And They're Off! - Now Updated

Project One has officially begun. We're going to study the nocturnal vertical migrations of plankton, so yesterday morning we went to the hardware store and stocked up on 300m of twine. We've been drinking a lot of Coke for the past three weeks so we could use the bottles for the traps, and the school is supplying the rest of the materials. Yesterday afternoon we motored out in one of the boats and deployed our own buoy, which now bobs proudly in the middle of Cook's Bay. We're using it to mark an area with the proper seafloor depth so we can return to the same place every night. After some daytime preliminary testing to make sure the bottles don't flush all of their occupants when we pull the traps back up, we modified our trap designs a little and redeployed them with a series of new trial designs. Our most successful traps were one with a weight at the bottom to keep it upright on both descent and ascent, and the other with a tube of pantyhose at the top that we trigger from the surface to seal it shut so the critters don't escape on their way back up to the boat. We also realized last night that we need to put something reflective or sparkly on the top of our buoy so we can find it more easily at night, after we spent about 10 minutes driving in circles, trying to find it with flashlights.


Way off in the distance you can see Mark and Antonio, my two groupmates, taping tinfoil to the buoy to make it a little shinier - hopefully that will help.

Here are a few pictures of what we caught last night. Even the traps that were deemed failures were just crawling with plankton when we brought them back up!


Plankton, actual size - my hand is in the picture for scale.

The contents of that very same cup.


More critters. Just think about this next time you accidentally swallow some seawater... eww.


A very nice close-up of a pair of amphipods, relatives of those jumping sand fleas that cover the beaches in California.


The round series of white stripes in this picture is a ctenophore (pronounced "teen-oh-four", which is close enough to the pronounciation of "10:04" to have to endure any of a series of many MANY lame biology jokes whenever you ask someone what time it is) - essentially a miniature comb jelly. The stripes are actually rows of tiny cilia, hairs that the ctenophore beats in sequence to propel itself through the water. We caught three ctenophores in one of our traps, which we're calling a fluke right now because it is extremely rare to catch even one of them. Another group has been doing a complicated series of blue water dives to catch slightly larger versions of these guys, and here we are just tossing Coke bottles overboard and then playing card games on the boat for 30 minutes while we wait. There may or may not be some gloating going on in our camp...

All of our samples are dead and preserved at this point so they don't start rotting and stinking any more than they already do, but they were literally crawling when we first pulled them out of the water last night. The long wormy-looking ones with many legs were zooming all over the place, gobbling up all of the copepods (that's the other reason we preserved them - we don't want them eating our samples), and the copepods moved around by twitching their bodies (which is probably why they kept getting eaten). Very cool.

In other news, we can no longer have baguettes at every meal, as we have been doing for the whole time we've been here. It seems that all of French Polynesia has run out of flour. Literally and no joke. The ladies cooking for our group are still making all sorts of great food, but we can no longer get our morning delivery of 20 baguettes for the day.