{"id":8288,"date":"2015-05-04T19:48:12","date_gmt":"2015-05-05T03:48:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mlmlblog.wordpress.com\/?p=8288"},"modified":"2020-09-29T18:47:34","modified_gmt":"2020-09-30T01:47:34","slug":"tales-from-the-field-in-antarctica-post-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life\/2015\/05\/04\/tales-from-the-field-in-antarctica-post-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Tales from the Field in Antarctica: Post 2"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Jamie Sibley Yin<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Dr. Valerie Loeb is an adjunct professor at Moss Landing Marine Labs. Currently, she functions as an independent Antarctic ecosystem research scientist collaborating with Jarrod Santora of UC Santa Cruz. In April, she headed out to sea with a new NSF funded project entitled \"Pilot Study:\u00a0 \u00a0Addition of Biological Sampling to Drake Passage Transits of the 'LM Gould'\".\u00a0\u00a0The following are updates from the field by Jamie Sibley Yin who is in charge of communications.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

April 9th<\/sup>, 2015 - Northern Drake Passage<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Checking<\/a>
Checking out one of the critters with the microscope.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Our first net tow scheduled for 2am was cancelled.\u00a0 I breathed a sigh of relief.\u00a0 I was nervous about sorting and identifying species of zooplankton I had never seen before, staying up late into the night, and working with no end in sight.<\/p>\n

The tow didn\u2019t actually get cancelled, but got pushed back to 9am.\u00a0 We eventually dropped our net in the water at 11am. The net we use is called a Isaacs Kidd Midwater Trawl and is a vast swath of tough black nylon suspended by cord that hangs from a large metal hook.\u00a0 The whole contraption looks like an off-kilter puppet.\u00a0 The marine technicians are the ones that actually deploy our nets. \u00a0It\u2019s time.\u00a0 The ship slows to a crawl, the net slithers off the back deck into the icy waters.\u00a0 Half an hour later the cod end is delivered to us in a bucket.\u00a0 The cod end is a thick white plastic container with mesh holes.\u00a0 It\u2019s attached at the end of the net and the unfortunate critters that don\u2019t swim away are trapped there.\u00a0\u00a0 The sample is a pink wriggling gelatinous blob.\u00a0 We dump it into another container and add seawater.\u00a0 Copepods, krill, amphiphods buzz around the dish, relieved to be in salty water once again.\u00a0 The salps, jelly fish, and chaetognaths are already dead.\u00a0 We pick them out with tweezers and count them.\u00a0 After sorting, counting, and recording all organisms in the sample except for the tiny copepods we are done.\u00a0 The stations were we sample are five hours apart going full speed on the boat.\u00a0 We have one hour to recuperate before the next station.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The marine technicians pulling in our net, an Isaacs Kidd Midwater.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We sampled six of the nine stations planned for the southbound transit.\u00a0 It was a brutal two days as we processed samples around the clock, catching two, maybe three hours of sleep when we could. \u00a0I was not enthusiastic about missing my precious sleep, but the night samples were filled with loads of small shiny fish, called myctophids, which were so cool I soon forgot my lack of sleep.<\/p>\n

The ship journey overall was quite calm except for our very last day in transit.\u00a0 Waves pummeled the side of the boat and splashed my window on the third floor, snow flew sideways outside, it was difficult to even stand without bracing myself against a wall. \u00a0My productivity on the ship fell to zero as I all my focus turned to just functioning. Peering through a microscope and trying to sort krill is no easy task when the water in your petri dish sloshes from side to side every time the boat goes through a wave.\u00a0 Books and DVDs hurled themselves from the shelves in the lounge.\u00a0 People slid off the leather couches as the boat continued to rock.\u00a0 It felt like a fun house\u2014one that was not so fun and that you couldn\u2019t leave.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Jamie Sibley Yin Dr. Valerie Loeb is an adjunct professor at Moss Landing Marine Labs. Currently, she functions as an independent Antarctic ecosystem research scientist collaborating with Jarrod Santora of UC Santa Cruz. In April, she headed out to sea with a new NSF funded project entitled “Pilot Study:\u00a0 \u00a0Addition of Biological Sampling to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":291,"featured_media":8265,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[41,114],"class_list":["post-8288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-drop-inblog","tag-antarctica","tag-fieldwork"],"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\/8288","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=8288"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20582,"href":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8288\/revisions\/20582"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}