,there's almost zero. Can that's interesting,Lights off. Look at that, John. Let's take one morewith the white light. That's so cool. There are cases of things that areflourescent and they're very beautiful, but they're few and far between. Greenland is really discusseda lot in the news with being a kind of ground zero of climate change,or of change. Really, the flourescence becameone part of the research but I think the broader thing willbe as the waters begin to warm, are there new fish coming inthat didn't used to be there? We don't even really understand fully yetwhat exactly it is we're losing. Is such a cold unexplored environment. We felt like in a lot of these placeswe were the first people ever to dive underwater andthat's kind of cooling away. Just look at these habitatsthat very few people have seen. What I love about this is that itwas really pure, pure exploration. It was just John and I and a smallboat in some of the most far-flung, difficult to get to places. It was- I've been diving forseveral decades and it felt like it was just totally new.?