 Life is never dull for UWI Lecturer Dr Judith Gobin, who was part of a team of international scientists on a 6-day, deep-sea exploration of the Kick’em Jenny volcano and Trinidad Tar Seeps on board the EV Nautilus in November.
Crew were thrilled to find what appears to be cold seeps with typical chemosynthetic biological communities at a depth of 2000 m (approx. 6000ft).
“Chemosynthesis is the breakdown of chemicals (possibly methane here) to provide energy and food whereas photosynthesis uses sunlight,” she explained. “The biological community included: giant mussels, tube worms, scale worms (and other marine worms), gastropods, and many other organisms. The seeps were located in the ‘debris avalanche deposit’ to the west of Kick'em Jenny volcano in the Grenada Basin.”
She writes of working for hours to prepare the samples for preservation, storage and further analyses. “The mussels are not only impressively large (approx. 33cm) but interestingly the 8 large specimens collected each had a large scale worm (polychaete) living inside it. There appears to be a symbiotic relationship between these two species.”
She rejoiced that she was the first to “recognise and extract the marine worm from the very large mussels.”
 Dr Gobin, who teaches Marine Ecology at The UWI is also a well-known polychaete (marine worm) expert and previously described a new species for Trinidad and Tobago (Mackie and Gobin 1993). The Corp Explorers (including Dr Gobin) and partner institution scientists will be collaborating during the next few weeks and will be producing scientific papers (over the next year or so) of this, and other interesting finds from the exploration.
Dr Gobin, a Lecturer of Marine Ecology/Coastal Ecosystems Management in the Department of Life Sciences at The UWI’s St Augustine campus, was selected to join the mission after taking part in a Workshop on Telepresence-Enabled Exploration of the Caribbean Region in Miami in 2012. The workshop was co-hosted by the Ocean Exploration Trust (OET), a non-profit organisation, comprising a team of experts dedicated to ocean exploration.
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