The grind

January 17 2019 (Note: this is #16 in a series of posts describing my NSF-sponsored fieldwork in Antarctica aboard the Laurence M. Gould).

Can you see the little copepod near my fingertips on the spoon? That’s Calanus propinquus. I guess I shouldn’t play favorites with my “subjects,” but, between us, It’s kind of my favorite. If you get a nice well-fed specimen, the red antennae really stand out. They are also really graceful in the water, kind of like aerial artists, sometimes they’ll do flips end-over-end.

Pretty copepods aside, I’ll admit that yesterday was kind of a grind. I had the opportunity to sample two stations, and they were both teeming with copepods. I sampled and sampled and sampled. I had just finished one station when it was time to start the next one. Then when I finished all that, I still had to do water changes for my experiment. It was a long day with a lot of time on the microscope and a bunch more time squinting at nearly transparent small animals in a bucket. When it was all over, I was happy to stretch out my back and spend some time focusing my eyes on more distant things. I’m glad I made a big push today because it will be my last chance to sample for a few days. Tomorrow we’ll be doing more MOCNESS tows (cool, but not really part of my project) and the next day we’ll be visiting Rothera, a British Antarctic station, for a scientific exchange.