Ugh. Three hours until we can officially put Project 1 to rest, and frankly, it couldn't come soon enough. We've all been hunkered down indoors for the past week, frantically processing the last of the data (which meant counting thousands of tiny plankton for our group) and writing up with final report that's due at midnight tonight, just a little over three hours from now. We're pretty much done at this point, just trying to play it safe and having one of the TAs look it over one last time before we send it on its merry way and join the compulsory party (marine bio types know how to have a good time).
If anyone wants a copy of the final report, leave a comment and I'll email it to you, but I warn you that it's written in mind-numbingly-boring scientific style (my previous attempts to breathe some life into it were nixed in earlier reviews by the other TA). Here's a quick recap for those who appreciate their bullet points:
What We Did
1. Built our own light traps out of glowsticks and Coke bottles with a device (made of pantyhose!) that allowed us to seal them from the boat to keep critters from getting out as we pulled them up.
2. Put these light traps out on a long (30m) line in the middle of Cook's Bay to catch plankton. Traps were located every 5m from 0-25m as measured from the surface.
3. Set this entire contraption out every two hours from 6pm to 4am for 45 minute periods each time.
4. Got the traps back and counted everything in them. By hand. I like my iPod.
What We Found
1. Virtually no plankton was ever found in the top layer of water (the 0m and 5m traps were always practically empty).
2. Plankton below the 10m mark showed a nightly migration up from the depths just after sunset, then descended again a couple hours later. Copepods (one of the most common types of plankton worldwide) also migrated upwards one more time just before sunrise, then descended again for the day.
3. Our traps allowed us to catch the more fragile organisms and keep them alive, unlike the more traditional plankton nets that tend to crush everything together into one congealed mass.
If you want more detail, I'll send the paper along to you. At this point, I kind of don't want to see this stuff for a while.
Tomorrow I'm going to Papeete, Tahiti with a few friends for a day trip and to relax a little before Project 2 starts up on Sunday. Mayhaps I'll have some pictures for you all. Until then, I'm off to finish up this paper and... um... have some fun. Heh.
And the parent figure asks...” so why is knowing the nightly migration habits of plankton important other than... a) satisfying your insatiable quest for knowledge b) getting to stay up really, really late, and c) you need two field projects to graduate...” Have fun in Papeete and be careful!
ReplyDeleteLove, Mom
PS. What’s the second project you’re doing?
Does anyone research salinity as a function of depth in your part of the world? It's a big topic in the polar regions since salinity is one of the tracers of global warming.
ReplyDeleteDad
Mom - Well, plankton is pretty much the base of the entire food web, including those on the reefs. The majority of those smaller fishes you've seen on this site eat what I've been studying, so they care very much about where they can find their next meal. And my next project is also a nocturnal one, studying sea urchin home range sizes and seeing if there's a correlation between range size and habitat quality (I'll describe it in more detail in future posts).
ReplyDeleteDad - Salinity is definitely an issue, but we assumed that the water in the bay has no significant halocline because there's enough mixing and turnover with seawater that the stratification of the entire body of water is fairly unstable. In general, though, tropical areas tend to be hypersaline at the surface due to evaporation, something I definitely noticed in my first couple of swims here!
Congrats on completing project one. A lot of the teachers at catalina have been asking what you are up to these days and they are very impressed. Have fun with project two!
ReplyDeleteEm - Yeah, I'm pretty much famous.
ReplyDeleteAnd how! Have fun on your day off!
ReplyDelete