We got up early in the hope that it would be calm enough to finish our sorting. It wasn’t really, but we still went for it since we were already awake. It was actually pretty successful, you just had to move very quickly to catch the little buggers as they ran across the trays with the mini waves. In case you were wondering, mornings like this, science is run on tea. The British empire still reigns. 

One of the teachers was also very excited to show us this little punk guy, he was pretty awesome. And quite possible we will have to identify him on our exam, which would be awesome, cause he’s got some pretty visible punkage going on. 

After all the sorting it was pretty important that we at least give identifying things a bit of a go. Though.. we are talking about polychaets, its not an easy kind of worm to be differentiating between. In fact, it’s more than a little bit difficult. There’s a million new different words to learn, and even telling which bit is the head and which bit is the tail is tricky. So, the fellow below is what I had to try and identify. It was not the most pleasant or easy experience. I have gained even more respect for our experts, of whom there are very few in the world. They do a hard job, a very repetitive job and they know their stuff. This is the little guy I had to identify. 

The captain did a great job of trying to shelter us today from the weather, so that we at least had a chance of getting some work done. He sheltered us behind a glacier and with the winds picking up you could really feel it. We’ve also had some horizontal snow which all the Australians got pretty excited about. It was that special kind of wind that rips all heat out of your hands instantly and wends its way through and into your clothing. It was at least two cups of tea and hot chocolate to regain feeling. 

And now we are sitting up on deck waiting for the storm to hit. There’s been a few casualties, and there’s bound to be a few more. But currently yours truly is going ok. I’m hoping we’ll see some proper north seas, it hasn’t felt a whole lot like we are in the Arctic till now. 

We did see some proper seas, but they were almost impossible to photograph. Waves crashed over the bow, I got airborne in my bed and woke up covered in little bruises. But over all I had a great night. It was the first night off in a very long time and it was a shame most people weren’t up for enjoying it. We watched a movie, at this point about 10 of us were ok (from 17), then had dinner, after which we dropped to about 5, and gradually dried off from there. It was fun, although it wouldn’t be any fun to live in for any extended period of time. You have to hold onto everything, you have to hold onto both banisters as you walk up and down stairs. The change from floating down the stairs to being squished onto them can be a bit rough and has been known to break the occasional leg. But for the people who were sick it was about 15 hours of hell, and most of them only seem to have got a few hours of sleep.

I was quite glad we didn’t a) run into the perfect storm, b) run into one of the freak waves some of my mates at UNSW are researching in their water laboratory. Occasionally, due to a combination of wave effects, you can end up with waves 10’s of meters high. These freak waves have been known to wipe out ships and oil rigs in one wave. They are almost impossible to predict and to prepare for so the guys at UNSW are attempting to replicate the conditions using millions of different wave combinations.

Tomorrow we are back to Ny Ålesund and the sheltered fjords to do some kelp collection and learn about echinoderms. 

At about 11 o’clock today the weather stated getting too rough for us to sort samples. This also means that it’s pretty much too rough to do anything much, and looking at this screen isn’t a particularly smart move so we shall see how it goes. The day did start fairly well, that is with coffee..

And then we had a cool lecture that was all about the intertidal zones around Svalbard. One of the scientists on the ship got to spend 3 years going around the island with some mates on a small rubber boat to sample the shoreline pretty much everywhere and see what differences were where. It’s been suggested that this has probably changed a lot in recent times and should be looked at again. As jobs go it sounds pretty good to me. Nice and relaxed and scientific.

There was also a nice interlude when some whales made an appearance quite a way from the ship. There were probably about 8-10 and we could see their blows which was awesome, although they weren’t breaching. It was cool to see some other stuff out here. There was also soooooo much bird life. It’s been fantastic watching the birds react to the ship. 

Before the weather picked up we managed to sort some of our samples just like yesterday. The sorted samples look a little bit like this. Well a lot like this actually, being as this is them.

After sorting through our tray there is a lot of detritus left. It’s really important that our lead ninja/scientist goes through the tray to make sure that we haven’t left anything out. The living things look quite a lot like the dead things in a few cases and there is more than one shellfish that will masquerade as a rock, as there are many rocks masquerading as bivalves. It’s a tricky world down there, but luckily we have an expert to help and hold our hand as we get onto the right track. As you might expect we have been getting much better at this, and even managed to be pretty successful at 6am. It’s a really satisfying thing to do, to clear out a tray and to get every little bit of organic living material out of it. 

So because there isn’t so much to talk about today so far I’ll introduce you to two other bits of the ship that have played some roles whilst we were out and about. When we were working on the deadly chemicals and cold room stuff, when we collected mud from the bottom of the ocean to see how much the critters are breathing, we had to collect water from the bottom of the ocean to keep these animals alive. Why? Because water at the bottom is really different to water at the top, it’s often a different temperature, different salinity and will have different organic material etc. inside. To do that a CTD with a carousel of bottles is dropped down to the bottom of the ocean. As many of the long term readers of this blog will know CTD stands for Conductivity, Temperature and Depth. So it is also measuring this as it heads down to the ocean bottom. This gives a very interesting sort of data about the layers of the ocean. Below you can see the deployment of the CTD which goes off the side of the ship and has to be carefully winched down and up because they are very very expensive to replace if you manage to lose one. 

Here are also some photos of the trawl deck. As you can see it’s a metal deck, and the trawl has plenty of little metal bits and pieces on it. Hence the racket it makes when being deployed and brought back in. It’s this trawl we use to catch the fish and shrimps for measurement, and stomach dissection. 

Because the weather continued to worsen there was still very little that we could do. The group working on the trawl had a pretty interesting catch, almost no shrimp and 80 kilos of Atlantic cod. So the evening plan became to learn how to fillet a fish, important life skills. Whilst I demonstrated 100% on my ability to concentrate on fish filleting it was a rather massive fail when it came to the nature of the fillet. It kinda looked like someone else had already eaten it. On the other hand I know what we’ll be eating for the next two weeks. It was quite a satisfying evening. Particularly knowing that the fish weren’t then going to go to waste. 

There was also a little bit of biological romance in the air.. points to whom so ever works it out. And the girl who receives that for valentines and appreciates it for what it is, she’s a keeper. 

And then there were some good little/huge fish fillets. I'll admit, mine looked liked something had gnawed at them.. but hey, they were fillets.. kinda..The pictures below are not of my fillets

So all up it was quite a productive day although we didn’t actually manage to do most of the scientific stuff we were hoping to do. It will be interesting to see how tomorrow goes, there are rumours of 40 knot winds. Faces turn green at the thought

Today we are starting on our next project. This is going to be about the polychaetes. Judging from the other groups reactions they are nigh on impossible to identify easily and there has been talk of one hour per creature. We have a polychaete ninja on board though. A Russian scientist who is astonishing when it comes to recognising polychaetes. She can tell what it is with a glance often, and that deserves some credit.

The steaming over night was through some rough weather, so people aren’t feeling overly flash, mostly just tired. Although I’m not looking forward to staring down a microscope in the rough seas. We woke up in Hindlopen which isn’t a fjord, the shock of finding some part of the Norwegian coast that isn’t fjorded! Golly gosh! But it’s still pretty spectacular. 

There was an unknown find in a sample yesterday which has been rather enthusiastically labelled “alien”, although when sketched on a whiteboard there is a certain alien-esque quality to it. Although it looks distinctly less alien than many of the other creatures we’ve seen so far. Either way, we are yet to identify it, which got everyone a little excited hence it got its own whiteboard sketch. It has been the inspiration for a potential mystery plot on board though.. the plot thickens. 

There was a little bit of waiting for the samples, the grab has to go down and up and down and up and down and up, the process of which takes 10-15 minutes each yo-yo. So I got to play with my camera a little more.

And we got to wear the outdoor clothes and hard hats which do a lot to help you feel like you’re doing real hard-core science, kind of like the syringes but in the opposite direction. 

But then when the samples did make it up on deck there was LOTS of work to be done. Each of the 3 samples had to be washed very very gently, to avoid damaging the little organisms that live in the soft sediment whilst also making sure they weren’t still covered in mud. Considering the shock these critters must go through they don’t seem too panicked and seem to recover fairly well, going from a dark high pressured area to low pressured and light, it must be quite weird. 

After making it through the washing which took the best part of 4 hours for the 3 samples (there was a lot of clay) we had samples to sort, on our white trays. They looked a little like this, sometimes with more rocks, sometimes with less. 

Some of the things are easy to spot, some less so ie. The little shell below. Because this is a quantitative, or numbers based, analysis of whats living down there we have to get everything, EVERYTHING!

It’s a great opportunity to listen to some music and start to get a handle on where the little creatures live, what kinds of tubes they build to live in. It’s quite interesting in a destructing kind of way. Once again, the determination of life to use every little skerrick of opportunity to live, thrive and survive. 

I’ve mentioned the divers going down before, for a few different things, sometimes they are taking photos, sometimes they are collecting specimens and sometimes they are playing with the moorings. Just for interest, this is the rig they use to take photos, it’s a pretty awesome piece of kit. 

We had a really awesome lecture today about the moorings that are happening around Svalbard and around the world. Hopefully I’ll have time to go into that some more later. There’s some really cool new developments happening in long term monitoring of the deep ocean.

Stay tuned for some more sorting and the beginning of some IDing tomorrow!

The day began at 5am sampling our cores again. Nothing more fun than starting the day in a walk in fridge. There was a genuine feeling of doing science though. 

Throughout the night we had to measure the oxygen levels in each tube at 3 hour intervals to see what is happening over a 24 hour period. Following that we ran all our sliced samples from yesterday, which have been bathing in acetone for the last 24 hours through a centrifuge to get all the mud to the bottom.

From there the samples are fun through a flurometer, this is to test the amount of organic matter, both living and dead, that was in that layer of sediment. The amount of organic matter is expected to decrease with depth. Basically what happens is that the little creatures that live in the sediment transport their bits of food (or “organic matter”) up and down through their layer of mud. As there are less creatures that dig deep there is less food down lower. Our results didn’t show this perfectly neatly, which could be caused by a number of different factors including say if a bit of worm ended up in the sliced layer or just some really active deep burrowing creatures. So you can see our results below. Basically they show how there is less and less organic matter as you go down, this is to a depth of 10cm. So the graph on the right is the dead organic matter, or the organic matter that has been munched, chomped and digested by some creature. The graph on the right shows all the “living” or undigested organic matter as measured by its chlorophyll content which doesn’t follow such a nice curve, but it means that there could be something a bit different going on down there around the 12 cm mark. It was quite awesome to actually get to take data and analyse it and then to present it.

To understand this movement of bits and pieces up and down through the mud we also added some fluorescent pink beads to the tubes. This will measure the “bioturbation” or the movement of particles that the little creatures get up to. They will take some pink beads down to the level they like to hang out in and then in a week when that core is sliced and analysed they will be able to see if there are any particularly deep burrowing creatures or some such. 

The majority of our day was spent putting together a presentation about what we had been up to and trying to analyse our data and consider what it might mean within the bigger picture. Because I like to think about things as systems I put together a little image to help this make more sense. The image below basically just shows how there are different systems at different scales, from global to local, and they are interacting. You can’t consider what’s happening at a local scale without considering what’s happening nearby and globally. All these factors are working together, and rarely are they working in the same direction. Looking at it like this can help to keep it all in perspective, every little bit of bioturbation is important for the bigger picture. 

Our presentation went down really well, and we then only had to do a little bit of data entry and then the same testing as we did last night with the DIC, the DOC and some nutrients. This experience, complete with the French pop music played to keep spirits high was converted into the last part of our project which was to draw a cartoon of our experience. I was involved with the DIC which involved mercury chloride, which is a particularly deadly substance, if ingested. Hence the “I’m going to die” bubble. However, I didn’t die, so all is well. It was really only if I ate the vial or my gloved I would die, and to be fair.. if I did that even without the Mercury Chloride I’d be likely to die anyways. Good general rule, don’t eat the lab equipment. 

And to see what I was actually doing with the DIC, in the big syringe is the sample water, in the little tube is an inert gas (think back to year 10 chemistry) and some mercury chloride. The challenge is to fill the little bottle with the sample so the second needle is to let out air and the mercury chloride. Its actually an astonishingly tricky thing to do because you have to try and get every little air bubble with this needle, and they often hide. Not a task for the faint hearted on a moving ship at night. French pop music does actually help though, and knowing you can tell all your friends you were risking your life for science. 

You can also tell that this is a research vessel by the ships track, it really doesn’t appear to make any sense at all. But that’s the ship trying to get into the right position and then hold position for various activities such as dropping the CTD which is a relatively delicate piece of equipment that has to be located on the leeward side when it is lowered. This often means that the ship has to be parallel to the waves rather than the more comfortable perpendicular, and can lead to some really odd feelings inside the ship. In some cases the ship is also trying to hold steady for the people who are dropping moorings or fixing moorings. Moorings are permanent mini research stations which either mark a location to come back to so we can do research over time, or are taking samples and sending that information back to land at a regular basis. There are a lot of different kinds of moorings which means a lot of different things can go wrong with them. Either way, it ends up with a very squiggly ship track. 

Our lecture this evening was about the management of Norwegian coastal waters, which because of Svalbard and some other small islands in the North Sea they have a lot of. The waters have a lot of oil and fish which are a key part of the Norwegian economy, so the sustainable management of these resources is essential. It was very interesting to hear how they approach their management, with multiple research voyages annually and very scientifically calculated quotas for fishing. It would be interesting to compare this to how Australia manages our fisheries, because we have much fewer research vessels. It’s also interesting hearing about the claims that different countries are making to the North Pole and their attempts to prove this through the nature of the sea shelf. If you can prove that there is a constant linkage between your landmass and are X (ie. The North Pole) then you have a chance at claiming it. A similar battle is happening down in the South with Australia and France and some others looking to strengthen their claims to Antarctica with underwater maps. Australia has a number of voyages planned for late next year to do some sea floor mapping to add to our claim.

Everyone finished a bit early tonight which was great, although some of us made the mistake of celebrating this early finish by staying up late to enjoy some free time. It was not the wise choice, although we did learn a lot about what it’s like to work on scientific research vessels as a Norwegian researcher. 

Today we begin with the analysis of sediment. Conducting various experiments on the sediment to see whats happening. Is there a lot of oxygenating activity? Is there not much happening? Is there plenty of organic matter? All these questions and more.

Our gear was deployed early in the day so we got a good running start at the science end. On previous deployments the box corer has actually broken, it’s smashed up against rocks and got rather seriously mangled. Having had a look up close at the corer it should be noted that smashing it is not an easy task. It’s a serious piece of kit. We did get a bit of time up on deck, which was an awesome break from watching the insides of a microscope, got to see some of the bird life.

And appreciate some of the awesomeness that is the Arctic. It’s always good to get out and have some fresh air now and again to get a reminder of why we do all these things. 

The box corer returned successful. Basically this piece of kit takes a solid chunk out of the sea floor and returns it to the surface, as is happening here. 

We then take smaller samples out of this one solid core of mud and conduct a number of experiments on them to get a better understanding of what is going on down there. So one of these littler cores looks like this:

And then for one of the experiments we have to take slices from each core at every 5mm until 2cm and then every 2cm until 10cm. Why more earlier? Because that is where most of the action is, and there for it’s good to have a look at it at a higher resolution. So how is this done? By slicing the core very very carefully. Yet again another skill to learn rapidly then demonstrate excellence at, we got pretty good at it, and started awarding grades for the smoothness of slice, and of course grades were deducted for mud spills. 

Then those slices are sampled for various tests to be done later in the day. Many of these tests require that the sediment rests for a while and so we spent a little bit of time developing better understanding of some of the calculations we will be applying to our data. 

Also, please note this is real science, there are test tubes.

We had to sample the cores for a whole bunch of different tests and due to my trusting nature I somehow ended up with the most deadly form of testing. This involves a giant syringe, two needles and a small vial with Mercury Chloride inside it. Apparently Mercury Chloride is quite deadly, but only when eaten, so if I manage to avoid eating the vials it’s likely I’ll live. As you can probably guess because this blog is being written, I did indeed survive, and life is sweet.

During the night we got up every 3 hours to measure the oxygen with a small fibre optic laser and the temperature of the bath of water that the cores are sitting in. No reset for the wicked as they say, although this data should give us some interesting information. More details are given below.

Now to really understand what we are doing today we have to read a paper, which we were supposed to read before we got on the ship but it all seemed to be a little alien to me and it’s making much more sense now we are doing something similar. So here’s some notes from the paper below. Have fun!

We’ll start with “Carbon cycling by seafloor communities on the eastern Beaufort Sea shelf”, as you can guess it’s about benthic carbon cycling. We did a little piece the other day about the importance of this for the global climate system, so we’ve already established that it’s a good thing to understand. Who doesn’t want to be able to pick up cute girls/fellas at parties with a solid understanding of carbon cycling? The story behind this paper is that the sea floor in the Beaufort Sea Shelf area is punching above its weight when it comes to cycling carbon. It’s actually a really important part of the carbon cycle up here, as are a number of geographical features such as shelfs and areas around polynas. Their productivity (activity, actions) make up for the lack of productivity in some of the areas with less exciting geography and less dramatic relief (ie. The flat bits).

Evidence of this productivity can be seen just by an increased amount of wildlife activity in the area. It should also be noted that the Arctic is different to other food chains globally. In the Arctic energy travels quickly from the small animals up to the big animals, whereas energy in other food systems travels much slower. 

Least used phrase in the English (or Norwegian) language: “Quick grab the survival suits before the walrus sits on them!”

Today is Saturday and we have almost actually had a bit of a weekend day. We are steaming for most of the day today. We woke up in Middle Earth today, or perhaps Koom valley if you follow Pratchett. It was the most astonishing view ever, and again worth the 6 hours sleep. 

Not to mention all the awesome glacier action going on, you can actually see and hear them in action which is amazing. They aren’t just a static image on a powerpoint presentation somewhere. The frustrating thing about them is that you need to have been watching them about 10 seconds BEFORE they made a sound because that’s when it actually did something. Why? Because of the speed of sound v.s speed of light, kids ask you parents about it (parents remember that’s the whole deal with the thunderclap lagging after the lightning bolt, if you’re still having troubles email me).

Our day was also heralded by clouds which look a whole lot like the carapace (helmet part) of the shrimp we have been studying, we saw this as a good sign for science for the day.

Where we were hanging around, near an old Dutch whaling station called Smeerenberg (literally “Fat City”) there is a permanent dive station where they are taking photos of the benthic ecology and seeing how is changes over time and with different events and inputs. They are also testing different “treatments” or experimenting with different “what if” scenarios. To do this, in some areas, they clear a small section of the floor (less than .5m2) and then photograph it as often as they can to see how the communities reinhabit the area. Which plants and animals come first, which ones come second and then what the community looks like when it has returned to normal. This can take any time between 10 and 30 years, so as you can imagine some patience is required when researching. It’s also important to have these records so that we can see how things like a decrease in ice-cover are changing the sea floor communities (first glance it looks like algae is taking over, rather like a manky fairy floss covering the sea floor). More to come on this later, because I find it particularly interesting, however it does involve these guys heading out to dive in the few degrees of water and taking photos with a camera.

After this we got some awesome news, we get to go ashore! To the land, ho! Specifically we get to visit the ghost town that is Smeerenberg, and see where the Dutch whalers, around 200 people at peak, lived, hunted whales and boiled them down for oil. They even used the whale bones to fuel the fires, so there wasn’t too much remaining from the city. A few logs and old metal bits and pieces. So it was a beach party, minus the bikinis and sun oil.

First spot of the day, POLAR BEAR FOOTPRINTS! There have been bears here, and fairly recently when you can still see the prints in the sand. So proof, and proof of the reason why there were guys wandering around with rifles. It is slightly confronting to be on land and considering that there could be something hungry out there hunting you, it’s a very different part of the world. 

It was also interesting to see the detritus on the beach, there was quite a lot of small pieces of plastic. Just to clarify, the Dutch whalers did not use plastics, there was no tuppaware to keep the left over pieces of whale in. This plastic is new, it has drifted in from different places, and mostly appeared to be broken down pieces of industrial plastic. Just to show, humans have impacts everywhere, and I still feel massively guilty about the chip packet I dropped in my first year of school and didn’t retrieve. 

To demonstrate some more of the drift we even found a plastic barrel which appears to have fallen off a ship along the way. It was of particular interest to everyone because it had been enthusiastically colonised by a couple of species, primarily “opportunists” who aren’t fussy about where they live or what they eat. It’s interesting to note these things because it’s transport like this that can bring in new species to an area. Mostly this doesn’t cause any trouble because southern species being transported North just die because the conditions are too rough for them. But, with a changing climate and less sea ice maybe some of these hitchhikers will be able to survive and will start colonising new areas. Just goes to show, there’s a lot of factors to consider when you think about how things are changing and how humans impact the natural environment. 

There was also some bones. Looking all the more dramatic because of a filter on my camera. There has to be some bones at an ex-whaling station, even if they aren’t whale bones. 

There was also a huge beautiful diversity of moss. Not having seen trees for weeks I’m really starting to appreciate some of the beauty in moss. Again, it is amazing to consider such soft small things surviving out here through the dark months of winter. It’s also amazing to think that the moss survives with much more ease than we would, and much more ease than the Dutch whalers did. On their first winter 6 people died, one of whom lost his leg before dying. They didn’t have a good time of it, but the lure of whale was still worth it to them. The things we do for resources. 

There were some cool relics from the olden days. Again, the mark of man in such a cruel place. 

The real excitement for all the biologists was the walrus though. There were two, one having a solid nap on the beach. He didn’t have any tusks, which wasn’t so great for him. They use their tusks to shuffle through the sediment where they find clams and suck the meat out of the clam. This, as you can imagine, used a serious amount of suction power. There are rumours of walruses sucking seal pups straight out of their skin, just saying, I’m not going to cross one of these fellas. There was also a walrus, and a few seals, observing us from the water (left tusked walrus clearly, it’s left tusk has been worn down much more than its right, again from shuffling through the sediment). It certainly appeared that they were curious about us and watching us. I have my suspicions that they went home to their families at night and told them all about how there were these weird creatures watching them from the shore, making funny high pitched “ohhhh, wowiee walrus!” noises. At least I hope so. 

It was all very exciting. The rest of our day was spent analysing out data and collating a quick presentation to show the rest of the groups what we have been up to. Overall a very satisfying Saturday. Stay tuned for tomorrow where we are moving down into the world of sediments. 

I feel an awful lot like I’ve reached a new level of tiredness and that this could just be a blog about different stages of tiredness with the occasional reference to a fish or two. We were up until 1 last night analysing the gut contents of various fish. We had about 100 stomachs to analyse because during the day the lecturers developed a new interest in the contents of a different, littler fish. But hey, we got pretty good at it. We are a testament to the ability to become experts instantly. To make up for the lack of sleep induced bloodshot eyes and blotchy skin there was a stunning “sunrise”, well pink bits in the sky, and a slurry of semi frozen sea water that the boat was sliding through. It made waking up worth it.

We started the day with another trawl. There were way fewer fish than the ones yesterday, which was a bit of a relief as it meant less to do and the prospect of a late morning nap! There was a bit of waiting for the fish, we got excited and thought maybe something big was caught in the trawl, for example, giant squid. 

But there was no giant squid, mostly Atlantic Cod (the big guy), Arctic cod (the little guys) and eating shrimp (the shrimp guys).

Then we divvied it all up again

We were really really efficient this time, knowing what we were doing was great. The shrimp got sampled and divided up into their life cycle sections. However, sadly at this point the boat seems to be turning in circles on the spot and is rocking in a rather suboptimal way for typing at a computer, so we’ll come back to the excitement later, only bad bloggers throw up on their computers..

So, some of the stuff we have been doing includes measuring the Polar cod

Why might you want to measure fish you may ask? Because the size is interesting, the size in relation to their location is interesting and the size in relation to what else is around is interesting. By measuring a large sample of fish (say around 400 fish), you can start to get a good statistical understanding of how the fish population is structured and how it’s changing over time. We’re sampling for these fish in both protected and non-protected areas. So by doing this analysis over time we can see how protected areas and non-protected areas are different. How they change, and this can then inform how many fish fisherman are allowed to catch. We can only tell if we are fishing sustainably if we know what is there in the first place, if we don’t know that then there is a greater chance of overfishing and thus decimating the population.

However, it’s the measuring bit that is the fun part. It starts to get messy when you’re looking at what the fish have been eating. So, we get to gut the fish.

Part of the gutting means identifying the stomach, which isn’t so easy the first time, but again it’s something you can get awesome at super quickly. We have then been keeping the stomachs separately held in alcohol ready for content analysis. Part of the gutting includes “sexing” the fish. Now fish are a bit coy about their sex, and with these guys you can’t tell what they are until you actually cut them open (I assume they have come up with a more sustainable dating option amongst themselves). If I’m going to be cheeky, the difference between the boys and the girls is easy. The girls innards are neat and tidy and as polite as innards can be. The boys, well.. they’re a bit messy and all over the shop. (See below). I wouldn’t want to encourage stereotypes, but these fish seem happy to do it for me. 

There’s also the gutting of the big Atlantic Cod (better known as Fish and Chips). That’s quite a bit of a different effort, although significantly easier because the fish are big and therefore the stomachs are big. The big fish do have a tendency towards gobbling everything they possibly can whilst in the trawl, up until they hit the air they probably think all their dreams have come true. In some cases you can actually identify what they have been eating without opening the stomach, and apparently some of the other groups opened some stomachs with still living fish inside them. Just a reminder to anyone who thinks us gutting these fish is cruelty, believe you me, if it was fish doing it to each other they wouldn’t have the decency to slit the others throat first. But yes, it’s gross, particularly if you just ate dinner yourself… 

This trawl was a bit special in that there were some red fish in it, first of our trawls to have red fish. Turns out these little fellas are trouble, covered with spines in an attempt to protect themselves from overly curious marine biologists. It would probably be beneficial for evolution to note that this form of protection was unsuccessful, although I did take a spine to the fleshy part of the thumb which wasn’t overly pleasant. That said, in the battle between myself and the fish I did come out on top. Win for opposable thumbs! (and kitchen gloves).

We had a successful shrimp trawl recently also, so this meant we got to boil some dinner shrimp! Because there have been groups doing this before us there is no shortage of shrimp, so we’ll have to wait until we get home for eating them, but they’re looking pretty good. Even the vegetarians are thinking about reclassifying them as a “swimming vegetable”.

The tiredness has also led to a slightly odd sense of humour developing, combined with listening to a little bit too much Bon Jovi (Particularly “Wanted dead or alive”), if there is such a thing. So I got a bit creative for our next group presentation. 

I hope everyone else finds them as entertaining as I did to make them. I also kept looking at the fish and thinking of the song “You had a bad day”.

Don’t they just look like they’ve had a bad day? Or am I starting to anthropomorphise the fish a little too much?

We’ve started to develop that sexy red eyed sleepless look, well me with my getting up early to blog has. Oh it’s a good look. However, we have woken up in the middle of a new fjord. Kongsfjorden, where there is a permanent research station with a bunch of different nationalities (not Australians) working here. It’s snowdusted, it’s extremely pretty AND we had pancakes for breakfast, so the world is starting to look up.

Today things are starting a bit later because people are going diving to take some photos of the sea floor. Just in case you didn’t already think things here are sufficiently hardcore, these guys are going down in wetsuits, that’s right wetsuits, not drysuits. It’s between 2 and 4 degrees down there. I’m starting to suspect they aren’t human. So after the dives we will be trawling for shrimp, and the things that eat shrimp.

This happened as expected. The first note is probably that it wasn’t nearly so smelly as expected. However it was messy, slippery, slimy and a bit hectic. Basically a net full of everything it caught gets dumped down a chute and into a sorting (fish) room. 

We then sort through it and group it into.. well groups. 

Then there is a little bit of the old fashioned retro book checking to see if things are what we think they are. It’s probably worth reminding readers that there is no internet on board, ships can’t get internet above 80 degrees due to the lack of satellites. 

Then there is the sorting out of the shrimp into different life cycle stages, of which shrimp have plenty. They are particularly flexible about the whole male/female thing.

From there we measure a subsample of the shrimp. Why only a subsample you say? What’s with you lazy scientists? Because there is a freak load of shrimp and after a certain point you aren’t learning anything new, you’re just creating busy work for a smart fella who could be doing something more meaningful (possibly, or eating biscuits).

Whilst that is happening there is also the dissecting of the fish that are big enough to eat the shrimp. We’re curious to see how the shrimp differ from fjord to fjord (ie. No. of big/small shrimp etc.) and then what the animals that could be eating shrimp have actually been eating. Are there few shrimp around but a lot been eaten? Are there lots of shrimp around but the fish would rather eat rocks than eat those shrimp? (N.B most fish don’t really go in for rocks.. it’s a joke there) So to do that you must have a look at the insides of the fish. I’d prefer to just watch the fish and see what they choose to eat, but what with it being about 2 degree water and dark that might be the slow way. So first you remove the stomach, then you have a look at the insides of the stomach. After gutting that many fish I suspect I’ll be smelling like fish for the rest of my life. 

Then some things have to be looked at closer under a microscope, where in one instance one of my colleagues said there appeared to be such a range of gut parasites that they were waving at her from the petri dish. 

The lesson I learnt today was: Fish can’t wash their hands, this might seem like a bloody stupid thing to say, but I think there’s actually an important lesson there. We’ve seen a lot of shrimp and fish with different kinds of parasites, a lot more than you would see if you were to investigate the health of a similar number of people (or even pets) in developed countries. I think a big part of that is that we are able to be picky in what we eat, we have basic hygiene (so we don’t tend to accidentally eat worms) and also we have opposable thumbs which allow us to pick off parasites and bugs that might cause troubles.

I just wanted to take a moment to appreciate this fact. Also to remind people as to WHY we practice hygiene! Cause we don’t want stomachs that look like, well I’m not going to show a photo cause it was super duper manky, but it wriggled, even after being removed from the fish and soaked in alcohol. Do you want a wriggling dead stomach? I think not!

All this stomach analysis did make me wonder a little bit what an alien coming down from outer space would think if he analysed my stomach contents (particularly straight after lunch) and one of the other girls who is a vegetarian. Would they think we were a different species? Would they draw conclusions about our sex based on stomach contents? Suffice to say I think really deep thoughts whilst analysing things. And do have a tendency of thinking of myself as an alien to the fish.

The geographical excitement of the day was seeing some ice, like real ice, including blue ice!

And the Kongsfjorden glacier up really really close, you could hear it crackling and rumbling and bits fell off! It was the kind of thing that makes people talk about the majestic wonder of nature. Personally I think that’s a pile of gizzards, its humbling because a) it could kill you without a thought b) it doesn’t need people to exist. If all the people suddenly disappeared the glaciers would be fine, they would rumble and crackle on without us, I suspect that’s the humbling thing. We aren’t required for such amazing harsh beauty to exist. That said, being humans and being excellent at destroying things like kids and sandcastles, we do have the ability to delete all the glaciers from the world. We have the capacity, and apparently the desire, to remove these things that we can’t recreate. There’s a message in there. 

But for a happy thought, lunch finished with an ice cream, it started with a very typical Norwegian meal and finished with ice cream, maybe the world will be ok after all. That said.. if aliens decide to dissect my stomach.. who knows what they're going to be left thinking..

Lots and lots of analysis was the name of the game today. We had a few samples left which still need to be gone through before we can hand over to the next group and then we can start on the “shrimp” project, and having a look in the guts of fish that might eat shrimp and see who’s dining out big in these fjords. Look forward to some awesome piccies there!

So for the samples there was a little bit more washing, because a lot of it looked like something.. well something dragged up from the bottom of the ocean. Full of little bits of seaweed, slime, the occasional rock and lots of mud.

Then we divvied up the big and small bits, below you can see some of the bigger bits which are notable for looking like they’ll take a finger off and for making the occasional grown human squeal. 

We saw some cool stuff and some common species we’ll need to know for the exam, but also some really really completely gut churning skin crawling icky stuff.

So there was the common as muck, Eualis gaimardii

(and it’s eggs up close)

Now its eyeball

There was the cute little polaris with the purple spots:

General mess, find interesting things in here now, kaaaaay go!

There was a lot of cool stuff

Then there was a few that had leeches stuck to their heads.. cause that’s not completely gross. And then a whole bunch with HUGE parasites in their egg sacs. Which you can see up close here. I’m sharing this grossity with you because I had to see it up close, so be thankful you’re seeing it at the distance of the internet AND of along the lines of 12,000km. There’s probably people out there who love studying parasites, because there are people who love looking at anything, however I am not one of them. 

The scientific excitement of the day was from the finding of the “Mystery in-between” shrimp. What is it? Who is it? Where does it come from? Where does it go? Why was this shrimp a mystery I hear you ask? (curiosity tingling in your voice). I’m so glad you asked, because it has two supraorbital spines, but is not so spiney as spinus. A supraorbital spine is a spine, or pokey bit, that pokes out above the eye. Kind of like a very enthusiastic eyebrow, and it is a key defining feature. So this guy, as seen below, is not featured in any of the keys for this area. So it looks like he’s migrating up from somewhere, silly little fella, doesn’t he know winter is coming?

We also collected samples to study when we get back to Uni. 

I thought some of you might like to see my creative use of Snapchat to learn. The problem being that you can take a billion photos in the real world and then not be able to tell in the slightest what it was when you get back to your computer. Enter snapchat and being able to save a photo with writing on it for later perusal. 

The normal excitement of today though is that it snowed, both on the boat and on Longyearbyen where the boat is hanging out for the day so that we can do the analysis on nearly calm waters. Just incase you were wondering why there was a lack of seasickness mentioned, its because the fjord is flat as a tack. Anyhow, the boat was pretty and so was Longyearbyen. 

And from there, nothing too radical happened, we had to do presentations about what our groups were up to, to help the handover tomorrow. As you can probably guess there were quite a few photos, although apparently I labelled one of them wrong (Cue going bright red and embarrassment). Ah well, the world goes on.

And we met the open ocean! That’s right, the ocean that is open. And things were a little rougher than they have been to now, which definitely showed on a few people, and made looking down a microscope nigh impossible. Onwards to tomorrow, where we will analyse the innards of fish and count shrimp. 

And we’re all starting to feel that 6hrs sleep. The general bleariness in the morning and the inability to get any kind of buzz from coffee. But they’re feeding us well, which is awesome, although it is rather leading to the occasional exploding stomach (there is a little bit too much food occasionally..). So, we had the usual things like update meetings and then our group headed off to try and identify small squiggly things, really really really really slowly. Because it’s a slow thing. In the “real” world of science they would just be collecting the samples and then we would do identification back at home, over a year or so, instead we are doing it over 72 hour period. As the group leader said, doing the impossible. But we are gradually learning some of the creatures, so it gradually gets a bit quicker. It's always nice to try doing the impossible, no real way of failing. 

So, some of the things we have, see below:

And theres a lot of sitting around and doing this:

We had a great lady join us today though, she’s an isopod ninja not to mention incredibly patient which is essential in this particular environment.

The good thing about identifying species is that at the moment it is something everyone is equally bad at. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been studying marine biology for 6 years, its still unlikely you’ve seen this particular species before, so I’m not so far behind.. at least in this. Although I’m not sure about my ability to memorise the names of the creatures, in latin, I can barely pronounce them let alone spell them. So it's going to be an interesting few weeks. That said, some of the creatures we have been seeing are incredibly amazing.

A lot of the creatures were VERY alive when we put them on the petri dish. I had a few very spirited bids for freedom, and got covered with more than my fair share of sea water. I do feel we should probably kill them before putting them under a hot lamp, but maybe that’s just me. It does seem funny to me that people protest to eating whale because we can’t kill them quickly, and yet the same people will happily have a thrashing dying isopod on their petri dish and not blink. Win one for the whale for being a cute mammal.

Oh! So the goss of lunch time is that apparently we were fed whale for dinner last night, and no one knew! Not everyone is particularly happy about this fact. We are after all a cruise of mostly marine biologists (with me the pretend biologist who’s really a geographer/aspiring science communicator, shhhhh!), and most people have got into it because they have a thing for pretty sea creatures. But hey, when in Rome. 

The things I learnt today. A shrimp must have a carapace, that’s the bit of a prawn you pull off that has the head inside it. Shrimp also have eyes on stalks. Mycids also have a carapace and the stalk eyes. Amphipods are squished dorsolly (ie. They are narrow in the same direction that we are) and all their legs point in the same way whilst isopods are squished laterally (ie. If someone came along and squished us along our shoulders) and they have legs that point in different directions. In an attempt to contribute I asked a few questions today, such as, why do the legs point in different directions? I had thought this would be REALLY obvious and easy to answer and would make me feel smart. Not so much, apparently no one knows, there’s an outside chance they used to cling to things and it’s easier to cling with a pincer movement. Most of the questions I asked about the difference between different species was met with a similar *shrug*. The differences are really important for the identification but no one seems to be able to tell me why they are different. I would have thought that would be kinda important.. maybe not. It just goes to show there is a lot of stuff we still don't know. I think that's pretty exciting. 

Also, I really don’t like picking up little sea creatures, I’m absolutely adamant that a) they are going to bite b) they are going to bite and be poisonous c) they are going to secrete poisonous slime that makes you hallucinate about pink rhinoceroses and then die a terrible slow death. To be fair, in most tropical water of Australia they would be perfectly rational fears. But apparently up here the more fearsome looking the creature the less likely to be problematic and picking things up with un-gloved hands is a perfectly normal activity. Well.. for people who can get their hands to do it. My fingers have developed an amazing ability to retreat rapidly at the last minute when going to grab a critter. Natural survival technique!

And we have another day of it tomorrow, then we’re off and rotated into another group to start trying to identify new things all together. 

It's awesome to actually be learning new things, hands on, so much of my time at University has been spent filling time with fluff, but there's no doubt about it, this is real. The people teaching us know their stuff, and there's no wriggle room for "I don't know".