Jackpot!
January 14, 2019 (Note: this is #14 in a series of posts describing my NSF-sponsored fieldwork in Antarctica aboard the Laurence M. Gould). Today’s “featured image” isn’t particularly related to this post, but I thought everyone might like to see a seal 🙂
Are you on twitter?? (I’m not…maybe a goal for 2020). If you are, you might want to check out @PalmerLTER
I woke up this morning to find that the birders had safely made it to Avian Island. Apparently the ice had cleared during the night, and the approach was relatively straightforward. Around dinnertime we were sampling a southern onshore station (200.040), our 44th zooplankton tow of the cruise. It was completely PACKED with the copepod Calanoides acutus. That meant it was a great time to do a special gentle tow to collect live animals (tow #45, special just for me!). It was similarly teeming with copepods, and even better, they were actively swimming and well-pigmented. I furiously picked copepods for the next three hours or so, first filling up vials for RNA studies. Then setting aside pools of live animals for shipboard experiments, and finally freezing animals for studies of enzyme activity, lipid content and maybe even epigenetic marks (Neel Aluru…that one’s for you!). All totaled, I picked out 307 copepods yesterday. Definitely more than any other station, and possibly more than all the previous stations put together.
Sampling this station has allowed me to scale up my shipboard experiments from 1-L bottles to 2-gallon buckets. That meant I needed to engineer (“McGyver”) a bigger system for keeping those animals cool. Some of the bins I had intended to use didn’t make it with my shipment, so I improvised. I had shipped a lot of my equipment in a large, sturdy bin (Action Packer). I called the “Action Packer” into action! We placed it in front of my sample rack, and piped the outflow from the top shelf into the tub. We then used a hole saw to drill a hole halfway up the side for the outflow. It works great, but that hole is going to be kind of odd when I ship my equipment home. I guess duct tape covers everything!
It was a great day all around! I feel like I’m really doing what I came here to do. I’m glad I didn’t reach this station earlier in the trip…it would have been somewhat wasted. Yesterday I was fully ready to take advantage of the bounty.