Exploring the Abyss with E/V Nautilus (NA181): Wake Island and the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument

Between August 17 and September 18, 2026, I had the privilege of co-leading a 33-day telepresence-enabled expedition aboard E/V Nautilus to explore deep-sea habitats around Wake Island in the western Pacific. NA181 was the first ROV expedition to explore Wake's deep waters since NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer expedition EX1606 in 2016. Together with co-lead Dr. Rob Pockalny (University of Rhode Island), I worked with scientists from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris, and URI, both at sea and on shore through live video, alongside the Ocean Exploration Trust and its partners.

Over the course of the cruise, our team completed 13 dives: nine with ROV Hercules and four with ROV Little Hercules. Seven of the Hercules dives were dedicated to biological and geological exploration of seamounts, including McDonnell Seamount and several unnamed peaks, at depths from about 800 to nearly 3,850 meters. The four Little Hercules dives (L1025–L1028) took us onto the abyssal plains, from 4,000 to 5,800 meters. The remaining two Hercules dives supported underwater cultural heritage exploration related to the Battle of Wake Island in World War II, in collaboration with marine archaeologists at NOAA's Office of Ocean Exploration.

We built directly on the foundation laid by EX1606, which showed that Wake's seamounts host a rich community of deep-sea corals and their associates. On NA181, we extended that picture with longer dives, filled gaps in the bathymetric survey, and explored deeper than anyone has before within Wake's EEZ. Many of the same groups turned up again, including Narella and Calyptrophora octocorals, Chrysogorgia and Victorgorgia corals, Asteroschema brittle stars and Uroptychus squat lobsters. We also found groups that EX1606 did not record, such as carnivorous sponges, polychaete worms, snails and clams. On the deepest dives, ferromanganese nodule fields hosted their own communities, with solitary cup corals, glass sponges and black corals anchored to individual nodules. We also observed and collected fossil teeth from an extinct giant shark (Otodus sp.).

In all, we collected more than 200 biological specimens and tissue subsamples representing dozens of distinct groups of animals. The samples will go to the Smithsonian and the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, where I will work with colleagues to identify and sequence them and build genetic reference libraries. Those libraries will help scientists recognize deep-sea species from environmental DNA and understand how remote seamount communities connect across the Pacific.