We joined a motley caravan out to Cape Evans Wednesday, this time to drill another dive hole for urchin collection, and fish hut placement. Fish Hut 20 is now scenically located near the Barne Glacier, several icebergs and the Terra Nova Hut. FH20 was also Gretchen's first fish hut at McMurdo and it has a lovely custom window in the shape of a fish (go Carp Shop!). B-308 now gets to enjoy its amenities.

Our caravan was fortunate enough to include Larry Fabulous! (emphasis mine), Terra Nova Hut Guide Extraodinaire. He was kind enough to take a photo of me with my favorite lab bench in the Hut.

While it is clear that the Antarctic Heritage Trust does a lot of staging, it is nonetheless thrilling to see a lot of the same stuff we use today. I could walk into the open stockroom in Crary and provision myself with many of the same chemistry implements. They just lacked a good set of sub-milliliter pipettors.

Rob and Steve bought us several dozen urchins with a lot of Phyllophora antarctica red macroalgae. The sea ice is first year ice and transmits a lot more light. The high productivity of the benthos at Cape Evans is pretty obvious.

Mary and I did a test spawn today, and it yielded some very gravid and fecund animals. We got a robust fertilization as a result. Crary has some really nice microscopy equipment which is kept in working order thanks to my new microscopy pal Jim. Now if NSF will decide to add an Environmental SEM...