In May 2018, Terry Conrad found himself aboard the research vessel R/V Robert Gordon Sproul in the Santa Barbara Basin off the coast of Southern California. One of his jobs was to bottle mud brought to the surface from various depths of the ocean floor and pack it in coolers to be sent back to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), one of the world’s leading organizations dedicated to ocean research and education. For the University of Iowa assistant professor of printmaking, this was a bit outside his comfort zone. “I was really nervous,” Conrad says. “I felt like this was too much responsibility for someone who knew very little about the research being done.” Conrad spent nine days aboard the ship with the WHOI research group as they studied foraminifera. These single-celled marine organisms are tiny—usually less than 1 mm long—and adept at surviving in low-oxygen areas known as dead zones. Foraminifera may hold answers to some big questions, such as how some creatures adapt and survive in dead zones and whether they may be able to predict future climate-change responses in the ocean.