Beverly is a newbie to Antarctica like Tina, Kevin, Julie, and David. Though she is from Atlanta, Georgia, she is currently going to school in Nashville, Tennessee.
Beverly adopted a WATER DROP from Harrison's class at Our Lady of Merced and took it to work with her for a few days. Beverly studies one of the critters that ICE AGED looks at, brittle stars. What do you know about brittle stars?
Beverly studies brittle stars. What do you think they eat? What eats them?
Beverly will be here in Antarctica for two months. After one week of training in McMurdo, she went camping at the same field camp that ICE AGED stayed at, New Harbor. She will be there for a few weeks. Then she is going to two other remote field camps called Herbertson and Bay of Sails.
Besides working with the brittle stars, Beverly also cooks and helps with camp chores. Here she is packing for the remote camp with the WATER DROP from Our Lady of Merced.
Beverly is not camping just to have fun. She is helping her team study animals in and on the seafloor, almost like ICE AGED. Like ICE AGED, her team drills holes in the ice and then uses SCUBA divers to help them study animals and experiments. Like ICE AGED, her team is also looking at how things change over time. However, unlike ICE AGED, they are looking at changes over two years, not forty or fifty.
Two years ago, Beverly’s team visited the same area. They put experiments in holes and this year they are back to collect these experiments.
Beverly looking at what is inside a brittle star. What do you think she finds?
There are 10 people on Beverly’s team: 3 professors, 1 graduate student, and 4 divers. One part of her team is looking at scallops. They want to see how their shells break down. Another part of her group is looking at the tracks and burrows in the mud of the seafloor. They want to see what goes where on the seafloor. They also want to see where the mud is coming from. Is it coming from the sea ice or from glaciers? Her group likes to think that they are playing with sand and mud. Would you want to work with them?
Beverly is studying brittle stars. She wants to see what happens to the bones in the brittle stars after the animals die. Two years ago, her group put dead brittle stars in bags. They put these in bags and tied them to stakes on the seafloor.
This year the divers got the bags back. They looked in the bags but they were empty. They couldn't find the bones. What happened to them? They should be there. Did something eat them? Did they get crushed? Did the water chemistry dissolve them somehow?
They don’t have the answers for that yet. This was a surprise for them. Now Beverly is looking at fresh brittle stars to see if she can learn something. She is dissecting them to see what is inside them. Would you want to do that?
Inside one brittle star, she found another one! Can you see it?
What will Beverly learn while she is here? Will she help her team learn why the bones have disappeared?
Can you see the two different ones now?