Jennifer Fry: March 17, 2012, Oscar Elton Sette

These crustaceans are sorting into a tray then measured for length (mm), volume (ml), and mass (g).

Mission: Fisheries Study
Geographical area of cruise: American Samoa
Date: March 17, 2012

Pago Pago, American Samoa

Cobb Trawl Day 6

Location: Wet Lab

Poetry into the Wee Hours of the Night

Here’s the data from Cobb Trawl Day: 6.1                                                                                        Total mass of trawl: 490 g

Name of fish:	Numbers Count	Volume (milliliters)	Mass (grams)
Myctophids	124	140	150
Non-Myctophids	58	80	75
Crustaceans	14	negl	negl
Cephalopods:	10	30	30
Gelatinous zooplankton	59	104	100
Misc. zooplankton	n/a	60	97

Animals seen:

Lizard fish

Light fish

Mantis shrimp

Ctenophore/ comb jellies

Stomatopod

Cob Trawl Day 6.2 :Total Mass 1035 g

Name of fish:	Numbers Count	Volume (milliliters)	Mass (grams)
Myctophids	385	300	232
Non-Myctophids	51	60	70
Crustaceans	17	6	7
Cephalopods:	32	26	55
Gelatinous zooplankton	122	400	405
Misc. zooplankton	n/a	240	225

Animals seen:

Trumpet / coronet fish

Snip eel

Salps

Balloon squid

Fulmar bird

Poetry into the Wee Hours of the Night: A collaborative effort:

“The Cobb Trawl Net” / With my week nearly over working  on the Cobb Trawl Net, I asked the scientists to join me in writing some scientific poetry about the operation.   The Cobb Trawl Net operation is overseen by John Denton and Aimee Hoover. The net is brought out of the water twice during the wee hours of the night, using a large noisy winch which certainly disturbs the slumber of those light-sleepers on the ship.  Coinciding with the Cobb Trawl Net activities are  nightly Plankton Tows.

 “I Wander Lonely as a Plankton” and “Plankton Mother”  honor the various types of plankton and microplastics that Emily Norton and Louise Giuseffi are studying.  We have been towing in different regions of American Samoan seas.  One area is called 2% Bank.  The other banks are called Northwest Bank and  Southbank.

“Myctohpids” / Since most of the bio-mass of the ocean is taken up by the little myctohpid fish, they are represented with an acrostic poem.  The poems show a passion for science and the research being conducted here in American Samoa.  I truly thank these scientists, John, Aimee, Emily, and Louise for their teachings, patience, and sheer enthusiasm for their scientific projects.

The Cobb Trawl Net

inspired by” The Fog” by Carl Sandberg

The trawl net comes in on thundering howl

The great black maw

Grinding and snarling brings in its folded catch,

The ocean’s toothy offering from the liquid, teeming abyss.

I Wander Lonely as a Plankton

Inspired by “I Wander Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth

I wander lonely as a copepod

That floats high and low in the sapphire blue water column ofAmerican Samoa

When all at once I saw a school

A host of dog tooth tuna

Along the 2% Bank

Beneath the NOAA ship OscarElton Sette

Thunniform undulation and escaping through the gently rolling waves.

Plankton Mother

 

Meticulously, she guards her catch

A treasure trove of tiny beasts

Carefully each dish is filled for observation.

Peering through the powerful microscope the

Blinking, pulsing Cephalopods, the cobalt Copepods, and spiral, conical Pteropods

So fragile to the touch

Tweezers carefully coax each delicate specimen into position

Checking for morphological traits

Does it have…

…Mysterious dark organ on its tiny body?

…Pointy sword-like structure on its rostrum?

The newly found charge is preserved in a viscous solution

Our link to plankton’s DNA

 transcriptome: all our DNA used to make proteins,

the building blocks of life

life’s basic units for construction

Myctophids

 

 Multitudes of  photophores, cup-shaped light emitting organs of epidermal origin.  Many many  millions of  blinking dots

Yellow irises look  with dreamy eyes like a  glazed over donut.

Clues to many different species found in the mesopelagic layer of the deep, ebony ocean.

The ctenoid scales possessing sharp, spiky spines

Out of the obsidian shoots the silver sprites, the beautiful slender fish

Prickly long-tailed myctophids with their stern-chasers, supracaudal/infracaudal luminous organs

Hungry for krill, small crustaceans, copepods and other planktonic creatures

Iridescent

Densly packed balls of gleaming, pulsing Actinopterygians A.K.A.  Actinops

Schooling,  synchronistic swimmers, tiny voices of light circumgloabally distributed around the world, cosmopolites.

A collaboration by:

John Denton, Emily Norton, Aimee Hoover,  Megan Duncan, Louise Guiseffi, and Jennifer Fry