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| "Larger" fishes collected, including some Jacks and a large bucket full of plankton on the right (Photo: NOAA) |
So, what is plankton and why do we care about it? Well without going into much detail: Plankton is made up of a mixture of invertebrates (baby crab, shrimp), plants, bacteria, fish (eggs, larvae) that drift in the upper layer of the ocean and serve as food for larger fishes and adult fish as well. We collect plankton to find larval or baby fishes in particular larval Bluefin Tuna! I am sure a lot of you had some kind of tuna in your lifetime - that's a pretty important fish if you ask me!
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| Bluefin Tuna (larval specimen ~7 mm long = tiny!!) Photo: NOAA, SP |
For yesterday's station, we were using a MOCNESS which is a Multiple Opening/Closing Net and Environmental Sensing System. This equipment has many nets and can collect plankton from discrete depths (ex. 25 meters 'bins' = we'll start at 100 meters and close it at 75 meters). It is connected to a computer inside the ship and the operator can control when to close the nets. We also have other instruments attached to the frame to measure salinity, depth and temperature. Its important to know at what depths you collect your organisms because we can then combine that information with oceanographic information collected during each station and throughout the cruise.
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| MOCNESS coming out of the water - this one has 6 nets attached (Photo: NOAA) |
One of the many challenges of executing research projects is gather the data. "Data" is collected in many ways, sometimes instruments record temperature or wind data; sometimes its as simple as dipping a net in the water and catching whatever is swimming around at the time. Although there are quite a lot of scientific and sophisticated experiments carried out every day all over the world, most of us that have been out on a boat/ship/field station and are trying to do some kind of 'work' - know that Murphy's Law is the law of the land out here. For instance, our net played some tricks on us yesterday when the MOCNESS (aka "Olivia") decided to trick us into thinking it worked properly when it actually failed miserably and after about an hour spent in the water... no plankton was collected :( We were very dissapointed because we had calm weather and an opportunity to capture our targeted species (BFT). Luckily we were able to get it to cooperate after some TLC from our Field Party Chief Denise, our ET Patrick, watch leader Andy and our Chief Scientist Dr. Lamkin. I got to test it out last night and it worked! hooray! I was glad that Olivia worked last night and it successfully collected lots of plankton! Hopefully, there are some Bluefin tuna in our samples ... next is sorting all those jars full of plankton!!! (but we'll leave that for another post).
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| many, many boxes full of sample jars with ... yes you guessed, PLANKTON! |
PS: I will try to translate this blog into spanish after lunch since we are a 'multinational' effort!
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