{"id":1310,"date":"2009-02-19T10:51:13","date_gmt":"2009-02-19T18:51:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mlmlblog.wordpress.com\/?p=1310"},"modified":"2009-02-19T10:51:13","modified_gmt":"2009-02-19T18:51:13","slug":"plankton-soup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life\/2009\/02\/19\/plankton-soup\/","title":{"rendered":"Plankton Soup"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n

\"Scientists
Scientists sift through plankton soup, searching for their favorite bits (photo: E. Loury)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\n

\"Erin<\/a>
Erin Loury<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

by Erin Loury<\/a>, Ichthyology Lab<\/p>\n

The swell was up and the rain in and out on Tuesday, but our ichthyology class braved it all for our class cruise in Monterey Bay.\u00a0 The Point Sur, MLML’s largest research\u00a0 vessel, was loaded with our class, an invertebrate zoology class from San Jose State, and various scientists from the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (incluing Kyra Schlining, featured in our alumni profiles!<\/a>). We were all on a treasure hunt of sorts – ready to dip our big nets in the water and see what kind of fish and invertebrates would come up.\u00a0 It was anyone’s guess.<\/p>\n

\"The
The crew hauls in the net, while a rainbow offsets the less-than-ideal weather (photo: E. Loury)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Like most cruises, there was a lot of downtime\u00a0 – waiting to get to our trawl location, waiting for the net to go out (about half an hour to reach our desired depth of 900 m!), waiting while the net dragged along catching things, waiting for it to come back in… But just trying to hold on to your balance (and your lunch) can be keep you plenty occupied on a rolling boat.\u00a0 It was a rough day for the faint of stomach, which I’m sure left many pondering Amanda’s timeless question: “Can I still become a marine biologist even if I get seasick?”<\/a> The short answer is yes – but it’s certainly not always fun.\u00a0 Or pretty, for that matter.<\/p>\n

\"What
What a find! Bottling up a squid (photo: E. Loury)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Our first trawl came up empty, because the net didn’t make it to the sea floor where it was designed to sample.\u00a0 But our second trawl of the midwater brought up a whole slurry of things to pick through and distract us from our queasiness.\u00a0 We huddled around tubs sloshing with a bright red soup of krill, the choice food of many whales, birds and fish.\u00a0 These little critters like small shrimp and are called euhpausiids<\/a>.\u00a0 Lots of other interesting things were floating in the mix – the visiting scientists scooped up some squid, little jellyfish, and other gelatinous blobs.\u00a0\u00a0 The fish class picked out the various myctophids<\/a>, or lanternfish, which are little, black, deepwater fish that have a line of glowing photophores along their sides.<\/p>\n

\"Some
Some shiny myctophids, or lantern fish, from the deep (photo: E. Loury)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We sifted though the animals that lived in the water that surrounded us, down at depths we could scarecly comprehend.\u00a0 It was a rare chance to pluck them from their hard-to-access homes and bring them to our world of the surface, where we could poke, stare, and try to understand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Erin Loury, Ichthyology Lab The swell was up and the rain in and out on Tuesday, but our ichthyology class braved it all for our class cruise in Monterey Bay.\u00a0 The Point Sur, MLML’s largest research\u00a0 vessel, was loaded with our class, an invertebrate zoology class from San Jose State, and various scientists from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":291,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"MLML Student Life","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/291"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1310\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}