This summer while many students will make a vacation to the beach, Doreen McVeigh will make her vacation in the submarine, Alvin, the deepest-diving manned submersible in the United States.
McVeigh is a Ph.D. student studying the connectivity of organisms residing in the methane seeps of deep-sea regions. She described connectivity as the exchange of how organisms move from population A to population B and contribute to the genetic pools of different populations.
“We’re looking at that in the deep sea, and the organisms that we study are sessile which means they can’t move in their adult phase, so it’s only during that early larval stage that they can disperse and leave one population and find a single habitat in one area,” McVeigh said.
McVeigh’s research is targeted at methane seep sites in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico area. The bulk of the organisms collected in the area are chemosynthetic, which means that they do not use the sun to make their energy.
Instead these organisms use the chemically rich waters that are filled with hydrocarbons, healthy amounts of methane, and sulfides that seep through the cracks of the earth’s crust. According to McVeigh, research in how these organisms interact is crucial for understanding the ocean system and how to best conserve it.
“In regards to the deep sea, there is a lot of activity with deep sea mining and oil and gas expansion which is even happening over our coast,” McVeigh said. “That is the next frontier of energy and extraction, and we don’t know where most of the methane seeps are, but they do tend to be along continental margins, but we haven’t been able to understand fully what is going on.”
Preserving the resources is one of McVeigh’s top priorities.
“We need to make sure there are measures in place to protect these extremely valuable and extremely old ecosystems,” McVeigh said.
This research, although it centers on the deep sea, has applicability in oceanic areas that are not in the deep sea, and it is especially useful within the fisheries and oceanic wildlife economy.
“The beauty of it is that this could easily cross over to more coastal areas, so if you’re looking at commercially valuable shellfish and other types of commercially valuable fish such as red snapper or grouper, which are very valuable economically, there are still many questions to be answered about the earliest stages of their life,” McVeigh said.
The research can help identify areas that may need to be protected as well as help identify populations that may be sources of larvae in order to protect them.
“If we don’t we could lose that larval input over time,” McVeigh said.
McVeigh’s project is multi-institutional, working with Duke University and University of Oregon with the research. One of her specific contributions is taking the biological information of these organisms and working with the Ocean Observing and Modeling crew to help create a particles hydrothermal model to understand the dispersal potentials. With this, researchers can identify new sites and levels of connectivity, and use population genetics to see if the model matches the ocean.
McVeigh earned her masters at Hood College where she found a love of working with marine life and doing fieldwork with stingray populations around the Chesapeake Bay. During her project, she had to design her own experiments, mobilize a field team and develop creativity methods for safely catching, trapping and testing stingrays without killing them.
She decided to earn her doctorate at NC State after attending a presentation by NC State professor Dave Eggleston at a benthic ecology conference.
McVeigh’s work since then has attracted the attention of many groups around campus including the University Scholars, and she was able to share a presentation of her research with them on March 23.
“I thought the research she was doing was awesome,” said Maggie DeWeese, a freshman studying biological sciences. “She did a great job showing us that college is a time to explore new ideas and passions, and I think she was a prime example of what could happen when someone tries something new.”
Lindsay Clontz, a freshman studying zoology, found McVeigh’s talk about her graduate work with stingrays inspiring as well.
“I thought it was encouraging that she was able to receive such a unique opportunity to work with something that she was setting a foundation for even though she hadn’t received anything but her B.S. at that point,” Clontz said.
As for any advice McVeigh gives, she hopes that students never lose sight of their creativity.
“Just keep exploring and be curious. Sometimes it almost seems that some people progress through their lives and become less curious. My hope is that more people in the world keep their excitement to learn something new.”