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.
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