Beaufort 7 today. Woke up to papers, clothes, chair and other stuff strewn around the room after sliding off their perches overnight. My desk chair is now held upright with a bungie cord, and in the lab a stool fell over with someone on it. In the shower you have to keep gripping a pipe with one hand. Ocean grizzled and streaked with foam, and the 7-foot swells are crosshatched, coming from 2 different directions. Wind blowing 30. The only consolations are Juan Fernandez Petrels and John Coltrane. Spray filled dip-netting station was yielding little and effort was called off after half an hour. There’s a storm inshore of us and we’re just waiting it out. Likely more of the same tomorrow. Meanwhile I’m transcribing my recordings of on-board interviews, trying to stay upright.- CS

800 miles from the Mexican coast, at 6º North, we turned northeast. We’ll maintain this direction for the duration. We’re as far from land as we’re going to get. We’re so far west of where we started (perhaps a thousand miles) dawn was coming much later, so Lisa decided to turn our clocks back an hour. We’re not in Kansas anymore.

The sea has settled a bit but remains whitecapped. It’s a sparse sea. We’re in the Counter Current all day. The water is a shocking electric blue. The thermocline is deep here. The water remains warm (27.7º C) down to 60 meters. That’s a pretty thick warm layer. And not until 120 meters does it fully transition to cool water ( 12.2º C).

From there it continues getting colder and at 750 meters (as deep as our morning probe goes) it’s just under 6º C. Most of the world is cold and dark, even in the tropics.

From the flying bridge this morning I spotted one single piece of floating bamboo. We steered past it, handlines went over the stern, and in several passes that one stick yielded 17 large mahimahi and a wahoo. They’d been eating snake mackerel, squid, and flyingfish. One had eaten a puffer whose spines failed to save it. They made for a lot of excitement, rare and welcome diversion for the deck crew, and a delicious lunch.

But other sightings remained relatively few. We saw one medium-sized school of Spotteds and Spinners with birds, and a very small group of Striped Dolphins. Juan Fernandez Petrels continued to dominate, Leach’s Storm Petrels outnumbered Galapagos Storm Petrels, and Sooty Terns replaced the Arctic Terns we’ve been seeing, the Nazca Boobies who prefer more productive water went missing, replaced by Masked Boobies. And among the Wedgies were all-dark birds that may originate in Hawaii.

By sundown the thermocline is a little shallower but still pretty deep. The temperature is 28ºC straight down to nearly 40 meters. Dip-netting reflected the poor productivity of the ocean here; it was slim pickings with very few small fish and squid.

The murderer aboard has killed several more people, all biologists, giving rise to suspicion that only a biologist would so well know the movements of other biologists.

- Carl Safina

Murder aboard!!
We were all called to muster and told to be seated in the mess hall. One of the crew handed a white envelope to every person. In each envelope was a white piece of paper. In one envelope was also a purple piece of plastic with a yellow dot. The person who got that yellow dot is the murderer. That dot is the murder weapon. Anyone who finds the yellow dot—when they open their computer, or when they reach for a napkin, or next to their toothbrush, etc—is murdered. The object of the game is for the murderer to kill everyone aboard without getting detected. A murdered person cannot speak until someone asks, “Are you murdered?” After that, they can say where they found the weapon. Upon being murdered, the victim must turn the murder weapon so the yellow dot is down. The murderer must retrieve the weapon without being seen, and murder again. So far, Candy the oceanographer has been killed in the lab.

Six hundred and fifty miles offshore, wind remained so forceful the mammal observers got the whole day off. Hence the diversion of the murder game.

We’re firmly within the Equatorial Counter Current, in blue, sparse water. Birds are sparser here. Perhaps the main species is the Juan Fernandez Petrel, named after a Chilean island named after a person. Virtually all the eponymous petrels breed on that one island. A castaway on that island, Alexander Selkirk, was apparently the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe. Lisa reminded me that in fact most of the seabirds are not from nearby. There’s no place to nest for hundreds of miles. They’re from places like Galapagos, Chile, New Zealand, and the Pacific Northwest. They live lives with no cover whatsoever from any weather. They’re tough, and they can handle a range of pretty extreme conditions.

Things were likewise sparse at the dip-net station, enlivened mainly by Jimi Hendrix wailing like a ghost on the aft deck in the dark. The netters caught just a few flyingfish and two squid. Bob says, “Yeah, this is what most of the tropics looks like at night.” One squid, a species I hadn’t seen yet, was thumb-sized but very aggressive. It took Bob on, biting his finger repeatedly as he tried to steady it for a photo. One of the flyingfish, a juvenile, is white at this small size and stays at the surface spreading broad, rounded wings. Its disguise is to look like a sea-foam bubble. Much of life here is guile and deception, and trying to avoid being murdered by expecting the worst.

- Carl Safina

Four hundred miles offshore, 10º North. Heavy weather. Plenty of bleary eyes aboard this morning. A couple of times last night I’d swear the ship got airborne before the next swell re-engaged the hull with a hard shudder.
It’s Beaufort 6 this morning. Hard to see much at any kind of distance. The mammal people will be “off effort” half the day because of rough seas and rain. While they’re on, they’ll sight four small pods of mammals: Bottlenose, Spotters, Spinners, and Commons. They’ll spend the rest of the time in the lab, in the mess hall playing cards and board games, in their bunks, or organizing their photos on their computers.
One industrious mammal-guy, Adam U, looked through 300 frames of yesterday’s Killer Whales (collected from numerous cameras) and spent a few hours with a photo-ID manual of individual killer whales previously seen in this region in past years. He made positive, highly detailed matches of 5 members of yesterday’s pod; they were in a pod of 7 seen and photographed in this region in 1999. So this is a long-standing group. That was pretty amazing and it took exceptional expertise and systematic organization to make those matches based on very subtle identifying features.
For a long while today I watched a café au lait colored Red-footed Booby that was hanging in the updraft off the flying bridge, holding like a pointer in the stiff wind, every few minutes sprinting like a cheetah at the flyingfish that the heaving bow scared airborne. In an ocean of the fittest, opponents out here are pretty evenly matched. Red-foots know what they’re doing, but so apparently do flyingfish. I watched at least a dozen attempts but each time the bird closed in tight behind, the flyingfish dropped into the sea ahead of that deadly bill. I never saw the bird succeed.
Over a lunch made leisurely because the weather had no one hurrying, Bob had some billfish stories. He once came upon a dead turtle with a broken-off sailfish bill sticking out both sides of its shell. He saw a photo of a swordfish (big, maybe 500 pounds) that had taken a bait on a longline and been caught—while carrying around an adult Green Turtle skewered on its massive bill. Why would a billfish stab such objects they can’t eat when collision with them could be injurious or fatal? Consider the diver who saw a smallish fish sprint straight toward him and scoot around behind him. A moment later a billfish struck the diver in the forehead, breaking its bill-tip in the man’s skull. Accidents happen.
Tonight’s dip-netting saw a return of juvenile Humboldt Squid, and these were hefty, maybe five pounders. They prefer more productive waters, which is what we’re in. We also had Sthenoteuthis squid, bright red with a light oval on their dorsal mantle.

They’re adapted to less-productive waters. The convergence of species adapted to both more- and less-productive waters suggest the nearby boundary of two great water masses, which is what we have as we approach the edge of that Counter Current. But why would anyone be adapted to less-productive water? Because, like plants and animals adapted to deserts, there are resources worth exploiting, and less competition from other species who can’t make it there. We also had 2-wing, 4-wing, and short-winged species of flying fish come to the lights and a few Mictophid fish, which during the day stay very deep, part of a vast layer of vertically migrating life that occurs in much of the world ocean. One impressive aspect of these nightly dip-net sessions is that you can stop anywhere in this region, turn on the floodights, and fish and squid appear alongside almost immediately.

At a rainy daybreak we were 280 miles from land. Harcourt’s storm petrels made a good showing, and the first Juan Fernandez petrels, which are associated with the core ETP region, have appeared.
In this blank, shape-shifting desert of water, only the birds cannot vanish downward. When they rest the sea floats them and does not swallow them. When they dive the sea returns them to the surface. A flyingfish tries hard to be a thing of air but the ocean always reclaims it—unless a booby plucks it. Birds take fish toward the heavens and swallow them; thus fish become birds.
In the morning we encountered a big—couple hundred—mixed herd of spotted and spinner dolphins, with seabirds (boobies, petrels, shearwaters) and some large leaping tuna. Those dolphins fled us in fear. But later another group approached and seemed rather confiding. Lisa suspects the latter were another group of untouchables, dolphins that have learned to avoid getting set on by hugging the ship. It’s unlikely they are naïve; Lisa and Bob say that statistical analyses suggest that each dolphin is likely caught in a tuna net dozens of times in its life.

Today’s biggest thrill by far was a pod of nine killer whales. I was in the ship’s lab when they were announced over the radio, and by the time I scrambled outside to get into the small inflatable boat that was holding alongside the ship (to try to go and get biopsy samples), the killers were already directly alongside—and underneath the small boat! This brought pandemonium—and a lot of yelling (“Look down! You’ve got a whale right under you!”) For a few moments it was hard to know where to look; we were surrounded by black backs and slicing fins. (See photo; I’m in blue and note biopsy dart headed for nearest whale.)

This group of killer whales was an unusually large pod for the tropics, unusually cohesive and close-knit, and unusually curious. Bob Pitman says they’re matriarchal and that a pod is usually a female, her offspring, and perhaps grandchildren. This one seemed to have all those members, including a large male that Pitman suspects is a grown son. Several times when that male was lost from view, I turned to see if he was following. There’s the theoretical possibility they could attack, though Pitman says he’s never seen killers act aggressive to a small boat (he has seen them kill sperm whales, though).

All in all, the encounter was awesome! Perhaps more amazing is that although the killer whale is probably the most widely recognizable animal in the sea for most people, scientists still don’t know how many species there are; there now seem to be at least two different species but that was just recently determined. Bob thinks there may be more. That’s how big and hard to study the ocean still is.
Dipnetting was cancelled tonight due to 40 knots of wind and slanting sheets of rain. There’s no point going to bed early; there’ll be plenty of “zero gravity” moments in the bunk tonight.

- Carl Safina

Another day, a different neighborhood at sea. Our track today kept us about 200 to 220 miles from shore. Yesterday brought 17 marine mammal encounters, mostly bottlenose dolphins. Today: only three encounters, none bottlenose. A small dolphin pod in the late morning and one at sunset bookended only one sizeable midday group of a couple hundred offshore spotted and spinner dolphins. Yesterday, turtles were everywhere; I don’t think we saw one today. After sundown, the flyingfishes we’d been seeing under the lights were replaced by short-winged flyingfish that can hop but not really sail out of the water (the tradeoff: long-winged species of flying fish can’t swim fast but can glide exceptionally well, often easily 50 yards; shorter wings mean you can swim faster. If you can’t avoid predators by swimming, you’d better fly well, but watch out for the boobies. If you are trying to minimize your exposure to birds, you’d better be a very fast underwater sprinter. But you can’t have it both ways.) The juvenile Humboldt squid were replaced by Stenoteuthis squid, and last night’s frigate mackerel were nowhere to be seen tonight. Like I said, we’re in a different ‘hood today.
We got within a few hundred yards of today’s big dolphin group before they all got up and bolted away in white explosions and long leaps. It’s sad to see how much they’ve learned to fear people. Sadder is that originally their lack of fear proved fatal, and now their fear itself is the problem; it would be better for them to just cooperate with fishing boats, get the netting over with, and get released rather than burn themselves up and risk losing their calves while fleeing.
We had a couple of redstarts land on the ship, and an oriole, and I saw a dragonfly. It makes you appreciate how far and wide these land-dependent animals disperse while migrating, and the risks to which they’re exposed.
The big excitement of the afternoon was a waterspout, a compact tornado with a funnel only a few yards across, vacuuming up seawater into a long, high-spiring pulsing spout like a charmed snake rising up into the low clouds. We passed very close, less than half a mile. Right behind it was a major downpour that overtook us. (see photo)

The water temp is about 30 Celsius, around 86 F.
Just after dark, large patches of phosphorescence set the sea aglow for a brief period.