Before arriving at the University of Delaware to take part in the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program at UD’s College of Earth, Ocean and Environment, Olivia Hines had never been out of the country. That all changed one Sunday, during her REU experience, when Art Trembanis, Hines’adviser for the summer and a professor in the School of Marine Science and Policy, asked if she could join an expedition to the Cayman Islands to map Pickle Bank, an uncharted seamount in the Atlantic.

Luckily, Hines, was ready to answer the call. An undergraduate student at the University of San Diego, she had been working all summer with Trembanis’ lab group mapping artificial reefs off Delaware’s coast using the same technology—a NORBIT Multibeam Echosounder—that would also be used in the Cayman Islands.

“We were scrambling to find a third person to go down to the Cayman Islands with us and Grant Otto [operations manager for Trembanis’ lab] immediately said, ‘I think we ought to consider Olivia,’” said Trembanis. “I said, ‘That's a fascinating idea.’because, of course, Olivia was here participating in the REU program.”

Once he secured approval for her to join the group, the race was on to get Hines’passport in time for the trip.

“I didn't even have my passport with me,” said Hines. “I had my parents FedEx it to Dr. Trembanis’ house just to make sure someone was there to sign for it.”

Semper Gumby

Passport secured, Hines, Otto and Trembanis departed with their gear in tow and headed to map Pickle Bank. There were only a few problems: Hurricane Beryl had just come through complicating travel to and within the Cayman Islands and the boat that they were planning to use for the expedition was pinned in by other boats in the boatyard. 

Trembanis said this was a beneficial experience for Hines, as being able to improvise and adapt to any situation is a good skill for any aspiring marine scientist to learn early on in their careers.

“The Coast Guard has a motto which is Semper Paratus, which means ‘Always Ready’,” said Trembanis. “As oceanographers, we have our own unofficial motto that we live by and it's Semper Gumby-a wordplay on Latin and the rubbery animated character. We have to be flexible. I said to Olivia, ‘The biggest thing you're going to do in your career if you're in this field is you’re going to have to always be flexible and prepared to dodge, duck, dive and weave to get through adversity.’”

Mapping Pickle Bank

After setting up and testing their equipment on an area known as Turtle Reef, the research team finally got a break in the weather and was able to head over to Little Cayman to map Pickle Bank.

Pickle Bank is a well-known deep-sea fishing site located 48 miles northwest of Little Cayman. Despite its popularity, there is a lack of detailed baseline knowledge about the seamount and Trembanis’ team was hoping to map it to shed some light on the area.

For the expedition, Trembanis’ team worked with the Central Caribbean Marine Institute (CCMI), that had divers coming to explore the Mesozoic coral reefs found off the deep edges of Pickle Bank after Trembanis’ team conducted their mapping.

Originally planned for four days of exploration, with only one day to map the seamount, the team once again made the Semper Gumby decision to map as much as they could in order to provide critical context for the dive team.

Hines said the team was able to get a rough outline of Pickle Bank completed in that one day of mapping.

“Our longest line that we mapped was 8-kilometers,” said Hines. “It's very large structure but we were able to get a general overview of the shape and some potential sites of interest for the scientific divers.”

UD REU Experience

As for her experience at UD, Hines was one of 10 undergraduate REU students studying at UD’s Lewes campus thanks to funds from the National Science Foundation.

For her main REU project, she worked with Trembanis to look at Red Bird Reef, an artificial reef located off the coast of Slaughter Beach, Delaware. As with her Pickle Bank exploration, Hines worked with data gathered from a multibeam echo sounder, a sophisticated sonar used for offshore surveys of all types.

“This specific multibeam echo sounder repeatedly sends out 512 individual pings that hit the sea floor,” said Hines. “The transducer and receiver communicate to see how long it takes the ping to hit the sea floor and come back to the unit which tells us the depth of the sea floor.”

Also known as Site 11, Redbird Reef is one of 14 artificial reef sites established over the past 20 years by the Delaware Artificial Reef Program located along the Delaware coast from Augustine beach to the edge of the continental shelf. The reefs mimic natural substrates and use recycled material to provide habitat for fish, and opportunities for angling and SCUBA diving, among other activities.

Redbird Reef was one of three reef sites that the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC), the organization that oversees the artificial reefs, asked Trembanis and his lab group to map this summer to see if the objects have moved.

“My specific site has one of the widest varieties of different kinds of objects so there's subway cars, retired armored military vehicles, tanks, Navy barges, tugboats and other retired commercial trawling vessels,” said Hines.

Redbird Reef was mapped by Trembanis’ lab group in 2012, before and after Hurricane Sandy. It has been mapped in bits and pieces every few years since.

This summer, Trembanis’ team and Hines went out aboard the R/V Joanne Daiber, one of UD’s research vessels, to map for six to seven hours at a time. This type of ocean exploration is exactly what Hines was looking for when she signed up for the REU program.

With the aim of eventually having a career in the deep-sea field, Hines was drawn to Trembanis’ lab and the experiences it could provide her.

“To be successful in this kind of an inaccessible environment, it is important to have a holistic perspective,” said Hines. “You need to be able to know how to use some of these technologies just because the deep sea is so inaccessible. All the equipment that I worked with in Dr. Trembanis’ lab this summer will help me down the road when I'm doing deep-sea research and oceanographic exploration.”