AT03-33 Block Party V and LARVE-2

Community Development and Structure at Hydrothermal Vents: Life After Recruitment: final in a series of five cruises investigating biological interactions during colonization of hydrothermal vents. From Chuck Fisher's website: As last year,this cruise originated in Manzanillo Mexico, a port we are getting to know well. The Penn State contingent for this cruise included Drs. Fisher and Schaeffer, two grad students (Erin and Derk), and Melanie Freeman, an undergraduate working in our lab. We again used the deep submersible ALVIN for our dives on the East Pacific Rise at about 9·N. This was the last NSF cruise in the collaborative project with Dr.Lauren Mullineaux of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Dr. Charles Peterson of UNC Chapel Hill. We finished up the field-work proposed for this grant spending large parts of most dives collecting basalt larval settlement blocks we had deployed on previous cruises. We also re-visited an experiment we began during our last cruise to see if mussel moved to newly cleared vent sites would inhibit tubeworm recruitment. Alas, the mussels ran off, however, we did collect fine data on community recruitment and growth over the one-year period of the experiment. All an all, an excellent cruise and fine end to the project.