{"id":207,"date":"2019-04-21T14:04:19","date_gmt":"2019-04-21T18:04:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/staff\/rgast\/?p=207"},"modified":"2019-06-04T14:47:29","modified_gmt":"2019-06-04T18:47:29","slug":"palmer-station-pit-stop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/staff\/rgast\/palmer-station-pit-stop\/","title":{"rendered":"Palmer Station Pit Stop"},"content":{"rendered":"

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We arrived at Palmer Station this morning (picture above, Happy Easter!), and are currently offloading supplies and fresh food for the station.\u00a0 The first thing(s) to come off the ship were the tanks of juvenile krill that the Bernard lab group will be studying at Palmer (image below shows one of the large grey tanks on small boat).\u00a0 The team will actually be at the station until October \u2013 which means they are \u201cwintering over\u201d.\u00a0 My two months away seemed like a long time until I heard this \u2013 actually, two months is still<\/em> a long time.<\/p>\n

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I promised that I\u2019d say more about the krill fishing and why they were doing it.\u00a0 They use a very large net (not teeny tiny hooks, mom) with a bucket-like container on the end (called a cod end \u2013 no, I don\u2019t know why.\u00a0 Google it, I only get 400 MB a day for internet access).\u00a0 The net is lowered and raised from the water with a winch.\u00a0 We often do smaller net tows over the side of the ship by hand, and you\u2019ll get to see some of that later in the cruise.\u00a0 They had to fish for krill at night because that is when the animals seem come into the upper water column to feed.\u00a0 After the net comes back onboard the ship, the contents of the cod end are sorted through to select the juvenile krill.\u00a0 They collected thousands.\u00a0 These animals were transferred to tanks that held several hundred liters of flowing seawater.\u00a0 The flowing seawater keeps the animals at their ambient temperature, perhaps provides a little bit of food, and also washes away waste products.\u00a0 That last bit becomes important when there are several thousand animals in one tank \u2013 even though they are small and the water volume seems very large, it can become dirty very quickly.<\/p>\n

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What are they going to do with all of these krill?\u00a0 They are going to examine how differences in what they eat influence their growth and survival in the Antarctic winter.\u00a0 This is important with respect to the rapid and dramatic changes being observed in sea ice and in the types of phytoplankton that are present, particularly around the Palmer peninsula region.\u00a0 Krill feed on diatoms on the bottom of the ice, in addition to other phytoplankton, and are the \u201cnext step\u201d up in the planktonic food web.\u00a0 Microscopic single celled algae, called phytoplankton, are the \u201cgrass\u201d of aquatic environments.\u00a0 They provide food for organisms higher in the food web, who then are eaten by other (usually larger) organisms.\u00a0 Without phytoplankton we don\u2019t get krill, and without krill we don\u2019t get whales.\u00a0 Everyone likes whales, right?\u00a0 BTW, two humpbacks surfaced within 10 ft of the back deck when we were working outside yesterday!\u00a0 And we watched a seal play in the water \u2013 but I know not everyone likes seals.\u00a0 Sorry, no pictures of either of those, but I did a drawing of a krill, and pulled out my watercolors to make it pretty.<\/p>\n

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Regarding our own project, we were actually busy yesterday.\u00a0 We got some surface water and ran through all of our sampling and experimental protocols to see how long they took and how to organize the work flow (no matter how many times you do it, it\u2019s always different).\u00a0 It took us from about 9 am until mid-afternoon to get finished with everything.\u00a0 We still need to finish the ingestion counts by microscopy, but this afternoon we are going to take a tour of Palmer station.\u00a0 This evening we can sit at the microscope, and it will be extra nice because the ship is very stable right now because we are moored at the station.\u00a0 It will be much more of a challenge when we are back at sea, especially since looking through the scope can bring on or aggravate seasickness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We arrived at Palmer Station this morning (picture above, Happy Easter!), and are currently offloading supplies and fresh food for the station.\u00a0 The first thing(s) to come off the ship were the tanks of juvenile krill that the Bernard lab group will be studying at Palmer (image below shows one of the large grey tanks…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":210,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/staff\/rgast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/staff\/rgast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/staff\/rgast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/staff\/rgast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/staff\/rgast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/staff\/rgast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":216,"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/staff\/rgast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207\/revisions\/216"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/staff\/rgast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/staff\/rgast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/staff\/rgast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.whoi.edu\/staff\/rgast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}