Te Vega Cruise #13

 

Te Vega—The Floating University

 

Nine graduate students and a faculty of four, led by Dr. Richard Dugdale of the University of Alaska, are now on Stanford's 135-ft research schooner, Te Vega, for tropical waters off Mexico and Central America. The 13 will pursue studies and research in biological oceanography on the cruise which will end in mid-March. The program is sponsored by the National Science Foundation under the direction of the Hopkins Marine Station of the university. The Te Vega's home port is Monterey, but she was completing her annual overhaul at Long Beach before she left on the quarterlong cruise. There will be three more cruises for the Te Vega in 1967, each cruise lasting about 10 weeks and corresponding to the unversity's academic quarters. On the cruises students take a 15-unit advanced course in biological oceanography. Students come from universities around the nation to participate in the program. This quarter all the participating students come from different institutions, including one Stanford student, James Childress. The voyage will include a stop at the Scammon Lagoon halfway down the coast of Baja California, where the group will try to observe the calving of California gray whales. The ship will procede to Acapulco and then go to the Galapagos Islands, where it will pass most of February. The cruise ends in Acapulco about March 17. An important objective of this cruise of the Te Vega is the investigation of the "oxygen minimum layer" lying 600 to 2400 feet deep in the waters the ship will traverse. This layer of the ocean, which has been relatively undisturbed by ocean currents, holds about 95 per cent less ox>gen than the surface waters. The layer nonetheless supports a dense population of marine organisms. The vessel will make about 58 "oceanographic stations" on the voyage; the ship will stop briefly at regular intervals while scientists take samples of the waters and the marine life and check the curents. A professional captain and crew will handle the Te Vega. The voyage's chief scientist, Prof. Dugdale, will be accompanied by his wife, Jane, who is also a qualified biologist and has signed up as a student for the vovage.