Sorry for the late update! It has been crazy busy since we actually started working! Luckily, I have the day shift which is 12pm to 12 am, and the four others on my shift are great. We all get along really well, and don't mind getting covered in mud and fish scales and goo all day long.
The sail out here wasn't too bad, but we ran into some rough weather. Despite the constant rolling and sea-sawing of the ship, I managed to avoid seasickness. But it was hard trying to sleep when your mattress was sliding up and down, up and down all night long. We have had clear, beautiful weather since then!
I'll try to give you a little overview of what goes on during the day shift. We have a map that has randomly set points for us to do CTD's, Plankton- Bongos and Neustons, and Trawls. So if you look on the satellite map of the Oregon, you might see sort of a zig-zag motion as we sail from station to station. At every stop, we have to do a CTD- Conductivity, Temperature, and Depth system. It is this really large contraption that has auto sensing mechanisms to take samples at different depths, measure temperature, chlorophyll level, salinity, and turbidity. Pretty much everything here runs on the computers and through radio, so we are constantly in contact with the bridge, deck crew, and the lab. During plankton stations, there are two nets we use- Neuston and the Bongo. The Neuston runs right along side the boat for about 10 minutes collecting whatever is in the waves and top of the water. The Bongo collects samples within the water column it self at different depths. Once we have the collections from both of those nets- which usually consist of different phytoplankton, zooplankton, sargassum, fish, crabs, larvae, etc., we then have to put them into jars with formaneline in order to prevent the specimens from decomposing. The night shift will them transfer the sample into jars with ethanol only. After we get back to land, the samples will be shipped to Poland to be analyzed. Apparently, Poland has a great plankton laboratory- who knew?
Pretty much all day yesterday and today, we have just being doing the regular trawl. Here, a 35 ft. net will trawl at the bottom of the sea floor for thirty minutes, capturing a plethora of different organisms. After the alloted time, we bring the net back onboard and dump all of the catch into baskets. We weigh the total catch and then dump it on to this large conveyor belt that runs through the wet lab inside. From there we put each species into different baskets, and we enter the species name and total weight into the computer system. After all of the catch is accounted for, we then start the tedious process of measuring each individual organism. Only on the commercial shrimp do we have to length, weigh, and sex each organism- which can be a really long process since we can do up to 200 per trawl. We catch an enormous array of organisms, and you can really see the difference in ecosystems just on the depth of the trawl. At certain stations we will get hundreds of squids, and at others we will catch hundreds of crabs and shrimp. One station yesterday we had over 430 individuals of this one type of small crab. We also catch skates, sharks, starfish, snapper, lots and lots of shrimp and squid, blue crabs, and soo many different types of fish. Everything is classified by scientific name, so I am trying to get at least some of the names down! Our watch leader, Brittany, is constantly quizzing us on them so we are starting to pick some of them up. We come up with little memory devices to remember them, and pretending that they are harry potter spells makes it a little more fun.
After my shift is over at midnight, I take a wonderful shower to try to get rid of slime, scales, and mud. I then proceed to crawl and bed and pretty much sleep till lunch and my next shift. It's alot of work, but its been really fun and a great learning experience. I've been trying to capture pictures of everything we do- but I won't be able to post them until I get back!
No comments:
Post a Comment