Tag: krill

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Michael Gutiérrez Santiago: Newport Hydrographic Line, August 18, 2022

Lea esta publicación en español: Michael Gutiérrez Santiago: Línea Hidrográfica de Newport, 18 de agosto de 2022

NOAA Teacher at Sea

Michael Gutiérrez Santiago

 NOAA Ship Bell M. Shimada

August 12 – August 25, 2022


Mission: Pacific Hake Survey

Geographic Area of Cruise: Coasts of Washington and Oregon

Date: August 18, 2022


Weather conditions from the bridge:

Latitude: 4539.9725N
Longitude: 12422.9606W
Temperature: 63°F 
Wind Speed: 13 mph
Barometer:  1017.2mb

Michael poses for a photo to show off his gear: orange Grundens (rubber overalls) over a black sweatshirt, an orange life vest, a yellow hard hat, and sunglasses.
Ready for plankton sampling!

Science and Technology Log

Newport Hydrographic Line

One way scientists assess the health of our ocean’s ecosystems is to take samples of zooplankton and ichthyoplankton (fish eggs and larvae), both on the surface of the water and at depth. Observations of these plankton can inform us greatly about productivity at the bottom of the food chain, spawning location and stock size of adults, dispersal of larval fish and crabs to and away from nursery areas, and transport of ocean currents.

The Newport Hydrographic (Newport Line) is an oceanographic research survey conducted by NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center and Oregon State University scientists in the coastal waters off Newport, Oregon.

Researchers have collected physical, chemical, and biological oceanographic metrics along the Newport Line every two weeks for over 20 years. This twenty-plus year dataset helps us to understand the connections between changes in ocean-climate and ecosystem structure and function in the California Current.

Data from the Newport Line are distilled into ocean ecosystem indicators, used to characterize the habitat and survival of juvenile salmonids, and which have also shown promise for other stocks such as sablefish, rockfish, and sardine. These data also provide critical ecosystem information on emerging issues such as marine heatwaves, ocean acidification, hypoxia, and harmful algal blooms.

a map of the coast of Washington and Oregon. the land is shaded gray, while the water includes a few blue lines indicating underwater topography. Though there are not grid lines, labels mark the latitude lines from 43 degrees North to 47 degrees North and the longitude lines from 125 degrees West to 123 degrees West. Midway, between 44 and 45 degrees North, a short red line extends horizontally out from Newport to the 125th meridian. It's labeled "NH Line"
Newport line

Barometer of ocean acidification and hypoxia in a changing climate

Global climate models suggest future changes in coastal upwelling will lead to increased incidence of hypoxia and further exacerbate the effects of ocean acidification. The Newport Line time-series provides a baseline of biogeochemical parameters, such as Aragonite saturation state—an indicator of acidic conditions. Researchers can compare this baseline against possible future changes in the abundance of organisms (e.g., pteropods, copepods and krill) sensitive to ocean acidification and hypoxia.

Equipment used

  • a net, which includes long mesh tubing extending from a ring, hangs in the air from a point above the photo's frame. a crewmember, wearing hard hat and life jacket, grips the ring with his left hand and reaches toward a rope attached to the net with his right hand. three other crewmembers are visible around the net.
    Vertical/half meter net
  • a net, which includes long mesh tubing extending from a ring, hangs in the air from a point above the photo's frame. a crewmember, wearing hard hat and life jacket, facing away from the camera, reaches over the rail of the ship to lower the end of the suspended net into the water.
    Getting the vertical net in the water
  • an illustration of a research vessel with a vertical net deployed off its side. the net looks like a white cone, pointing downward, ending in a red cannister.
    Vertical net deployed vertically in the water from a research vessel

A vertical net is a ring net with a small mesh width and a long funnel shape. At the end, the net is closed off with a cylinder (cod-end) that collects the plankton. It is deployed vertically in the water from a research vessel. It is mostly used to investigate the vertical/diagonal stratification of plankton. This allows the abundance and distribution of mesozooplankton to be determined.

  • a cable lowers a bongo net onto the ship's deck. the bongo net, name for bongo drums, is actually a pair of nets: two rings side by side hold up the nets made of long mesh tubing that narrow until they end in attached cannisters. a crewmember, wearing a hard hat and a life vest, leans to look at something around the back of the net.
    Bongo net
  • a crewmember, wearing a hard hat and life vest, hoses down the mesh tubing of one side of the bongo net. the top of the net hangs from a cable about 12 feet above the deck so the crewmember can rinse the tubing while standing.
    Washing the sample down the bongo net
  • an illustration of a research vessel with a bongo net deployed off its stern. the net looks like a pair of white cones, pointing horizontally away from the ship, ending in red cannisters.
    A bongo net is drawn horizontally through the water column by a research vessel

A bongo net consists of two plankton nets mounted next to each other. These plankton nets are ring nets with a small mesh width and a long funnel shape. Both nets are enclosed by a cod-end that is used for collecting plankton. The bongo net is pulled horizontally through the water column by a research vessel. Using a bongo net, a scientist can work with two different mesh widths simultaneously.

  • Michael, at left, holds up the net while Toby, right, uses a hose to spray down the mesh tubing at the end. Both Michael and Toby wear rubber pants, rubber boots, life jackets, and hard hats.
    Assisting Toby with Isaacs-Kidd net
  • three crewmembers, wearing hard hats and life vests, hold different portions of a large fishing net that is attached to cables extending out of frame. One steadies the net spreader, a horizontal metal bar. Another grasps the webbing. We can see a wide piece of metal toward the front that is bent like a wide "V". The belts of the crewmembers' vests are each clipped to brightly covered, stretchy tethers to prevent them from falling overboard.
    Isaacs-Kidd midwater trawl
  • a diagram of the shape and dimensions of the Isaacs-Kidd midwater trawl. labels identify the net spreader (horizontal metal bar), depresser (v-shaped metal plate), and bridle (short cables extending from the edges of the net opening, coming to a point). the net opening is 4 feet 8 inches wide by 5 feet 9 inches tall. the main portion of the trawl net extends 20 feet 6 inches long; it attached to a finer mesh net that is 5 feet 8 inches long.
    Isaacs-Kidd midwater trawl dimension

Isaacs-Kidd midwater trawl collects bathypelagic biological specimens larger than those taken by standard plankton nets. The trawl consists of the specifically designed net attached to a wide, V-shaped, rigid diving vane. The vane keeps the mouth of the net open and exerts a depressing force, maintaining the trawl at depth for extended periods at towing speeds up to 5 knots. The inlet opening is unobstructed by the towing cable.

What we got?

a close-up view of a hand holding a clear jar with a white lid. This jar contains the sample collected by the vertical net. Since this net targets plankton, the sample mostly looks like cloudy, yellowish water.
Samples from vertical net
a close-up view of the contents of a white container, perhaps a bucket. This contains the sample collected from the bongo net. It's a soupy mixture of plankton, zooplankton, krill, and at least one small fish.
Samples from bongo net
  • a close-up (possible magnified) view of a petri dish containing organisms sampled by the Isaacs-Kidd net. mostly crustaceans and larval fish. The petri dish rests on a bright blue background that creates a sharp contrast with the somewhat translucent creatures.
    Isaacs-Kidd sample
  • close-up view of a pile of many, many krill. they look like clear pink tubes with black dots for eyes.
    Krill from the Isaacs-Kidd

Personal Log

SHARK ATTACK!

That’s right, our underway CTD was attacked by a shark.

a view through a metal rigging of a pully with a cable extending down to the ocean's surface. there is no longer anything attached to the cable.
R.I.P.

On a bright and sunny day, the science team decided to launch the underway CTD, but things didn’t go as planned! Retrieving the uCTD back to the ship we saw a big dorsal fin zigzagging close to the uCTD, until we noticed that the uCTD was no longer attached to the line, therefore we had no choice that to cancel the uCTD. You should have seen all of our faces; we couldn’t believe what we saw. We think it could have been a:

a stock image of a white shark swimming underwater.
White shark
a stock image of a salmon shark swimming underwater.
Salmon shark
view of a hand holding an underwater conductivity, temperature, and depth (uCTD) profiler. in the background is a painting on a cabinet door of a white ship sailing through waves and somewhat fantastical deep sea creatures swimming below.
underway CTD
(what the shark ate)

CTD stands for conductivity (salinity), temperature, and depth and it enables researchers to collect temperature and salinity profiles of the upper ocean at underway speeds, to depths of up to 500 m. Ocean explorers often use CTD measurements to detect evidence of volcanoes, hydrothermal vents, and other deep-sea features that cause changes to the physical and chemical properties of seawater.

Sunset on the Pacific Ocean, as seen from an upper deck of NOAA Ship Bell M. Shimada. The trawl net frame, davits, and other equipment on the fantail are visible in silhouette.
Sunset on board
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Allison Irwin: Whales! July 16, 2019

NOAA Teacher at Sea

Allison Irwin

NOAA Ship Reuben Lasker

07-25 July 2019


Mission: Coastal Pelagic Species Survey

Geographic Area: Northern Coast of California

Date: July 16, 2019

Weather at 1300 Pacific Standard Time on Monday 15 July 2019

We’re slowly coasting through a dense patch of fog. I can see about 20 meters off the deck before the horizon tapers to a misty, smoky haze. Then my eyes are affronted with a thick wall of white. It’s like we’re inside a room covered in white felt wallpaper – one of those rooms in a funhouse where the walls keep closing in on you as you walk through it.  For safety, the ship keeps sounding a loud horn at least once every 2 minutes to announce our position for other boats in the area. It’s been like this for an hour now. It’s a little spooky.


PERSONAL LOG


On a brighter note, we saw whales earlier this morning! We were one mile off the coast of southern Oregon, and ahead of us we saw the backs of a few whales peeking out of the surface. I was able to grab a pair of binoculars sitting next to me on the bridge, and with those I could clearly see their dark bodies in the water! Every once in a while one would gracefully lift its tail above the surface as it prepared to dive. They were so cute!

Eventually we got closer to them and we started to see more whales on either side of the ship. I spent probably 15 minutes moving from one side of the bridge to the other with my binoculars to get a better look. I’m lucky the NOAA Corps officers are so accommodating! Otherwise I think my constant fluttering from one area to another could’ve been construed as a pain.

The officers like to see whales too, so they were happy to share what they knew with me. It turns out we were most likely watching Humpback Whales. LT Dave Wang, Operations Officer on the ship and trained as an ichthyologist (fish biologist), said most whales have a distinctive blow pattern, tail shape, and dorsal fin size that makes it easier to identify which kind he’s looking at. I had no idea before today that there were so many different species of whales. I knew Orca – Free Willy, Humpback, and maybe something called a Blue Whale? But that would’ve been the extent of it. In the marine mammals identification guide housed on the ship, there are 45 types of whales in the table of contents! And that’s probably not a complete list of all whale species.

At one point today, eventually, once the fog lifted, we were 36 miles off shore and started seeing shoals of coastal pelagic species all around the ship. We could pick them out easily because each shoal looked like a dark, churning, rippled inkspot on the otherwise smooth-as-glass surface. While the low wind conditions are partly what left us in a thick layer of fog all afternoon, it is what also kept the water smooth enough to pick out the shoals. So I guess not all was lost. We saw even more whale activity around these shoals than we saw this morning, and they were a lot closer to the ship! 

One of the whales just off the starboard bow left a footprint. Larger whales like the Humpback produce larger footprints, and the calm sea state today allowed us to see them! It looked like a smooth patch of water in the center of concentric circles.

I’ve been trying to see whales and other marine mammals the whole trip. I saw a sea lion the other day, just one glimpse of it before it went under the water and we left the area, but now having seen the whales I feel pretty content.  The Commanding Officer of the ship also told me that seals or sea lions like to hang out on the pier that we’ll be docking at in San Francisco, so there’s still hope yet!


THE SCIENCE


If you’ve ever been whale watching on a boat, the type of whale you probably saw was a Humpback Whale. They can often be seen near the shore since they like to stay within the continental shelf, and they spend a lot of time near the surface compared to other whales. Not all whale species exhibit this same behavior.  If whales had a personality, I would call the Humpback Whales the Jersey Shore cast of the sea. They do things that come across as attention-seeking behaviors to the outside observer – slapping their unusually long flippers on the surface of the water, smacking their tails against the water in agitation, flipping their tails in the air before diving, and sometimes breaching the surface with their whole bodies. Of course, they’re not doing it to get our attention. But it makes for easy and exciting observation!

All Humpback Whales have unique patterns of coloration and texture on their flukes, so scientists can use photos to track specific animals as they migrate or go about their regular activities in a similar fashion to how we use fingerprints to uniquely identify people.

They also have the advantage of something called countershading. One of the whales I saw today had a silvery-shiny underside to its fluke that glistened in the sunlight and contrasted greatly with the dark, almost black color of its back. A lot of fish and marine mammals like whales and porpoises use countershading to help camouflage them by having naturally darker backs (dorsal side) and lighter stomachs (ventral side). This way when something is looking down at the creature, it blends in with the dark depths of the ocean, and when something is looking up at the creature, it blends in better with the lighter, sunlit layer of water near the surface.

Anything from krill to small fish are fair game for Humpback Whales when they’re hungry. Sometimes a group of Humpback Whales will work together as a team to catch fish. One way they do this is by bubble net feeding. It’s rare to witness, but a bubble net is a pretty sophisticated way to catch fish. It reminds me of the trawling we do each night from NOAA Ship Reuban Lasker except in this case the whales use a circular pattern of bubbles to corral a bunch of fish into one area… then they thrust forward aggressively, quickly, to scoop up the masses. We use a trawl net to corral the little critters into a codend instead of swallowing them whole.

bubble net
Photo of Humpback Whale Using Bubble Net to Catch Anchovies.
Photo by LT Dave Wang, taken earlier this year
krill in a jar
Quart Jar Filled with Krill Collected in a Bongo Tow

Baleen whales, like the Humpback, have a unique mouth that is hard to explain. If you can visualize a pelican’s beak, it looks a bit like that from the outside. These whales gulp a whole mouthful of water – including zooplankton, krill, and small fish – into their mouths, but they don’t swallow it down outright and they don’t exactly chew their food either. With all that saltwater and prey in their mouths, they use long rows of baleen attached to their upper jaw like a fine-toothed comb. And just like we would use a cheesecloth to strain the moisture off of runny yogurt, Humpback Whales filter the water out of their mouths through the baleen and keep the fishy goodness for themselves.


TEACHING CONNECTIONS


Watching the whales all day kept drumming up images in my mind from when I read Grayson by Lynne Cox. I wrote a review of Grayson in July 2014 on the Pennsylvania Council of Teachers of English and Language Arts (PCTELA) blog. This book, by far, is one of my favorite recommendations to read aloud to students.

If you’re not an English teacher, you probably didn’t spend a lot of late nights in college reading novels to cram for a test. It wasn’t part of your major. But you’re missing out! There are so many ways to use novels and literary nonfiction across the content areas.  Grayson, for example, is artfully written. In the book review I wrote it tells Lynne’s “account of meeting a baby whale in the ocean during one of her early morning training swims. This lonely whale, separated from its mother, stays close to Lynne in the water while fishermen search for the mother.  This true yet almost unbelievable story is hauntingly beautiful.”

Taking 15 minutes of class time to read an excerpt from this book aloud could enrich any classroom. There are many instances when she writes about wanting to give up and swim back to shore. The baby whale is ultimately not her responsibility. It was very cold. She’d been out there in the ocean for hours with nothing but her own strength and experience to keep her afloat. She hadn’t eaten all day. But she stayed with the baby whale. She resolved to see it through to the very end. Any teacher can use her stick-with-it attitude as an example to encourage students to work through academic challenges.

One of my friends, blogger Allyn Bacchus, is a middle school social studies teacher. He uses historical fiction in his class every year. He writes, “My 8th grade U.S. History class covers a unit on Industry and Urban Growth in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s.  I have supplemented our unit with the historical fiction novel Uprising written by Margaret Peterson Haddix.  It covers the story of 3 teenage girls and their involvement in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York in 1911.  The author brings to life the living, working, and social conditions of the time period and allows my students to experience this unit through the eyes of girls who are living in it.”

Through the eyes of girls who are living in it.  This is something a textbook cannot do.

No one knows your discipline, your students, and your intended classroom environment better than you. Take an hour to fall down the Amazon rabbit hole! Search for a topic you find interesting and relevant to your curriculum, read the book review, click on the comparable book recommendations… you get the point.  Most of the time you can find a book preview to check out the text before purchasing – is the font too small? Too complicated? Too boring? Choose a short excerpt from a text you like for your first attempt at using literature in the classroom and build from there.


TEACHING RESOURCES


Since we’re talking about literature today, I’ll narrate the resource list.

  • We can search online for other educators who have already blazed the trail for us. Here is a blog post written by Terry McGlynn titled Assigning Literature in a Science Class.  The post itself is well written, and if you take the time to read through 54 comments below it, you will find lots of other text recommendations for a science classroom.  This article written by Kara Newhouse titled How Reading Novels in Math Class Can Strengthen Student Engagement shows why two math teachers read books in their high school classrooms. One of those teachers, Joel Bezaire, wrote a blog post with suggestions for other novel studies in math class. The other teacher, Sam Shah, shares a student example to explain how powerful it can be to use literature in a math class. It gets students to understand abstract and often elusive mathematical concepts.
  • I’ve written four nonfiction book reviews to accompany this NOAA Teacher at Sea experience and PCTELA is posting one review each week in July to the new media platform on their website. If not Grayson, then maybe you’ll find useful one of the books I read and reviewed to prepare for this trip. They include Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage, The Hidden Life of Trees: What they Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World, and Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature.
  • And finally, I would be remiss to end this post without steering you toward The Perfect Storm written by Sebastian Junger about a small fishing vessel and crew caught in an Atlantic storm and In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick – a captivating true story about the whaling industry which is thought to be the inspiration for Moby Dick.
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Erica Marlaine: Onboard the City That Never Sleeps, June 28, 2019

NOAA Teacher at Sea

Erica Marlaine

Aboard NOAA Ship Oscar Dyson

June 22 – July 15, 2019


Mission: Pollock Acoustic-Trawl Survey

Geographic Area of Cruise: Gulf of Alaska

Date: June 28, 2018

Weather Data from the Bridge:

Latitude: 58º 28.54 N
Longitude: 154º 46.05 W
Wind Speed: 16.8 knots
Wind Direction: 190º
Air Temperature:  11º Celsius
Barometric Pressure: 102


Science and Technology Log

Scientists aboard NOAA Ship Oscar Dyson are estimating the numbers and biomass of walleye pollock in the Gulf of Alaska.  They use acoustics (sound data)  to help them do this.

acoustic readout
Acoustic representation of fish in the area


Acoustic representation of fish in an area

Echo sounders send an acoustic signal (ping) into the water.  The sound bounces off objects that have a different density than the surrounding water (such as the swim bladder in a fish) and returns back to the echo sounder.  Using the speed of sound, this technology can determine how deep the fish are in the water column. 

How much sound each object reflects is known as the target strength.  The target strength is dependent upon the type of fish and the size of the fish.  A bigger fish will give off more of an echo than a small fish will.  A fish’s swim bladder is primarily what reflects the sound.  Smelt and krill do not have swim bladders. As a result, they do not reflect as much sound as a pollack would. Even though a big fish gives off more sound energy than a small fish of the same species, it is possible that a return echo could indicate either one big fish or several smaller fish clumped together. A big fish of one species could also give off similar sound energy to a big fish of a different species. For that reason, actual fish are collected several times a day in the nets described in a previous blog.

From a net sample, scientists determine the number of each species in the catch as well as the length and weight of individuals of each species. 

Measuring pollock
Measuring pollock

Additionally, scientists also determine the sex and age of the pollock.  The catch data is used to scale the acoustic data, which in turn allows scientists to estimate how many pollock there are of various size and age groups in a given area. These numbers help scientists  determine the sustainability of the pollock population, which in turn allows the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to set catch quotas. 

Counting krill
Counting krill


Krill Fun Facts:

Krill (aka euphausiids) are small crustaceans (a couple of millimeters long) of the order Euphausiacea.  The word “krill” is a Norwegian word meaning “a small fry of fish.” Krill are found in every ocean and are a major food source. They are eaten by fish, whales, seals, penguins, and squid, to name a few.  In Japan, the Phillipines, and Russia, krill are also eaten by humans.  In Japan, they are called okiami.  In the Phillipines and Russia, they are known as camarones. In the Phillipines, krill are also used to make a salty paste called bagoong. Krill are a major source of protein and omega-3 fatty acids.

krill on spoon
There are many kinds of krill. Thus far, in the Gulf of Alaska, we have been seeing mostly Thysanoessa enermis, which measure approximately 1/2 inch in length.

Personal Log  

People often refer to New York as the city that never sleeps. The same can be said for the NOAA Ship Oscar Dyson. Life onboard the Oscar Dyson carries on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  There is never a time that the ship is not bustling with activity.  Everyone on the boat works 12-hour shifts, so someone is always working while others are sleeping (or doing laundry, exercising, or watching a movie in the lounge before they go to sleep.) Most people on the boat work either the noon to midnight shift or the midnight to noon shift.  However, the science team works 4 a.m. to 4 p.m., or 4 p.m. to 4 a.m. I am in the latter group.  It was easier to get accustomed to than I had imagined, although it is sometimes confusing when you look at your clock and wonder whether it is 5 a.m. or 5 p.m. since the sun is shining for most of the day.  Kodiak has only 4-5 hours of darkness now, and the sun sets at approximately midnight.  Therefore, it does not really feel like nighttime for much of my shift.

View
The view from NOAA Ship Oscar Dyson
Sunset
Views (and sunsets) like these make it easy to work the night shift!
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Karah Nazor: Sorting Protocol and the Ubiquitous Tunicates of the Central CA Coast: Salps and Pyrosomes, May 30, 2019

NOAA Teacher at Sea

Karah Nazor

Aboard NOAA Ship Reuben Lasker

May 29 – June 7, 2019


Mission: Rockfish Recruitment & Ecosystem Assessment

Geographic Area: Central California Coast

Date: May 30, 2019

Last night I fell asleep, twice, at the lab bench in between trawls, since I am still adjusting to being on the night shift.  We worked from 9:00 P.M. to 6:30 A.M. After the shift I had a nice hot shower and slept a solid 9 hours from 7:00 AM to 4:00 PM.  Hopefully, I will be less drowsy tonight!

Upon waking, I went to the galley and grabbed some Raisin Bran and coffee and took it up to the flying bridge to hang out with Ornithologist Brian Hoover.  Our current location is in the middle of the Channel Islands, an area I know something about because my friend Evan Morrison, mentioned in my first blog, helps with the Channel Islands Swimming Association, and I would like to swim between these islands one day.  Lauren Valentino, Flora Cordoleani, Ily Iglesias and I congregated on the flying bridge and decided we should exercise. We joined Flora in her squat challenge (80 squats on this particular day), followed by 5 minutes of planking and a bit of erging.  Half of female members of the fish sorting team are avid rock climbers. They did lots of pull-ups using the rock ring climbing training holds that are installed there.

It felt nice and warm when the ship stopped for deployment of the Conductivity, Temperature and Depth (CTD) Rosette, and it got chilly again as the wind picked up when the ship started moving again. We saw a few whale spouts in the distance and at 5:30 P.M. we went down to the galley for a delicious meal of steak and mashed potatoes.  I am beginning to really appreciate how nice this whole experience has been in terms of amenities. The NOAA Reuben Lasker first set launch in 2014 and is a state of the art fisheries vessel with a sophisticated acoustics lab, fish lab, dynamic positioning system, CTD, etc., but is ALSO equipped with creature comforts including a movie lounge, an ice cream cooler loaded with ice cream sandwiches, snickers, fruit pops, you name it, and my personal favorite – a coffee bar where all coffee is freshly ground, an espresso machine, and all varieties of milk and creamers, including Reese’s cup whipped cream. The mattress in my stateroom bunk is quite comfortable and the shower gets hot within seconds! I doubt it can get much better than this for a research experience at sea?

Game Plan and Trawling Line: Point Sal line with five 15 minute hauls.

I am familiar with the sorting protocol now. The catch is dropped from the net into the bucket by members of the deck crew and survey tech, with the oversight of Keith Sakuma, Chief Scientist and NOAA Operations Officer Keith Hanson.  The bucket is immediately placed in the fish lab and this is when the fish sorting team starts our work.

Cobb Trawl net
Dropping the catch from the Cobb Trawl net into the bucket.
fish on a sorting tray
A volume of fish just placed on a sorting tray. This catch has a lot of anchovies, krill, and California smoothtongues.
Separating the krill
Separating the krill from the myctophids, Northern anchovies, and California smoothtongues.
Sorting fish group photo
Team Red Hats sorting fish. NOAA’s Keith Hanson in the rear left side.


SORTING AND COUNTING METHOD

We start by carefully picking through a 2000 mL or 5000 mL volume of the harvest, depending on Keith Sakuma’s initial assessment of the species density and volume in the bucket.  The first volume of catch to be sorted is evenly dispersed onto four white sorting trays arrayed on the main lab bench. Once you have a pile of the catch on your tray, you start to separate them into piles of different types of organisms, such as Northern anchovies, ctenophores, krill, salps, pyrosomes, Californian smoothtongues, squid, rockfish, myctophids, and young of year (YOY) fish.  I prefer to use my hands for sorting while others use forceps. Once sorted, we count the number of individuals for each species. If we have difficulty identifying an animal that we have not yet seen, we ask Keith Sakuma or a more experienced team member to help with identification. YOY fish, some in larval form, are particularly difficult for me.

Once sorted and counted, we verbally call out the common name and number of organisms to Keith Sakuma who manually records the data in a 3-ring binder for the lab hard-copy.   For smaller organisms, such as krill or salps, or in hauls with a high number of any particular species, it would be quite tedious to pick out and count each individual in the total haul.  This is why we start with a small subsample volume or 0.5, 2 or 5L, count the individuals in that small volume, establish the ratio for the number of individuals in that volume, and then extrapolate and calculate by the total volume of the haul.  For example, if we counted 97 pyrosomes in the initial 5L sort, and we collected a total of 1000L, then we can say that there are 19,400 pyrosomes in the haul.

Chief Scientist Keith Sakuma
Chief Scientist Keith Sakuma recording the data from a haul during sorting.

Once 20 individuals of each species have been called out, we no longer have to count that species since the ratio for this catch has already been established and to expedite sorting the rest of the volume.  Following sorting, the length of the twenty representatives of each species is measured using electronic calipers and the values populate on an Excel spreadsheet. After measuring, specimens requested by various research institutes including Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Moss Landing, and Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) are collected, labelled and frozen.

Flora Cordoleani
Flora Cordoleani keeping track of which specimens are to be preserved for various research groups.
Keith Sakuma bagging specimens to send to collaborators.

Creature(s) feature: Salps and Pyrosomes. 

Salps What are these strange gelatinous organisms in our catch that look like little puddles of clear jelly with a red, green, yellow, and brown digestive organ in the center?  They are goopy, small and slippery making them difficult to pick up by hand. They float on the sea surface and are ubiquitous in our hauls BUT NOBODY KNOWS ABOUT THEM.

These creatures are called salps and belong to the subphylum Tunicata. Tunicates have a notochord in their early stage of life which makes them members of the phylum Chordata, to which humans also belong. Having a transparent body is a way escape being preyed upon.

A group of salps. This species is dime to quarter sized and this number of salps occupies a volume of ~10-15 ml once placed in a beaker.
Salp digestive organs.

Salps are planktonic tunicates  That can be found as individual salps or in long chains called blastozooids.   The salps shown in the photo below were individuals and were notable in most of our hauls. Individual salps in this pile are dime to quarter sized and occupy a volume of ~10-15 ml. We measured the volume of salps in every haul.

While on the topic of salps, I will tell you about a cool 1 inch long salp parasite I found on my sorting tray (see image below). Keith Sakuma explained that it was a deep sea amphipod called Phronima which is a parasitoid that takes up residence inside of a salp’s body, eats the salp’s organs, and then lays its eggs inside of the salp. The King-of-the-salmon, Trachipterus altivelis, (which we are also catching) uses its protrusible jaw to get inside of the salp just to eat this amphipod!

Phronima amphipod
Phronima amphipod – lives and reproduced in salp after eating the salp’s organs. King-of-the-salmon fish use their protrusible jaws to eat the amphipod.
King-of-the-salmon
King-of-the-salmon, Trachipterus altivelis
King-of-the-salmon jaw protruded
King-of-the-salmon, Trachipterus altivelis, who preys upon phronima living inside of salp, with jaw protruded.
A large haul full of salps.

Another type of salp we keep catching is Thetys vagina, a large solitary species of nektonic salp that feeds on plankton, such as diatoms, and is an important carbon sink in the ocean. Thetys has an external surface, or test, that is covered with bumps and ridges, as seen in the photo below.

Thetys vagina, the twin-sailed salp.
Thetys vagina, the twin-sailed salp.
internal filtering organ
The internal filtering organ of Thetys vagina.
Kristin Saksa examining a larger Thetys
Kristin Saksa examining a larger Thetys vagina, or the twin-sailed salp. The dark colored tentacles are downward facing. This is the siphon where water enters the sac-filled body.

Pyrosomes Pyrosoma atlanticum are another type of planktonic tunicate which are very numerous in most of our hauls. Pyrosomes look like bumpy pink hollow tubes with openings on both ends. They are rigid in structure and easy to pick up by hand, whereas salps are goopy and difficult to pick up by hand.  We have collected some pyrosomes that are 13 inches long, while most are in the 4-6 inch range. The small pyrosomes look like clear Tic Tacs, but they do not taste as such.

Pyrosoma atlanticum
Pyrosoma atlanticum, with an ~6 inch specimen on the left and small pyrosomes on the right.

How can pyrosomes be so ubiquitous just 20 miles or so off of the Central California Coast, but I have never seen one that has floated up on the beach or while swimming?

Pyrosoma atlanticum are also planktonic tunicates, but are colonial organisms made up of many zooids held together by a gelatinous structure called the tunic. One end of the tube is wide open and filters the water for zooplankton and phytoplankton, while the other end is tighter and resembles a diaphragm or sphincter. The pyrosomes we harvested appeared in diverse array of pinks and purples.  Pyrosomes are believed to harbor intracellular bioluminescent bacteria. Pyrosomes are drifting organisms that swim by beating cilia lining the branchial basket to propel the animals through the water and create a current for filter feeding. 

Pyrosome rainbow
Pyrosoma atlanticum assorted by color.
Kristin Saksa
Moss Landing Graduate Student Kristin Saksa excited about the large haul of Pyrosoma atlanticum.
high-five
Pyrosoma atlanticum high-five.
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Roy Moffitt: Calling in the Drones, August 13, 2018

NOAA Teacher at Sea

Roy Moffitt

Aboard USCGC Healy

August 7 – 25, 2018

 

Mission: Healy 1801 –  Arctic Distributed Biological Observatory

Geographic Area: Arctic Ocean (Bering Sea, Chukchi Sea, Beaufort Sea)

Date: August 13, 2018

 

Current location/conditions: Evening August 13 – northwest of Icy Point Alaska

Air temp 34F, sea depth 45 m , surface sea water temp 42F

 

Calling in the Drones

We have not seen another ship or any other sign of civilization since we left Nome, until today when NOAA scientists coordinated an at sea meeting between the Healy and two saildrones.  Saildrones are remotely piloted sailboats that roam the seas without anyone on board.  A given route is programmed for collecting data and changes to the sailboat’s survey area can be given directly by satellite through the Internet.   After not seeing anything on the horizon for many days when the sail drone came into view it was quite eerie for me.  It was like a random floating traffic cone dropped in the Arctic.  I was amazed that it did not tip over.  The saildrone has a relatively large keel (the fin part of the boat you cannot see under water) to help it from tipping over.  The boat itself is about 7 m long (23 ft)  x 5 m tall ( 16.3 ft) x 2.5 m wide (8.2 ft) with a traveling speed of 3 to 5 knots.

Saildrone on the ocean
The saildrone is a remotely piloted sailboat that contains many scientific instruments.

We collected surface water samples near the drone that will be tested to verify the accuracy of the drones reporting instruments.

The instruments on a saildrone measure weather conditions and ocean conditions and properties.  The ocean data includes measurements for temperature, wave height, sea depth, currents, pH, salinity, oxygen, and carbon dioxide.  Underwater microphones listen for marine mammals and an echosounder can keep track of fish that pass by.   This is a wealth of information in an area of the world where there are so few ships to report back weather and sea observations to civilization.

 

Today’s Wildlife Sightings

We caught Thysanoessa inermis in the big Methot net today. I had to have Nissa Ferm, a fisheries biologist from Lynker Inc working under contract for NOAA, spell that word out for me. She wrote it down without hesitation. I found this amazing because even spell check doesn’t recognize those words.  Nissa identifies many specimens we catch by eye and then verifies identification under a microscope. In general terms, Thysanoessa inermis is a type of organism often referred to as krill and is only about a centimeter in length.

Thysanoessa inermis, a species of krill
Thysanoessa inermis, a species of krill

Thysanoessa inermis is a vital member of the bottom of the food chain and an animal that eats phytoplankton. Phytoplankton is a microscopic plant that lives in the sunlit layers of the ocean and gets energy from the sun.  As with all plants, this is done through the process of photosynthesis. In the case of phytoplankton being an underwater plant, it uses carbon dioxide dissolved in the water in its photosynthesis process. Thysanoessa inermis helps gather this energy in by eating the phytoplankton and then becomes the prey of much larger creatures in the marine food chain such as fish and whales.

 

Now and Looking Forward

Although it was short lived, we saw our first snow flurry today.  It was incredible to see snowflakes in​ August! I am looking forward to more snowflakes and continued cool weather. ​

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Pam Schaffer: Sampling the Food- Assessing Krill Populations July 5, 2018

NOAA Teacher at Sea

Pam Schaffer

Aboard NOAA Ship Bell M. Shimada

July 2-10, 2018

Mission: ACCESS Cruise

Geographic Area of Cruise: North Pacific:  Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary

 

Weather Data from the Bridge

Date July 5 2018
Time 1100
Latitude 37 30.1’N
Longitude 123 08.5’W
Present Weather/ Sky Cloudy
Visibility (nm) 12
Wind Direction (tree) Light
Wind Speed (kts)  Variable
Atmospheric Pressure (mb) 1021.3
Sea Wave Height (ft) <1
Swell Waves Direction (true) 270°
Swell Waves Height (ft) 1-2
Temperature  Sea Water (C) 13.0°
Temperature Dry bulb (C)

Air Temperature

 16.7°
Temperature Wet Bulb (C ) 13.7°

 

Science and Technology Log

Krill are small crustaceans (think shrimp-like) that inhabit the world’s oceans.  They are an essential component of marine ecosystems, residing near the bottom of the food chain.  Krill are a staple in the diet of whales, squid, octopuses and fish.  Understanding the variability of krill populations is an important way of monitoring ocean health.    In order to track the krill population, scientists do two things; they use acoustics to estimate the biomass and use nets to verify the results from the acoustics.

Deploying the Tucker Trawl
Deploying the Tucker Trawl

Scientists use a large net mechanism called a “Tucker Trawl” to collect samples of krill and other zooplankton at various depths in the water column.  A Tucker Trawl is a set of opening and closing cone shaped nets made of fine mesh (holes that are 333 microns in diameter).  The unit we are using has three sections, each with a mouth diameter of 1 meter by 1.5 meters and a sample collector container on the bottom. Krill is collected by dropping the net in a specific location to a specified depth while the ship is slowly moving at a rate of approximately two knots per hour (2.3 mph).  An onboard crane deploys and retrieves the mechanism using a heavy cable. On this cruise we’ve sampled to depths as much as 200 meters deep.   The Tucker Trawl depth and when the nets are opened can be adjusted in order to sample several vertical positions in the water column during a single trawl.

Processing Samples
Processing Samples

Once the samples are back onboard the nets are sprayed down and the collectors are carefully emptied into storage containers for later analysis onshore.  The content analysis will count and identify the various species collected in the sample, as determining sex, size, lifecycle which vary by species.    We’ve observed two different species in our samples; Euphasia pacifica (smallest and most abundant) and Thysanoessa spinifera (larger with a spiny back).  Data collected via these Tucker Trawl sessions is used to construct models for assessing krill biomass using acoustic measuring technology.

 

Thysanoessa spinifera upclose
Thysanoessa spinifera upclose

Loads of Krill
Loads of Krill

Personal Log

Tucker Trawling is wet business but really interesting.   It’s a great learning experience working with Dr. Jaime Jahncke to deploy the nets and process the samples.  We’re doing several trawls each day throughout the cruise- one session around noon and another set around midnight.   I’ve adjusted my sleeping schedule to get a few hours of rest before we start the midnight shift and then I sleep a few hours after we finish working around 4:30 am.  I’m tired but really happy to be here.

 

Did You Know? 

                       

The name “krill” is Norwegian for “small fry of fish”.

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Christine Webb: August 21, 2017

NOAA Teacher at Sea

Christine Webb

Aboard NOAA Ship Bell M. Shimada

August 11 – 26, 2017

Mission: Summer Hake Survey Leg IV

Geographic Area of Cruise: Pacific Ocean from Newport, OR to Port Angeles, WA

Date: 8/21/2017

Latitude: 49.48 N

Longitude: 128.07 W

Wind Speed: 10 knots

Weather Observations: Sunny

Science and Technology Log

Today was our first chance to use the Methot net, and it was a lot of fun! The Methot net is smaller than the net that we usually use, and it is used to catch smaller organisms. Today we were targeting euphausiids. We thought we saw a pretty good aggregation of them on the 120 kHz acoustics data, where they appear the strongest of the three frequencies we monitor. We needed to validate that data by trawling the area to find the source of the backscatter and make sure they really were what we thought they were. There are many scientists who use data on euphausiids, so this was a good opportunity to provide them with some additional data. Because we’ve been working mostly on larger organisms, I was excited for the chance to see what a Methot net would pull up.

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The Methot net coming up with its haul

It was very exciting that when the net came up, we had TONS of euphausiids! (“Tons” here is not used in a literal sense…we did not have thousands of pounds of euphausiids. That would have been crazy). Although we did not have thousands of pounds of them, we did have thousands of specimens. I’m sure thankful that we only had to take data on a subsample of thirty! I got to measure the lengths and widths of them, and using the magnifying lenses made me look very scientific.

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Measuring euphausiids

Along with euphausiids, we also found other species as well. We found tiny squids, jellies, and even a baby octopus! It was adorable. I’ve never considered that an octopus could be cute, but it was.

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Baby octopus

We also measured volumes and weights on samples of the other specimens we found, and I used graduated cylinders for the first time since college. We would put in a few milliliters of water, add our specimens, and then calculate the difference. Voila! Volume. Good thing I remembered to call the measurement at the bottom of the liquid’s meniscus… I could have messed up all the data! Just kidding… I’m sure my measurements weren’t that important. But still – good thing I paid attention in lab skills. It was definitely a successful first day with the Methot net.

Personal Log

The big buzz around the ship today was the solar eclipse! I was even getting excited at breakfast while I ate my pancakes and made them eclipse each other. We got lucky with weather – I was nervous when I heard the foghorn go off early in the morning. Fortunately, the fog lifted and we had a pretty good view. We all sported our cheesy eclipse shades, and the science team wore gray and black to dress in “eclipse theme.” Even though we couldn’t see the totality here, we got to see about 85%. We’re pretty far north, off the coast of Vancouver Island in Canada. The mountains are beautiful! Seeing land is always a special treat.

Here are some eclipse pics:

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Rockin’ our cheesy eclipse shades

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Some science team members enjoying the eclipse

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Eclipse!

The eclipse would have made the day exciting enough, but the excitement didn’t stop there! While the scientists and I were working in the wet lab, we heard that a pod of orcas was swimming within eyesight of the ship. We dropped everything and hurried to take a look. It was so amazing; we could see five or six surface at once. They must have been hunting. We only see orcas when we’re close to land because their prey doesn’t live in deeper waters. Deeper into the ocean we are more likely to see gray or humpback whales.

It’s almost time for dinner…we sure have been spoiled for food! Last night we had pork loin and steak. I’m not sure that our chef will be able to top himself, but I’m excited to find out. I have heard rumors that he is very good at cooking the fish we’ve been catching, and that really makes me wish I liked seafood. Unfortunately, I don’t. At all. Not even enough to try Larry’s fried rockfish. Luckily, he makes lots of other food that I love.

Tonight after dinner I think Hilarie, Olivia, and I are going to watch Pirates of the Caribbean 2. Last night we watched the first movie while sitting on the flying bridge. It was a pretty cool experience to feel the spray of the sea while watching pirates battle!

IMG_20170820_174605473_HDR
Movie time!

That’s all for now; I’ll be back with more scientific fun soon!

Did you know?

Krill (the type of euphausiid we studied) is one of the most populous species on earth. It basically fuels the entire marine ecosystem.

 

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David Amidon: Science @ Sea, June 8, 2017

NOAA Teacher at Sea

David Amidon

Aboard NOAA Ship Reuben Lasker

June 2 – 13, 2017

Mission: Pelagic Juvenile Rockfish Recruitment and Ecosystem Assessment Survey

Geographic Area of Cruise: Pacific Ocean off the California Coast

Date: June 8, 2017

 

 

TAS David Amidon with a tray of sorted catch
Different Rockfish species caught 6/8/17

 

Science and Technology Log

The main scientific research being completed on the Reuben Lasker during this voyage is the Pelagic Juvenile Rockfish Recruitment and Ecosystem Assessment Survey and it drives the overall research on the ship during this voyage. Rockfish are an important commercial fishery for the West Coast. Maintaining healthy populations are critical to maintaining the fish as a sustainable resource. The samples harvested by the crew play an important role in establishing fishery regulations. However, there is more happening than simply counting rockfish here on the ship.

How does it work? Let me try to explain it a bit.

 

First, the ship will transfer to a specific location at sea they call a “Station.”

IMG_1590
Collection stations off the California Coast that the Reuben Lasker trawls annually.

For a half hour prior to arrival, a science crew member will have been observing for Marine Mammals from the bridge area. When the station is reached, a new observer from the science crew will take over the watch outside on the deck. The fishermen on the boat crew will then unwind the net and launch it behind the boat. It must be monitored from the deck in order to ensure it is located 30 m below the surface. Once everything is set, then the ship trawls with the net at approximately 2 knots. Everything must be consistent from station to station, year to year in order to follow the standardized methods and allow the data recorded to be comparable. After the 15 minutes, then the crew pulls the net in and collects the sample from the net. This process is potentially dangerous, so safety is a priority. Science crew members can not go on the deck as they have not received the proper training.

 

 

Timelapse video of the fishermen bringing in a catch. 6/7/17 (No sound)

 

Once the sample is hauled in, the science personnel decide which method will be used to establish a representative sample. They pull out a sample that would most likely represent the whole catch in a smaller volume. Then we sort the catch by species. After completing the representative samples, they will eventually stop taking counts of the more abundant organisms, like krill. They will measure the volume of those creatures collected and extrapolate the total population collected by counting a smaller representative sample. Finally, we counted out all of the less abundant organisms, such as squid, lanternfish and, of course, rockfish. After the sample is collected and separated, Chief Scientist Sakuma collects all of the rockfish and prepares them for future investigations on shore.  

 

 

A selection of species caught off the coast of San Clemente. These include Market Squid, Anchovies, Red Crab, King-of-Salmon (the long ribbonfish), and Butterfish, among others.

NOAA has used this platform as an opportunity. Having a ship like the Reuben Lasker, and the David Starr Jordan before that, collecting the samples as it does, creates a resource for furtAher investigations. During the trawls we have catalogued many other species. Some of the species we analyzed include Sanddab, Salp, Pyrosoma, Market Squid, Pacific Hake, Octopus, Blue Lanternfish, California Headlightfish and Blacktip Squid, among others. By plotting the biodiversity and comparing the levels we recorded with the historic values from the stations, we gain information about the overall health of the ecosystem.

What happens to the organisms we collect? Not all of the catch is dumped overboard. Often, we are placing select organisms in bags as specimens that will be delivered to various labs up and down the coast.

IMG_1519
Collecting subsets for classification

This is a tremendous resource for researchers, as there is really no way for many of these groups to retrieve samples on their own. Rachel Zuercher joined the crew during this survey in part to collect samples to aid in her research for her PhD.

Along with the general species analysis, the team specifically analyzes the abundance of specific krill species. Krill forms the base of the marine ecosystems in the pelagic zone. They are a major food source for many species, from fish to whales. However, different krill species are favored by different consumers. Therefore, an extension of the Ecosystem Assessment involves determining the abundance of specific krill species. Thomas Adams has been responsible for further analyzing the krill collected. He counts out the representative sample and use microscopes to identify the species collected based on their physical characteristics.  

Additionally, at most stations a Conductivity, Temperature and Depth cast (CTD) is conducted. Basically, bottles are sent overboard and are opened at a specified depth.

IMG_1589
The apparatus for collecting water during CTD casts

Then they are collected and the contents are analyzed. Often these happen during the day prior to the Night Shift taking over, with final analysis taking place after the cruise is complete. This data is then connected with the catch numbers to further the analysis. Ken Baltz, an oceanographer on the ship, uses this information to determine the production of the phytoplankton based on the amounts of chlorophyll detected at depth. This is an important part of the food web and by adding in this component, it makes the picture below the surface clearer.

 

 

img_1488.jpg
NOAA Corps’ Ryan Belcher completing the CTD collection for a station.

Finally, there are two more scientific investigations running as we cruise the open seas during the daylight hours. Michael Pierce is a birdwatcher from the Farallon Institute for Advanced Ecosystem Research who is conducting a transect survey of Seabirds and Marine Mammals. He is based on the Flying Bridge and catalogs any birds or marine mammals that pass within 300 meters of the ship’s bow. Although difficult, this study attempts to create a standardized method for data collection of this nature. As he explained, birds are more perceptive than we are – what looks like open ocean really varies in terms of temperature, salinity and diversity below the surface. Therefore, birds tend to favor certain areas over others. These are also important components of the food web as they represent upper level predators that are not collected in the trawl net. Also, on the bottom of the ship transducers are installed that are able to gather information through the EK60 Echosounder. This sonar can accurately identify krill populations and schools of fish underwater. Again, adding the data collected from these surveys help create a much more complete understanding of the food web we are analyzing out on the open sea.

 

IMG_1591
Sonar data from the EK60

Personal Log

 

Sunday, June 4

The waves were very active all day. Boy am I glad I’m wearing the patch. There was so much wind and the waves were so high, there was a question if we were even going to send the net out. High wind and waves obviously add an element of concern, especially for the safety of the boat crew working the net.

I spent some of the day up on the Bridge- the section of the boat with all of the navigation equipment. The Executive Officer (XO) gave me an impromptu lesson about using the map for navigation. They have state-of-the-art navigation equipment, but they also run a backup completed by hand and using a compass and straightedge just like you would in math class. Of note – the Dungeness Crab season is wrapping up and many fishermen leave traps in the water to catch them. When the boat is passing through one of these areas, someone will act like a spotter so the boat can avoid getting tangled up. When I was looking with him, we saw some whale plumes in the distance.

We did launch the net twice Sunday night, collecting a TON of krill each time. In the first batch, we also caught some squid and other small prey species. The second trawl was very surprising. Despite cutting it down to a 5 minute trawl, we caught about the same amount of krill. We also caught more squid and a lot of young salmon who were probably feeding on the krill.  

IMG_1493
That is a ton of krill!

 

Monday, June 5

I am getting used to the hours now – and do not feel as guilty sleeping past 2PM considering we are up past 6 in the morning. It will make for a tricky transition back to “the real world” when I go home to NY!

During the day, spent some time just talking with the science folks and learning about the various tasks being completed. I also spent some time up on the Flying Bridge as they said they had seen some Mola, or Giant Ocean Sunfish (although I did not see them). I did have a chance to make a few videos to send to my son Aiden’s 3rd grade teacher back in NY. It did not work out as well as I had hoped, but considering we are out in the middle of the ocean, I really can’t complain about spotty wi-fi.

Once we started the night shift, we really had a good night. We completed work at 5 stations – which takes a lot of time. We saw a LOT of biodiversity last night – easily doubling if not tripling  our juvenile rockfish count. We also saw a huge variety of other juvenile fish and invertebrates over the course of the night. We finally wrapped up at 6:30 AM, what a night!

Tuesday, June 6th

We found out today that we will need to dock the ship prematurely. There is a mechanical issue that needs attention. We are en route straight through to San Diego, so no fishing tonight. However, our timing will not allow us to reach port during the day, so we will get a chance to sample the southernmost stations Wednesday night. Thus is life at sea. The science crew is staying on schedule as we, hopefully, will be back on the water this weekend.

Wednesday, June 7th

After a day travelling to San Diego, we stopped at the stations near San Clemente to collect samples. Being much farther south than before, we saw some new species – red crabs, sardines and A LOT of anchovies. Closer to shore, these counts dropped significantly and krill showed up in numbers not seen in the deeper trawl. Again, I am amazed by the differences we see in only a short distance.

 

More from our anchovy haul- the bucket contains the entire catch from our second trawl, the tray shows how we analyzed a subset. Also on the tray you find Red Crab, Salps, Mexican Lanternfish and Krill.

 

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David Amidon: The Night Shift, June 4, 2017

NOAA Teacher at Sea

David Amidon

Aboard NOAA Ship Reuben Lasker

June 2 – 13, 2017

Mission: Pelagic Juvenile Rockfish Recruitment and Ecosystem Assessment Survey

Geographic Area of Cruise: Pacific Ocean off the California Coast

Date: June 4, 2017

 

Science and Technology Log

All of the work for the Juvenile Rockfish Survey is completed at night – we probably will not even get going  most nights until after 9 PM. Wonder why so late? Any guesses?

This is a night time operation because we are focused on collecting prey species – we are not catching full grown rockfish, only juveniles which are less than a years old (YOY = Young of the Year). As Keith Sakuma, the Chief Scientist for the Reuben Lasker, explained – this survey gathers information about the juvenile rockfish so that NOAA can pass information onto the states in order to establish a sustainable fishery. This could lead to changes in fishing regulations based on the abundance of the juvenile stocks, which would be adults down the road. They trawl at night for two main reasons- during the day time, the rockfish would simply see the net and swim away. Also, many of the other creatures being catalogued are prey species that hide in the depths during the day to avoid predators, rising to the surface as the night moves on.

The night shift includes the science personnel and the crew of the boat. The boat crew not only operates the ship, but the fisherman also send out the trawl net and bring it back in. While the boat crew rotates on a specified schedule, the night-time science group keeps going until the work is done. However, these two groups are very much in sync and really work well together.  This blog entry will be my introduction into the procedures and initial results of our work from the first couple nights. I will provide much more detail in later posts.

The science personnel for this leg of the voyage includes myself and Chief Scientist Sakuma as well as Cherisa and Ryan, who are members of the NOAA Corps; Thomas, an undergrad student from Humboldt State; Rachel, a PhD student at UC-Santa Cruz; and Maya, a Hollings undergraduate scholar from UNC-Wilmington.

Pink shrimp 7
The Night Crew at work separating species during the shrimp haul. Photo by Keith Sakuma.

The Juvenile Rockfish Survey, boiled to its simplest terms, consists of a midwater trawling net behind the ship, meaning it does not float and it never touches the bottom. Anything caught will be sorted and analyzed by the science crew. In reality, it is a bit more complicated.

First of all, net operations take place at specified stations that the ship revisits periodically and have been used for some time. The stations for a night run on the same latitude line, running west away from the coast.

Before sending the net out, we need to run a Marine Mammal Watch from the bridge for 30 minutes. If a marine mammal, such as a sea lion, dolphin or whale, is spotted, then they make efforts to avoid getting them tangled in their nets, or alter their behavior in any way. Sometimes the trawl for that station has to be abandoned due to wildlife activity, although we have not seen any marine mammals during our investigation so far.

IMG_1428
Getting ready for my shift on the Marine Mammal Watch

Once the ship arrives at a station, the boat crew sends out the net. After it reaches the depth of 30m, they trawl for a 15 minute interval. A science crew member is also sent outside on deck to continue the marine mammal watch for the duration of the trawl. Finally, after the time is up, they bring in the net and empty its contents into buckets, which are then transferred to the science crew.

This is when our work began. While we are on the lookout for rockfish, we actually found very few of these. A majority of our catch consisted of pyrosomes and krill. The science crew employed a number of measures to estimate the numbers of these creatures, as counting them one-by-one would have taken a long, long time to do. We did volume approximations and analysis of representative samples for these creatures. When we found fish or other species of note, we would pull the individuals out, classify them and record their lengths. Samples were frozen for use by researchers working at other locations on the West Coast.

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Measuring the mantle of a Market Squid. Photo by Rachel Zuercher.

Some examples of the species we collected:

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Juvenile Rockfish collected off the “Lost Coast”

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Sample of other species collected and catalogued, including: Medusa Fish, Gonatus Squid, Thetys and California Headlight Fish

We worked solid through four stations on the first night, wrapping up just before 6 AM. We will be at it again, if weather permits, every night of the voyage.

Personal Log

Thursday, June 1st

This was a very long day. I left my house in Syracuse, NY at 6 AM, flying out of the airport around 8 AM. After a quick transfer in Chicago, I flew in a Boeing 737 all the way to San Francisco. I then made it to Eureka, California around 4 PM (West Coast time) for an overnight stay. Fortunately, I met up a few of the science personnel for dinner who were also headed to the Reuben Lasker in the morning. Eureka was beautiful, surrounded by oceans and redwoods.

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Sunset in Eureka, CA

Friday, June 2nd

In the morning, we caught a transfer boat at the public marina out to the Reuben Lasker, anchored a few miles away off the coast. Once the passage was done, we settled in and met some of the crew. I even shared a coffee with the CO- or Commanding Officer. Everyone onboard has been so open and welcoming – you can tell they enjoy their work.

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Transfer boat that to us to the Reuben Lasker

After dinner, we finally got down to sciencing. (That’s my word – I’m sticking to it.) I was impressed by how different the catch was from each station, even though they are only a few miles apart. You can try to start telling a story right there. That’s kind of the point to this whole survey. To try to tell a story about the overall health of the pelagic ecosystem based on representative samples. Piece by piece, year by year, data points can turn into meaning when connections are made. I think it is science in the purest form -gathering data for the sake of having information. By having a long-term data base of information about all of the other creatures collected, not just the rockfish, we can decipher meaning by analyzing population trends and collating them with other phenomena, such as weather, fishing or pollution. 

Saturday, June 3rd

I am getting adjusted to the day/night pattern of the Night Shift. I got to sleep around 6:30 AM and woke up close to 2 PM. I was able to grab a quick cereal from the Galley and then started in on some work. Dinner was served at 5 PM – filet mignon with crab legs? The cooks, or stewards, Kathy & Patrick do an amazing job. They also save meals for people running the late schedule. For the next week and change, lunch is served around midnight and breakfast will be close to 6 AM, before we head to sleep.

Today, the wind picked up and the waves kicked up with it. We cruised around the “Lost Coast” and ran two stations at night. We were scheduled for more, but the waves got larger the further the ship is off the coast. Today’s word is shrimp – we hauled in more shrimp than you could count. We also found a number of rockfish in one of the stations, although there were very few found in our second trawl.

Did You Know?

… that there are over 85 species of krill?

http://www.krillfacts.org/1-krill-facts-center.html

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Dana Chu: May 17, 2016

NOAA Teacher at Sea
Dana Chu
On Board NOAA Ship Bell M. Shimada
May 13 – 22, 2016

Mission: Applied California Current Ecosystem Studies (ACCESS) is a working partnership between Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary, Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, and Point Blue Conservation Science to survey the oceanographic conditions that influence and drive the availability of prey species (i.e., krill) to predators (i.e., marine mammals and sea birds).

Geographic area of cruise: Greater Farallones, Cordell Bank, and Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuaries

Date: Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Weather Data from the Bridge
Clear skies, light winds at 0600 increased to 18 knots at 0900, 6-8 feet swells

Science and Technology Log

Ahoy from the Bell Shimada! Today, I will explain three of the tools that are deployed from the side deck to obtain samples of the water and the ocean’s prey species.

First off we have the Harmful Algal Bloom Net, also known as the HAB Net, which is basically a 10-inch opening with a 39-inch fine mesh netting attached to a closed end canister. The HAB net is deployed manually by hand to the depth of 30 feet three consecutive times to obtain a water sample. The top fourth of the water collected is decanted and the remaining water (approximately 80ml) is transferred to a bottle which is then sealed and labeled with the location (latitude, longitude), date, time, vertical or horizontal position, and any particular comments. The samples will eventually be mailed off to California Department of Health Services lab for analysis for harmful toxins from algae that can affect shellfish consumers.

Next we have the hoop net, which is pretty much similar in design to the HAB net, except for a larger opening diameter of 3 feet (think hula hoop) and a net length of nine feet. The net tapers off into a closed container with open slits on the sides to allow for water drainage. The purpose of the hoop net to collect organisms that are found at the various depth levels of the deployment. The hoop net is attached to a cable held by the winch. The hoop net is lowered at a specific angle which when calculated with the speed of the vessel equates to a certain depth. The survey crew reports the wire angle sighting throughout the deployment.

Every time the hoop net is brought back up there is a sense of anticipation at what we will find once the canister is open. Coloring is a good indicator. Purple usually indicates a high concentration of doliolids, while a darker color may indicate a significant amount of krill. Phytoplankton usually have a brownish coloring. Many of the hoop net collections from today and yesterday include doliolids and colonial salps, neither are very nutrient dense. Yesterday we also found pyrosomes, which are transparent organisms that resemble a sea cucumber with little bumps and soft thorns along their body. The smallest pyrosome we came upon was two and a half inches with the largest over six inches long. A few small fish of less than one inch in length also showed up sporadically in these collections as well.

The Scientific team is looking for the presence of krill in the samples obtained. The Euphausia pacifica is one of the many species of krill found in these waters. Many tiny krill were found in the various hoop net deployments. On the last hoop net deployment for today and yesterday, larger sized krill of approximately 1 inch) were found. This is good news because krill is the dominant food source for marine mammals such as whales. Ideally it would be even better if the larger krill appeared more frequently in the hoop net samples.

Finally, we have the Tucker Trawl, which is the largest and most complex of the three nets discussed in today’s post. The Tucker Trawl consists of three separate nets, one for sampling at each depth: the top, middle, and bottom of the water column. Like the hoop net, the tucker trawl nets also have a canister with open slits along the side covered with mesh to allow water to drain. All three nets are mounted on the same frame attached to a wire cable held by the winch. As the Tucker Trawl is towed only one net is open at a time for a specific length of time. The net is closed by dropping a weight down along the tow. Once the weight reaches the net opening, it triggers the net to shut and sends a vibration signal up the cable line back to the surface which can be felt by the scientist holding the cable. The net is then towed at the next depth for ten minutes. Once the last net tow has been completed, the Tucker Trawl is brought back up to surface. Similar to the hoop net, the survey tech reads the wire angle throughout the deployment to determine the angle the cable needs to be at in order for the net to reach a certain depth. This is where all the Geometry comes in handy!

As mentioned already, with three nets, the Tucker Trawl yields three separate collections of the nutrients found within the top, middle and bottom of the water column. Once the nets are retrieved, each collection container is poured into a different bucket or tub, and then into a sieve before making it into a collection bottle. If there is a large quantity collected, a subsample is used to fill up a maximum of two bottles before the remainder is discarded back into the ocean. Once the samples are processed, an outside label is attached to the bottle and an interior label is dropped inside the bottle, formalin is added to preserve the sample organisms collected so that they can be analyzed later back in the lab.

Personal Log

It is so good to finally get my sea legs! I am glad I can be of use and actively participate. Cooperative teamwork is essential to getting everything to flow smoothly and on time. The Bell Shimada’s deck crew and NOAA team work hand in hand with the scientists to deploy and retrieve the various instruments and devices.

In the past two days I am getting a lot of hands on experience with deploying the HAB net to assisting with processing samples from the HOOP Net and Tucker Trawl. It’s always exciting to see what we might have collected. I can’t wait to see what the rest of the week may bring. I wonder what interesting finds we will get with the midnight Tucker Trawl samples.

Lesson Learned: Neatness and accuracy are imperative when labeling samples! Pre-planning and preparing labels ahead of time helps streamline the process once the samples are in hand.

Word of the Day:        Thermocline – This is the depth range where the temperature of the water drops steeply. The region above the thermocline has nutrient depleted waters and while the region below has nutrient rich waters.

 

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Michael Wing: How to Sample the Sea, July 20, 2015

NOAA Teacher at Sea
Michael Wing
Aboard R/V Fulmar
July 17 – 25, 2015

Mission: 2015 July ACCESS Cruise
Geographical Area of Cruise: Pacific Ocean west of Marin County, California
Date: July 20, 2015

Weather Data from the Bridge: 15 knot winds gusting to 20 knots, wind waves 3-5’ and a northwest swell 3-4’ four seconds apart.

Science and Technology Log

On the even-numbered “lines” we don’t just survey birds and mammals. We do a lot of sampling of the water and plankton.

Wing on Fulmar
Wing at rail of the R/V Fulmar

We use a CTD (Conductivity – Temperature – Depth profiler) at every place we stop. We hook it to a cable, turn it on, and lower to down until it comes within 5-10 meters of the bottom. When we pull it back up, it has a continuous and digital record of water conductivity (a proxy for salinity, since salty water conducts electricity better), temperature, dissolved oxygen, fluorescence (a proxy for chlorophyll, basically phytoplankton), all as a function of depth.

CTD
Kate and Danielle deploy the CTD

We also have a Niskin bottle attached to the CTD cable. This is a sturdy plastic tube with stoppers at both ends. The tube is lowered into the water with both ends cocked open. When it is at the depth you want, you clip a “messenger” to the cable. The messenger is basically a heavy metal bead. You let go, it slides down the cable, and when it strikes a trigger on the Niskin bottle the stoppers on both ends snap shut. You can feel a slight twitch on the ship’s cable when this happens. You pull it back up and decant the seawater that was trapped at that depth into sample bottles to measure nitrate, phosphate, alkalinity, and other chemical parameters back in the lab.

Niskin bottle
Niskin bottle

When we want surface water, we just use a bucket on a rope of course.

We use a hoop net to collect krill and other zooplankton. We tow it behind the boat at a depth of about 50 meters, haul it back in, and wash the contents into a sieve, then put them in sample bottles with a little preservative for later study. We also have a couple of smaller plankton nets for special projects, like the University of California at Davis graduate student Kate Davis’s project on ocean acidification, and the plankton samples we send to the California Department of Health. They are checking for red tides.

Hoop net
Hoop net

We use a Tucker Trawl once a day on even numbered lines. This is a heavy and complicated rig that has three plankton nets, each towed at a different depth. It takes about an hour to deploy and retrieve this one; that’s why we don’t use it each time we stop. The Tucker trawl is to catch krill; which are like very small shrimp.  During the day they are down deep; they come up at night.

Tucker trawl
Part of the Tucker trawl

 

krill
A mass of krill we collected. The black dots are their eyes.

What happens to these samples? The plankton from the hoop net gets sent to a lab where a subsample is taken and each species in the subsample is counted very precisely. The CTD casts are shared by all the groups here – NOAA, Point Blue Conservation Science, the University of California at Davis, San Francisco State University. The state health department gets its sample. San Francisco State student Ryan Hartnett has some water samples he will analyze for nitrate, phosphate and silicate. All the data, including the bird and mammal sightings, goes into a big database that’s been kept since 2004. That’s how we know what’s going on in the California Current. When things change, we’ll recognize the changes.

Personal Log

They told me “wear waterproof pants and rubber boots on the back deck, you’ll get wet.” I thought, how wet could it be? Now I understand. It’s not that some water drips on you when you lift a net up over the stern of the boat – although it does. It’s not that waves splash you, although that happens too. It’s that you use a salt water hose to help wash all of the plankton from the net into a sieve, and then into a container, and to fill wash bottles and to wash off the net, sieve, basins, funnel, etc. before you arrive at the next station and do it all again. It takes time, because you have to wash ALL of the plankton from the end of the net into the bottle, not just some of it. You spend a lot of time hosing things down. It’s like working at a car wash except with salty water and the deck is pitching like a continuous earthquake.

The weather has gone back to “normal”, which today means 15 knot winds gusting to 20 knots, wind waves 3-5’ and a northwest swell 3-4’ only four seconds apart. Do the math, and you’ll see that occasionally a wind wave adds to a swell and you get slapped by something eight feet high. We were going to go to Bodega Bay today; we had to return to Sausalito instead because it’s downwind.

sea state
The sea state today. Some waves were pretty big.

We saw a lot of humpback whales breaching again and again, and slapping the water with their tails. No, we don’t know why they do it although it just looks like fun. No, I didn’t get pictures. They do it too fast.

Did You Know? No biologist or birder uses the word “seagull.” They are “gulls”, and there are a lot of different species such as Western gulls, California gulls, Sabine’s gulls and others. Yes, it is possible to tell them apart.

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Andrea Schmuttermair, Bottom’s Up!, July 15, 2015

NOAA Teacher at Sea
Andrea Schmuttermair
Aboard NOAA Ship Oscar Dyson
July 6 – 25, 2015

Mission: Walleye Pollock Survey
Geographical area of cruise: Gulf of Alaska
Date: July 15, 2015

Weather Data from the Bridge:
Latitude: 56 42.2N
Longitude: 153 46.5W

Sky:  Overcast; foggy

Visibility: 6nm
Wind Direction: 173 degrees

Wind Speed: 14 knots
Sea wave height: 2ft

Swell wave: 4-5ft

Sea water temp: 12.3C
Dry temperature: 11.5C

 

Science and Technology Log

In my last post we talked about the Aleutian Wing Trawl (AWT), the mid-water trawling net we use to take samples of pollock. There are two other types of nets we may use during our cruise, although not as frequently as the AWT.  Sometimes the echogram shows a large concentration of fish closer to the ocean floor. In this instance, we might use a bottom trawl net, known as the Poly Nor’easter (PNE), to “go fishing”. The process for putting out the net is similar to putting out the AWT, except that it is extended to just above the ocean floor in order to catch fish that are congregated towards the bottom. In our recent bottom trawl, we caught a lot of Pacific Ocean perch, or rockfish, and very few pollock.

It has been fascinating to see how scientists “do science” out here. Patterns and observations are important skills for scientists, and analyzing patterns and behaviors of fish help scientists to make informed decisions about whether they are seeing pollock, krill, rockfish, or something else entirely on the echogram. For example, acoustically, pollock and rockfish have the same reflectivity (and therefore are difficult to differentiate based solely on acoustics), but their behaviors are different. When we recently put out a bottom trawl net, we anticipated catching mostly rockfish because of the location we were at, and their schooling behavior close to the ocean floor. Rockfish are also usually found lower in the water column than pollock. Our first bottom trawl yielded quite a few rockfish, some jellies, several flatfish, and a few other types of fish. Just as we did with the pollock, we weighed, sexed and measured a sample of rockfish. These fish were a little more difficult to handle as they have sharp spines in several places.

Robert and Derek looking at krill flatfish larvae under the microscope
Counting out a few hundred krill
They’re so tiny!
Bucket-o-krill
Counting krill

There is a third type of net we deploy on this survey is called a Methot net. It’s named after Dr. Rick Methot, a famous fisheries modeler. This net has an opening of 5 square meters, and has a finer mesh than the AWT or the PNE at 2x3mm. At the end of the net is a small codend where the sample is taken from. This net is typically used to catch krill and macrozooplankton that would normally escape the larger nets. From the acoustic display, we would anticipate about 100-200 times more than what is actually caught in the net. Back scatter could be one reason for this. Scientists have worked to try and decrease this discrepancy by using strobe lights mounted on the net. The abundance tends to agree better with strobes on the net, with the hypothesis being that the organisms are blinded and don’t realize they’re going into the net.

Meet the Scientists

Kresimir smelling a capelin (smelt)- they smell like cucumbers!
Kresimir smelling a capelin (smelt)- they smell like cucumbers!

Chris, one of the scientists on board
Chris, one of the scientists on board

During one of our shifts, I had the opportunity to interview 2 of the scientists on our night watch team, Kresimir Williams and Chris Bassett. Their enthusiasm and passion for their work is evident in the discussions we have had and the work they are doing. It is great to work with scientists who are so knowledgeable and also patient enough to explain what we are doing here. Let’s meet them!

What is your educational background?

Kresimir:  I received my undergraduate degree in marine science from Samford in Birmingham, Alabama. During this time, I spent summers at Dauphin Island. I received my Master’s Degree in fisheries and aquaculture from Auburn (also in Alabama), and finally received my PhD in fisheries from the University of Washington.

Chris: I went to the University of Minnesota for my undergraduate degrees in mechanical engineering and Spanish. I then went on to receive both my Master’s & PhD in mechanical engineering at the University of Washington.

How long have you been working at the AFSC lab in Seattle?

Kresimir:  I have been working at the lab for 13 years as a research fisheries biologist.

Chris: I am currently working with both AFSC and the Applied Physics Lab at the University of Washington as a post-doctoral research associate.

What do you most enjoy about your work as a scientist?

Kresimir: I enjoy doing the research, discovering new things, and conducting field experiments.

Chris: The work that I do allows me to learn by playing with big kid toys in beautiful places; for example, the EK80, one of the broadband acoustic scattering systems brought on this ship

What has been a career highlight for you?

Kresimir:  The development of the CamTrawl (what we are currently using on our nets here on the Dyson). I have seen this project from development to operationalization.

Chris: Using broadband acoustics systems in a 4 month long lab experiment to detect crude oil spills under sea ice.

What does it mean to you to “do science”?

Kresimir: It means following a set of rules, and discovering things that can be repeated by other people. Remembering that data leads you to the answers rather than using it for something you want to prove.  Research generally generates more questions.  Finally, it means learning how the little piece of the world you are interested in works.

Chris: It means looking around and seeing what knowledge exists and where we can advance knowledge in that field and how we can do so. It’s understanding that often identifies more new questions than it answers.

What message would you give students who want to pursue a career in (marine) science?

Kresimir: Do your math homework! There are very few biologists out there discovering new things, so you need to bring something else to the table such as coding or geosciences. There is a lot of quantitative modeling and interplay between other sciences such as physics and chemistry.

Chris: Do your math homework! Having skills in a little bit of everything – all of the sciences come into play. You also need good writing skills.

What is your favorite ocean creature?

Kresimir:  I love all kinds of fish because I can find something unique about each one of them.

Chris: Bluefin tuna

Thanks for the interview gentlemen!

Personal Log

The Oscar Dyson runs for 10 months out of the year, more than most of the other ships in the NOAA fleet. Many of the people on this ship are here almost year-round, and call the Dyson their home. Having places where they can relax and feel at home is important. Besides up on the bridge or out on the deck, another place to spend some free time is in the lounge. Equipped with beanbag chairs, a large couch, and some comfy chairs, the lounge encourages people to hang out, watch a movie, play video games, or just relax after their shift.  We have a large selection of movies, and have access to some of the most recent movies as well. We recently watched Mockingjay, the third movie in the Hunger Games series. It was a good movie, but not as good as the book.

I am really enjoying my time so far on the Oscar Dyson, mostly because I am being challenged to learn new things. We’ve had a bit of downtime the last couple nights, and it has been a good opportunity for me to learn the game of the ship, cribbage. This is a popular game amongst the scientists, and you can typically find some of them playing a quick round in between shifts or as a break from work. I’m by no means great at it yet, but I expect by the end of this trip I’ll be a lot better.

Filleting some rockfish
Filleting some rockfish

Fileting Rockfish
Fileting Rockfish

When I first got on board the Dyson, I remember talking to one of the scientists about filleting fish. I’m not too sure how we got on that subject, but it occurred to me that I had never actually filleted a fish myself. I used to fish as a kid, but we left the cleaning and filleting to my dad (thanks, dad). What could be a better time to learn this skill than on a boat full of experienced fishermen? We ate a rockfish ceviche that Robert, one of the scientists, had made the first night I was on the ship, and it was delicious. When we pulled in our bottom trawl of rockfish, it was the perfect time to learn how to fillet a fish. Rockfish are a bit tricky, as they have several sharp spines covering them. We had to be careful so as not to get stabbed by one of them- it wouldn’t feel very good! I had a busy evening helping to fillet about 14lbs of rockfish. I was by no means quick (our lead fisherman filleted 3 rockfish to my 1), but I had lots of time to practice.

Did you know? Pacific Ocean Perch (POP), or rockfish, were overfished in the 1970’s. Today, Pacific Ocean perch have recovered to the extent that they support a sustainable fishery in Alaska. Read more about the POP.

This POP bears a striking resemblance to the scorpionfish, one of the species we brought up in the SEAMAP Summer Groundfish Survey in the Gulf of Mexico in my TAS trip in 2012. Guess what? These two fish, while living thousands of miles apart, are actually related! They both belong to the family Scorpaenidae.

Pacific Ocean Perch (rockfish)
Pacific Ocean Perch (rockfish)

Scorpionfish we pulled up in a bottom trawl from the Gulf of Mexico (TAS2012)
Scorpionfish we pulled up in a bottom trawl from the Gulf of Mexico (TAS2012)

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DJ Kast, Bongo Patterns, June 1, 2015

NOAA Teacher at Sea
Dieuwertje “DJ” Kast
Aboard NOAA Ship Henry B. Bigelow
May 19 – June 3, 2015

Mission: Ecosystem Monitoring Survey
Geographical areas of cruise: Mid Atlantic Bight, Southern New England, George’s Bank, Gulf of Maine
Date: June 1, 2015

Science and Technology Log:

Bongo Patterns!

Part of my job here on NOAA Ship Henry B. Bigelow is to empty the plankton nets (since there are two we call them bongos). The plankton is put into a sieve and stored  in either ethanol if they came from the small nets (baby bongos) or formalin if they came from the big nets (Main bongos).

What are plankton? Plankton is a greek based word that means drifter or wanderer. This suits these organisms well since they are not able to withstand the current and are constantly adrift. Plankton are usually divided by size (pico, nano, micro, meso, macro, mega). In the plankton tows, we are primarily focused on the macro, meso and megaplankton that are usually with in the size range of 0.2- 20 mm  (meso), 2-20 cm (macro), and above 20 cm (mega) respectively.

Group Size range Examples
Megaplankton > 20 cm metazoans; e.g. jellyfish; ctenophores; salps and pyrosomes (pelagic Tunicata); Cephalopoda; Amphipoda
Macroplankton 2→20 cm metazoans; e.g. Pteropods; Chaetognaths; Euphausiacea (krill); Medusae; ctenophores; salps, doliolids and pyrosomes (pelagic Tunicata); Cephalopoda; Janthinidae (one family gastropods); Amphipoda
Mesoplankton 0.2→20 mm metazoans; e.g. copepods; Medusae; Cladocera; Ostracoda; Chaetognaths; Pteropods; Tunicata; Heteropoda
Microplankton 20→200 µm large eukaryotic protists; most phytoplankton; Protozoa Foraminifera; tintinnids; other ciliates; Rotifera; juvenile metazoans – Crustacea (copepod nauplii)
Nanoplankton 2→20 µm small eukaryotic protists; Small Diatoms; Small Flagellates; Pyrrophyta; Chrysophyta; Chlorophyta; Xanthophyta
Picoplankton 0.2→2 µm small eukaryotic protists; bacteria; Chrysophyta
Femtoplankton < 0.2 µm marine viruses

(Omori, M.; Ikeda, T. (1992). Methods in Marine Zooplankton Ecology)

We will be heading to four main geographical areas. These four areas are: the Mid Atlantic Bight (MAB), the Southern New England (SNE), Gulf of Maine (GOM), and George’s Bank (GB). I’ve been told that the bongos will be significantly different at each of these sites.  I would like to honor each geographical area’s bongos with a representative photo of plankton and larval fish.  There are 30 bongos in each area, and I work on approximately 15 per site.

DJ Kast holding the large plankton net. Photo by Jerry P.
DJ Kast holding the large plankton net. Photo by Jerry Prezioso

Bongos in the Sunset. Photo by DJ Kast
Bongos in the Sunset. Photo by DJ Kast

Here is a video of a Bongo launch.

 

Flow Meter Data. It is used how to count how far the plankton net was towed. Used to calculate the amount of animals per cubic meter. Photo by DJ Kast
Flow Meter Data. It is used how to count how far the plankton net was towed to calculate the amount of animals per cubic meter. Photo by DJ Kast

 

The plankton nets need to be wiped down with saltwater so that the plankton can be collected on the sieve.

 

Day 1: May 19th, 2015

My first Catch of Plankton! Mostly zooplankton and fish larvae. Photo by: DJ Kast
My first Catch of Plankton! Mostly zooplankton and fish larvae. Photo by: DJ Kast

Day 1: Fish Larvae and Copepods. Photo by: DJ Kast
Day 1: Fish Larvae and Copepods. Photo by: DJ Kast

 

 

Day 2: May 20th, 2015

Larval Fish and Amphipods! Photo by: DJ Kast
Larval Fish and Amphipods! Photo by: DJ Kast

Day 3: May 21st, 2015

IMG_7096
Day 3, the plankton tows started filling with little black dots. These were thousands of little sea snails or pteropods. Photo by DJ Kast

IMG_7100
Clogging the Sieve with Pteropods. Photo by DJ Kast

IMG_7110
Close up shot of a Shell-less Sea Butterfly. Photo by: DJ Kast

IMG_7121
Glass Eel Larva. Photo by DJ Kast

 

Day 4: May 22nd, 2015

Butterfly fish found in the plankton tow. Photo by; DJ Kast
Butter fish found in the plankton tow. Photo by; DJ Kast

IMG_7187
Baby Triggerfish Fish Larvae Photo by: DJ Kast

Swimming Crab. Photo by DJ Kast
Swimming Crab. Photo by DJ Kast

IMG_7174
Megalops or Crab Larva. Photo by: DJ Kast

IMG_7176
Polychaete Worms. Photo by: DJ Kast

IMG_7165
Salp. Photo by: DJ Kast

 

Day 5: May 23, 2015

Unidentified organism Photo by DJ Kast.
Unidentified organism
Photo by DJ Kast.

Sand Lance Photo by DJ Kast
Sand Lance Photo by DJ Kast

Polychaete worm. Photo by DJ Kast
Polychaete worm. Photo by DJ Kast

3 amphipods and a shrimp. Photo by DJ Kast
3 amphipods and a shrimp. Photo by DJ Kast

Such diversity in this evenings bongos. Small fish Larva, shrimp, amphipods. Photo by DJ Kast
Such diversity in this evening’s bongos. Small fish Larvae, shrimp, amphipods. Photo by DJ Kast

Small fish Larva. Photo by DJ Kast
Small fish Larvae. Photo by DJ Kast

Below are the bongo patterns for the Southern New England area.

I have learned that there are two lifestyle choices when it comes to plankton and they are called meroplankton or holoplankton.

Plankton are comprised of two main groups, permanent or lifetime members of the plankton family, called holoplankton (which includes as diatoms, radiolarians, dinoflagellates, foraminifera, amphipods, krill, copepods, salps, etc.), and temporary or part-time members (such as most larval forms of sea urchins, sea stars, crustaceans, marine worms, some marine snails, most fish, etc.), which are called meroplankton.

Day 6: May 24th, 2015

Copepod sludge with a fish larva. Photo by: DJ Kast
Copepod sludge with a fish larva. Photo by: DJ Kast

Baby Bongo Sample in ethanol. Photo by: DJ Kast
Baby Bongo Sample in ethanol. Photo by: DJ Kast

Megalops? Photo by: DJ Kast
Megalops?
Photo by: DJ Kast

Fish Larvae. Photo by: DJ Kast
Fish Larvae. Photo by: DJ Kast

Side station sample from the mini bongos on the sieve. Photo by: DJ Kast
Sample from the mini bongos on the sieve. Photo by: DJ Kast

Day 7: May 25th, 2015

???? Photo by DJ Kast
???? Photo by DJ Kast

Tiny Snail. Photo by DJ Kast
Tiny Snail. Photo by DJ Kast

Georges Bank- It is a shallow, sediment-covered plateau bigger than Massachusetts and it is filled with nutrients that get stirred up into the photic zone by the various currents. It is an extremely productive area for fisheries.

Photo by: R.G. Lough (NEFSC)
Photo by: R.G. Lough (NEFSC)

Today, I learned that plankton (phyto & zoo) have evolved in shape to maximize their surface area to try and remain close to the surface. This makes sense to me since phytoplankton are photosynthesizers and require the sun to survive. Consequently, if zooplankton are going to consume them, it would be easier to remain where your food source is located. I think this would make for a great lesson plan that involves making plankton-like creatures and seeing who can make them sink the least in some sort of competition.

Photo by DJ Kast
Photo by DJ Kast

Harpactacoid Copepod. Photo by DJ Kast
Harpactacoid Copepod. Photo by DJ Kast

The Biggest net caught sand lance (10 cm). Photo by DJ Kast
The Biggest net caught sand lance (10 cm). Photo by DJ Kast

Fish Larvae. Photo by DJ Kast
Fish Larvae. Photo by DJ Kast

Day 8: May 26th, 2015 Very Diverse day,  Caprellids- skeleton shrimp, Anglerfish juvenile, Phronima inside of salp! Photo by DJ Kast

Photo by: DJ Kast
Juvenile Anglerfish aka Monk Fish. Photo by: DJ Kast

IMG_7483
Sand Shrimp. Photo by DJ Kast

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A tiny krill with giant black eyes. Photo by DJ Kast

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A small jellyfish! Photo by: DJ Kast

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A phronima (the bee looking thing inside the translucent shell) that ate its way into a salp and is using the salp as protection. Photo by: DJ Kast

Video of the phronima:

Caprellids or Skeleton Shrimp. Photo by DJ Kast
Caprellids or Skeleton Shrimp. Photo by DJ Kast

Video of the Caprellids:

Day 9:  May 27th, 2015= Triggerfish and colorful phronima (purple & brown). Our sieves were so clogged with phytoplankton GOOP, which is evidence of a bloom. We must be in very productive waters,

Evidence of a Phytoplankton bloom in the water, Photo by: DJ Kast
Evidence of a Phytoplankton bloom in the water. Photo by: DJ Kast

Juvenile Triggerfish. Photo by: DJ Kast
Juvenile Triggerfish. Photo by: DJ Kast

Day 10: May 28th, 2015= change in color of copepods. Lots of ctenophores and sea jellies

A Sea jelly found in George's Bank. We are in Canada now! Photo by: DJ Kast
A comb jelly (ctenophore) found in George’s Bank. We are in Canada now! Photo by: DJ Kast

Gooseberry: a type of ctenophore or comb jelly. Photo by DJ Kast
Sea Gooseberry: a type of ctenophore or comb jelly. Photo by DJ Kast

Did you  know? Sea Jellies are also considered plankton since they cannot swim against the current.

Day 11: May 29th, 2015: Border between Georges Bank and the Gulf of Maine!

Krill found in the Gulf of Maine. Photo by DJ Kast
Krill found in the Gulf of Maine. Photo by DJ Kast

Callenoid Copepods. Photo by DJ Kast
Callenoid Copepods- its so RED!!! Photo by DJ Kast

Gulf of Maine! Water comes in from the North East Channel (the Labrador current), coast on one border and George’s  Bank on the other. Definitely colder water, with deep ocean basins. Supposed to see lots of phytoplankton. Tidal ranges in the Gulf of Maine are among the highest in the world ocean

Gulf of Maine currents! Photo by NEFSC NOAA.
Gulf of Maine currents! Photo by NEFSC NOAA.

Day 12: May 30th, 2015: day and night bongo (Just calanus copepods vs. LOTS of krill.)

Krill, Krill, Krill! Photo by DJ Kast
Krill, Krill, Krill! Photo by DJ Kast

Krill are normally found lower in the water column. The krill come up at night to feed and avoid their predators and head back down before dawn. This daily journey up and down is called the vertical migration.

Video of Krill moving:

Day Sample. Photo by DJ Kast
Day Sample. Photo by DJ Kast

Night Sample. Photo by DJ Kast
Night Sample (look at all those krill). Photo by DJ Kast

Day 13: May 31th, 2015: Calanoid Copepod community.  Calanoida feed on phytoplankton (only a few are predators) and are themselves the principal food of fish fry, plankton-feeding fish (such as herring, anchovies, sardines, and saury) and baleen whales.

Calanious Community. Its so RED! Photo by DJ Kast
Calanus Community. It’s so RED! Photo by DJ Kast

Day 14: June 1st, 2015:

Brittle Stars caught in the Plankton Tow. Photo by DJ Kast
Brittle Stars caught in the Plankton Tow. Photo by DJ Kast

Tusk shell. Photo by DJ Kast
Tusk shell. Photo by DJ Kast

Side profile of Shrimp caught in the plankton nets. Photo by DJ Kast
Side profile of Shrimp caught in the plankton nets. Photo by DJ Kast

Shrimp Head. Photo by DJ Kast
Shrimp Head. Photo by DJ Kast

Shrimp Tail with Babies. Photo by DJ Kast
Shrimp Tail with Babies. Photo by DJ Kast

Day 15: June 2nd, 2015: Last Day

Gooey foamy mess in the sieve with all the phytoplankton. Photo by DJ Kast
Gooey foamy mess in the sieve with all the phytoplankton. Photo by DJ Kast

Gooey foamy mess in the net with all the phytoplankton. Photo by DJ Kast
Gooey foamy mess in the net with all the phytoplankton. Photo by DJ Kast

Gooey foamy mess in the jar with all the phytoplankton. Photo by DJ Kast
Gooey foamy mess in the jar with all the phytoplankton. Photo by DJ Kast

Map of all the Bongo and CTD/ Rosette Stations. Photo by DJ Kast.
Map of all the Bongo and CTD/ Rosette Stations (153 total). Photo by DJ Kast.

Through rough seas and some amazingly calm days, we have all persevered as a crew and we have done a lot of science over the last 16 days. We went through 153 stations total. I have learned so much and I would like to thank Jerry, the chief scientist for taking me under his wing and training me in his Ecosystem Monitoring ways.  I would also like to thank Dena Deck and Lynn Whitley for believing in me and writing my letters of recommendation for the Teacher at Sea program. I would love to do this program again! -DJ Kast

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Lauren Wilmoth: Strange Sea Creatures, October 16, 2014

NOAA Teacher at Sea
Lauren Wilmoth
Aboard NOAA Ship Rainier
October 4 – 17, 2014

Mission: Hydrographic Survey
Geographical area of cruise: Kodiak Island, Alaska
Date: Friday, October 16, 2014

Weather Data from the Bridge
Air Temperature: 7.32 °C
Wind Speed: 9.2 knots
Latitude: 57°44.179′ N
Longitude: 152°27.987′ W

Science and Technology Log

ENS Steve Wall collecting a bottom sample.
ENS Steve Wall collecting a bottom sample.

Wednesday, I went on a launch to do bottom sampling and cross lines.  Wednesday was our last day of data acquisition, so the motto on the POD (Plan of the Day) was “LEAVE NO HOLIDAYS! If in doubt, ping it again!”  Bottom sampling is pretty straight forward.  We drive to designated locations and drop a device that looks a little like a dog poop scooper down into the water after attaching it to a wench.  The device has a mechanism that holds the mouth of it open until it is jarred from hitting the bottom.  When it hits the bottom, it snaps closed and hopefully snatches up some of the sediment from the bottom.  Then, we reel it up with the wench and see what’s inside.

We took 10 bottom samples and most were the same.  We had a fine brown sand in most samples.  Some samples contained bits of shell, so we documented when that was the case.  At one location, we tried for samples three times and every time, we got just water.  This happens sometimes if the sea floor is rocky and the device can’t pick up the rocks.  If you try three times and get no definitive answer, you label the sample as unknown.  Two times we got critters in our samples.  One critter we found was an amphipod most likely.  The second critter was shrimp/krill-like, but I don’t know for sure.  Cross lines are just collecting sonar data in lines that run parallel to the previous data lines.  This gives us a better image and checks the data.

TeacheratSea 008 (8)
Survey Tech Christie and Me on our bottom sampling launch.

Amphipod found in bottom sample.
Amphipod found in bottom sample.

Unknown shrimp/krill critter from bottom sample.
Unknown shrimp/krill critter from bottom sample.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Staff observations at Terror Bay.
Staff observations at Terror Bay.

Thursday, we closed out the tidal station at Terror Bay. This entailed doing staff observations, a tidal gauge leveling check, and then break down everything including completing a dive to remove the orifice.  Since I have already taken part in a tidal gauge leveling check, I was assigned to the staff observations and dive party.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, for staff observations you just record the level of the water by reading a staff every six minutes for three hours.  We did this while on a boat, because the tide was pretty high when we got started, so we wouldn’t be able to read the staff if we were on shore.  Again, the reason we do staff observations is so we can compare our results to what the tidal gauge is recording to make sure the tidal gauge is and has been working properly.

While doing staff observations, I saw a small jellyfish looking creature, but it was different.  It had bilateral symmetry instead of radial symmetry. Bilateral symmetry is what we have, where one side is more or less the same as the other side.  Jellyfish have radial symmetry which means instead of just one possible place you could cut to make two side that are the same, there are multiple places you can cut to make it the same on each side.  Also, the critter was moving by flopping its body from side to side which is nothing like a jellyfish.  I had to figure out what this was!  In between our observations, Jeff, the coxswain, maneuvered the boat so I could scoop this guy into a cup.  Once we finished our staff observations, we headed to the ship.  I asked around and Adam (the FOO) identified my creature.  It’s a hooded nudibranch (Melibe leonina).  Nudibranches are sea slugs that come in a beautiful variety of colors and shapes.

Bilateral versus radial symmetry.

The hooded nudibranch.
The hooded nudibranch.

ENS Wood and ENS DeCastro diving for the orifice.
ENS Wood and ENS DeCastro diving for the orifice.

After a quick return to the ship, we headed back out with a dive team to remove the orifice from underwater. Quick reminder: the orifice was basically a metal tube that air bubbles are pushed out of.  The amount of pressure needed to push out the air bubbles is what tells us the depth of the water. Anyways, the water was crystal clear, so it was really neat, because we could see the divers removing the orifice and orifice tubing.  Also, you could see all sorts of jellyfish and sea stars.  At this point, I released the hooded nudibranch back where I got him from.

Jellyfish!
Jellyfish!

Just as we were wrapping up with everything.  The master diver Katrina asked another diver Chris if he was alright, because he was just floating on his back in the water. He didn’t respond.  It’s another drill! One person called it in on the radio, one of the divers hopped back in the water and checked his vitals, and another person grabbed the backboard. I helped clear the way to pull Chris on board using the backboard, strap him down with the straps, and pull out the oxygen mask. We got him back to the ship where the drill continued and the medical officer took over. It was exciting and fun to take part in this drill.  This was a very unexpected drill for many people, and they acted so professional that I am sure if a real emergency occurred, they would be prepared.

Drill: Saving ENS Wood.
Drill: Saving ENS Wood.

Personal Log

Sadly, this was most likely my last adventure for this trip, because I fly out tomorrow afternoon. This trip has really been a one-of-a-kind experience. I have learned and have a great appreciation for what it takes to make a quality nautical chart. I am excited about bringing all that the Rainier and her crew have taught me back to the classroom to illustrate to students the importance of and the excitement involved in doing science and scientific research. Thank you so much to everyone on board Rainier for keeping me safe, helping me learn, keeping me well fed, and making my adventure awesome!  Also, thank you to all those people in charge of the NOAA Teacher at Sea program who arranged my travel, published my blogs, provided me training, and allowed me to take part in this phenomenal program.  Lastly, thank you to my students, family, and friends for reading my blog, participating in my polls, and asking great questions.

Did You Know? 

1 knot is one nautical mile per hour which is equal to approximately 1.151 miles per hour.

Challenge:

Can you figure out what my unknown shrimp/krill critter is?

Unknown shrimp/krill critter from bottom sample.
Unknown shrimp/krill critter from bottom sample.

 

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Britta Culbertson: The Beat of the Bongo (Part 2) – Catching Zooplankton, September 12, 2013

NOAA Teacher at Sea
Britta Culbertson
Aboard NOAA Ship Oscar Dyson
September 4-19, 2013

Mission: Juvenile Walley Pollock and Forage Fish Survey
Geographical Area of Cruise: Gulf of Alaska
Date: Wednesday, September 12th, 2013

Weather Data from the Bridge (for Sept 12th, 2013 at 9:57 PM UTC):
Wind Speed: 23.05 kts
Air Temperature: 11.10 degrees C
Relative Humidity: 93%
Barometric Pressure: 1012.30 mb
Latitude: 58.73 N              Longitude: 151.13 W

Science and Technology Log

Humpback Whale
A humpback whale. (Photo credit: NOAA)

We have been seeing a lot of humpback whales lately on the cruise.  Humpback whales can weigh anywhere from 25-40 tons, are up to 60 feet in length, and consume tiny crustaceans, plankton, and small fish.  They can consume up to 3,000 pounds of these tiny creatures per day (Source: NOAA Fisheries).  Humpback whales are filter feeders and they filter these small organisms through baleen.  Baleen is made out of hard, flexible material and is rooted in the whale’s upper jaw.  The baleen is like a comb and allows the whale to filter plankton and small fish out of the water.

Baleen
This whale baleen is used for filter feeding. It’s like a small comb and helps to filter zooplankton out of the water. (Photo credit: NOAA)

I’ve always wondered how whales can eat that much plankton! Three thousand pounds is a lot of plankton.  I guess I felt that way because I had never seen plankton in real-life and I didn’t have a concept of how abundant plankton is in the ocean. Now that I’m exposed to zooplankton every day, I’m beginning to get a sense of the diversity and abundance of zooplantkon.

In my last blog entry I explained how we use the bongo nets to capture zooplankton.  In this entry, I’ll describe some of the species that we find when clean out the codends of the net.  As you will see, there are a wide variety of zooplankton and though the actual abundance of zooplankton will not be measured until later, it is interesting to see how much we capture with nets that have 20 cm and 60 cm mouths and are towed for only 5-10 minutes at each location.  Whales have much larger mouths and feed for much longer than 10 minutes a day!

Cleaning the codends is fairly simple; we spray them down with a saltwater hose in the wet lab and dump the contents through a sieve with the same mesh size as the bongo net where the codend was attached.  The only time that this proves challenging is if there is a lot of algae, which clogs up the mesh and makes it hard to rinse the sample.  Also, the crab larvae that we find tend to hook their little legs into the sieve and resist being washed out.  Below are two images of 500 micrometer sieves with zooplankton in them.

Zooplankton
A mix of zooplankton that we emptied out of the codend from the bongo.

Crab larvae
Crab larvae (megalopae) that we emptied out of the codend.

Some of the species of zooplankton we are finding include different types of:

  • Megalopae (crab larvae)
  • Amphipods
  • Euphausiid (krill)
  • Chaetognaths
  • Pteropods (shelled: Limasina and shell-less: Clione)
  • Copepods (Calanus spp., Neocalanus spp., and Metridea spp.)
  • Larval fish
  • Jellyfish
  • Ctenophores

The other day we had a sieve full of ctenophores, which are sometimes known as comb jellies because they possess rows of cilia down their sides.  The cilia are used to propel the ctenophores through the water.  Some ctenophores are bioluminescent.  Ctenophores are voracious predators, but lack stinging cells like jellyfish and corals. Instead they possess sticky cells that they use to trap predators (Source:  UC Berkeley).  Below is a picture of our 500 micrometer sieve full of ctenophores and below that is a close-up photo of a ctenophore.

Ctenophores
A sieve full of ctenophores or comb jellies.

Ctenophore
A type of ctenophore found in arctic waters. (Photo credit: Kevin Raskoff, MBARI, NOAA/OER)

It’s fun to compare what we find in the bongo nets to the type of organisms we find in the trawl at the same station.  We were curious about what some of the fish we were eating, so we dissected two of the Silver Salmon that we had found and in one of them, the stomach contents were entirely crab larvae! In another salmon that we dissected from a later haul, the stomach contents included a whole capelin fish.

Juvenile pollock are indiscriminate zooplanktivores.  That means that they will eat anything, but they prefer copepods and euphausiids, which have a high lipid (fat) content. Once the pollock get to be about 100 mm or greater in size, they switch from being zooplanktivores to being piscivorous. Piscivorous means “fish eater.”  I was surprised to hear that pollock sometimes eat each other.  Older pollock still eat zooplankton, but they are cannibalistic as well. Age one pollock will eat age zero pollock (those that haven’t had a first birthday yet), but the bigger threat to age zero pollock is the 2 year old and older cohorts of pollock.  Age zeros will eat small pollock larvae if they can find them.  Age zero pollock are also food for adult Pacific Cod and adult Arrowtooth Flounder.  Older pollock, Pacific Cod, and Arrowtooth Flounder are the most voracious predators of age 0 pollock.  Recently, in the Gulf of Alaska, Arrowtooth Flounder have increased in biomass (amount of biological material) and this has put a lot of pressure on the pollock population. Scientists are not yet sure why the biomass of Arrowtooth Flounder is increasing. (Source: Janet Duffy-Anderson – Chief Scientist aboard the Dyson and Alaska Fisheries Science Center).

The magnified images below, which I found online, are the same or similar to some of the species of zooplankton we have been catching in our bongo nets.  Click on the images for more details.

A chaetognath found in the Bering Sea. (Photo credit: Dave Forcucci, NOAA)
A type of euphausiid called Thysanoessa raschii. (Photo credit: WoRMS Database)
Dungeness crab megalopa (larval form). Photo credit: Liz Leavens, Padilla Bay NERR
A type of naked or shell-less pteropod called an “ice snail”. (Photo credit: Kevin Raskoff, NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration)
A type of copepod called Calanus. (Photocredit: Russ Hopcroft, University of Alaska, Fairbanks)
Limacina helicina, a type of shelled pteropod. (Photo credit: Russ Hopcroft, University of Alaska, Fairbanks)
Neocalanus critatus – a type of copepod found in the Gulf of Alaska. (Photocredit: Russ Hopcroft, University of Alaska, Fairbanks)
A type of amphipod found in the cold waters around Alaska. (Photo credit: Russ Hopcroft, NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration)
Metridia pacifica – a type of copepod found the Gulf of Alaska. (Photo credit: Russ Hopcroft, University of Alaska, Fairbanks)

Personal Log (morning of September 14, 2013)

I’m thankful that last night we had calm seas and I was able to get a full eight hours of sleep without feeling like I was going to be thrown from my bed.  This morning we are headed toward the Kenai Peninsula, so I’m excited that we might get to see some amazing views of the Alaskan landscape.  The weather looks like it will improve and the winds have died down to about 14 knots this morning.  Last night’s shift caught an octopus in their trawl net; so hopefully, we will find something more interesting than just kelp and jellyfish in our trawls today.

Did You Know?

I mentioned that we had found some different types of pteropods in our bongo nets.  Pteropods are a main food source for North Pacific juvenile salmon and are eaten by many marine organisms from krill to whales.  There are two main varieties of pteropods; there are those with shells and those without.  Pteropods are sometimes called sea butterflies.

Pteropod
A close-up of Limacina helicina, a shelled pteropod or sea butterfly. (Photo credit: Russ Hopcroft/University of Alaska, Fairbanks)

Unfortunately, shelled pteropods are very susceptible to ocean acidification.  Scientists conducted an experiment in which they placed shelled pteropods in seawater with pH and carbonate levels that are projected for the year 2100.  In the image below, you can see that the shell dissolved slowly after 45 days.  If pteropods are at the bottom of the food chain, think of the implications of the loss of pteropods for the organisms that eat them!

Pteropods
Shelled pteropods after being exposed to sea water that has the anticipated carbonate and pH levels for the year 2100. Notice the degradation of the shell after 45 days. (Photo credit: David Liittschwager/National Geographic Stock)

Read more about ocean acidification on the NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) website. Also, check out this press release from November 2012 by the British Antarctic Survey about the first evidence of ocean acidification affecting marine life in the Southern Ocean.

Teacher’s Corner

In my last blog entry on the bongo, I talked about using the “frying pan” or clinometer to measure wire angle.  If you’re interested in other applications of clinometers, there are instructions for making homemade clinometers here and there’s also a lesson plan from National Ocean Services Education about geographic positioning and the use of clinometers this website.

If you are interested in teaching your students about different types of plankton, here is a Plankton Wars lesson plan from NOAA and the Southeast Phytoplankton Monitoring Network, which helps students to understand how plankton stay afloat and how surface area plays a role in plankton survival.

If you would like to show your students time series visualizations of phytoplankton and zooplankton, go to NOAA’s COPEPODite website.

Zooplankton time series
Zooplankton time series visualization from the COPEPODite website.

For more plankton visualizations and data, check out NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service website.

If you are interested in having your students learn more about ocean acidification, there is a great ocean acidification module developed for the NOAA Ocean Data Education Project on the Data in the Classroom website.

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Julia Harvey: Listening to Fish/How I Spent My Shift, July 28, 2013

NOAA Teacher at Sea
Julia Harvey
Aboard NOAA Ship Oscar Dyson (NOAA Ship Tracker)
July 22 – August 10, 2013  

Mission:  Walleye Pollock Survey
Geographical Area of Cruise:  Gulf of Alaska
Date:  7/28/13

Weather Data from the Bridge (as of 18:00 Alaska Time):
Wind Speed: 15.61 knots
Temperature:  13.71 C
Humidity:  91%
Barometric Pressure:  1023 mb

Science and Technology Log:

How do scientists use acoustics to locate pollock and other organisms?

Scientists aboard the NOAA Research Vessel Oscar Dyson use acoustics, to locate schools of fish before trawling.  The Oscar Dyson has powerful, extremely sensitive, carefully calibrated, scientific acoustic instruments or “fish finders” including the five SIMRAD EK60 transducers located on the bottom of the centerboard.

Trnasducer
Scientists are using the EK60 to listen to the fish.

This “fish-finder” technology works when transducers emit a sound wave at a particular frequency and detect the sound wave bouncing back (the echo) at the same frequency.  When the sound waves return from a school of fish, the strength of the returning echo helps determine how many fish are at that particular site.

The transducer sends out a signal and waits for the return echo...
The transducer sends out a signal and waits for the return echo…

Sound waves bounce or reflect off of fish and other creatures in the sea differently.  Most fish reflect sound energy sent from the transducers because of their swim bladder<s, organs that fish use to stay buoyant in the water column.

swim bladder
The above picture shows the location of the swim bladder. (Photo courtesy of greatneck.k12.ny.us)

Click on this picture to see how sound travels from various ocean creatures through water. (Photo from sciencelearn.org)
Click on this picture to see how sound travels from various ocean creatures through water. (Photo from sciencelearn.org)

These reflections of sound (echoes) are sent to computers which display the information in echograms.  The reflections showing up on the computer screen are called backscatter.  The backscatter is how we determine how dense the fish are in a particular school.  Scientists take the backscatter that we measure from the transducers and divide that by the target strength for an individual and that gives the number of individuals that must be there to produce that amount of backscatter.  For example, a hundred fish produce 100x more echo than a single fish.  This information can be used to estimate the pollock population in the Gulf of Alaska.

echograms
These are the echograms that are produced by the EK60.  Five frequencies are used to help identify the type of fish.

The trawl data provide a sample from each school and allow the NOAA scientists to take a closer look by age, gender and species distribution.  Basically, the trawl data verifies and validates the acoustics data.  The acoustics data, combined with the validating biological data from the numerous individual trawls give scientists a very good estimate for the entire walleye pollock population in this location.

echogram for krill
These echograms are similar to the ones produced when we trawled for krill. Krill have a significant backscatter with the higher frequencies (bottom right screens)

Personal Log:

How I spent my shift on Saturday, July 27th?

When I arrived at work at 4 pm, a decision was made to trawl for krill.  A methot trawl is used to collect krill.

Methot Trawl
Survey tech, Vince and Fishermen Brian and Kelly ready the methot trawl.

Then we set to work processing the catch.  First we have to suit up in slime gear because the lab will get messy.  My previous blog mentioned not wanting to count all of the krill in the Gulf of Alaska.  But in this case we needed to count the krill and other species that were collected by the methot trawl.

Counting krill
I needed my reading glasses to count these small krill.

How many krill do you think we collected?

Krill Sample
This is the total krill from the first methot trawl of the night.
How many are here?

Patrick, the lead scientist, put a few specimens under the microscope so we could see the different types of krill.

krill
Closeup look at krill.
Photo courtesy of NOAA

The collection of krill was preserved in formaldehyde and sea water.  It will be sent to Poland for further species diagnosis.

preserving krill
Scientist Darin Jones preserves the krill for shipment to Poland.

As the ship continued back on transect, I wandered in to see what Jodi and Darin were doing with the data collected last night.   Jodi was processing data from the multibeam sonar and Darin was surveying the images from the drop camera.  Jodi was very patient explaining what the data means.  I will write more about that later.  But I did feel quite accomplished as I realized my understanding was increasing.

multibeam data
These images are what Jodi was processing.

A decision was made to do another methot trawl.  This time we had a huge sample.

In an approximately 50 gram sample we counted 602 individual krill.  Compare this to the 1728 individuals in a 50 gram sample from the first trawl.  They were much bigger this time.  The total weight of the entire sample of krill was 3.584 kilograms.

krill
This was the haul from the second methot trawl.

How many individuals were collected in the second trawl?  (Check your answer at the end of the blog)

Around midnight, Paul decided to verify an echogram by trawling.

trawl net haul
Emptying out the trawl net right next to the fish lab.

We collected data from the trawl net and the pocket net.

squid
This trawl had a variety of specimen including Pacific Ocean perch, salmon, squid, eulachon, shrimp and pollock.

The pocket net catches the smaller organisms that escape through the trawl net.

pocket trawl
These were caught in the pocket net.

It was after 2 am by the time we had processed catch and washed down the lab.  The internet was not available for the rest of my shift due to the ship’s position so I organized my growing collection of videos and pictures.

I wasn’t sure how I would handle my night shift (4 pm to 4 am) after I dozed off during the first night.  Now that I have adjusted, I really enjoy the night shift.  The night science team of Paul, Darin and Jodi are awesome.

Did You Know?

People who are on the Oscar Dyson live throughout the United States.  They fly to meet the boat when they are assigned a cruise.  Jodi is from Juneau, Alaska.  Paul is from Seattle, Washington.  And Darin is from Seattle/North Carolina.  There are a number who are based out of Newport, Oregon.

Something to Think About:

When we are fishing, a number of birds gather behind the boat.  What different sea birds are observable this time of the year in our survey area?

birds
Many sea birds follow the ship hoping for some of our catch.

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Adam Renick, Getting To Know the Ocean – The Kona Ecosystem, June 16, 2013

NOAA Teacher at Sea
Adam Renick
NOAA Ship Oscar Elton Sette
June 12th – June 26th, 2013 

Mission: Kona Integrated Ecosystems Assessment http://www.pifsc.noaa.gov/kona_iea/
Geographical area of cruise: The West Coast of the Island of Hawaii
Date: Sunday, June 16, 2013

Current Air Temperature: 78° F
Sea Surface Temperature: 79° F
Wind Speed: 20 knots

Personal Log
 

Sunrise in Hawaii
Sunrise in Hawaii

All is well on the Sette! Skies have been clear, waters have been relatively calm and the mood onboard has been positive. With the cooperative work of the scientists, the crew’s expert ship handling and Clem and Jay’s fine cooking it has been a very interesting week for me. For years I have taught about physical oceanography with a focus on what we know, not necessarily how we know it. I had a sense of how things were done in general; using sonar and taking samples, but I never understood the details of how we can target specific locations to study in such a vast ocean to get a picture of it as a whole system. In just a few days aboard this research vessel I have been given a look at how ocean science is conducted and how our knowledge about the expansive oceans is built one piece of thoughtful data at a time. In the last week I have learned how a well-organized research plan is executed and have also learned about some of the difficulties of conducting science at sea as well.

 
Science and Technology Log – Night Trawling
 

The zones of life in the ocean.
The zones of life in the ocean.

One of my nightly tasks is to help a team of scientists conduct trawls of the mesopelagic zone to identify the organisms that live there. The mesopelagic zone (pictured) is also known as the twilight zone because it is where there is a small amount of sunlight that penetrates the water, but not enough for photosynthesis to occur. If you recall from my last blog, the Sette has an active acoustics team that is using active sonar to identify layers of organisms at specific depths in the water column. During the daytime this layer is too deep for our nets to catch them. But at nighttime this layer migrates up towards the surface allowing us catch them with in a net in a process called a trawl. We do two trawls each night. Before each trawl the acoustics team tells the trawl team the depth of the target layer. The deck crew then deploys a fairly large net down to that depth and drags it through the water to scoop up the organisms that we have targeted. Blog4 (1)After about an hour of doing this the net is pulled back up to the ship where all the creatures are collected in a bag called a “cod end”. It may sound fairly simple, but this process requires the coordination of many different people as the scientists need to communicate with the deck operations crew, and the deck crew has to work with the captain to ensure that the very long net line hits the target and does not get tangled or damaged in the process. Keep in mind that this is happening at 1:00am with 20 knot winds and 10 foot waves. It is a wonder to see and be a part of this operation.

Krill...
Krill…

Once we have collected all of the organisms we move on to sorting the catch. We separate the contents of the net into five main categories and then measure the number, mass and volume of each of the types. Perhaps the most commonly abundant of the groups that we classify are mesopelagic fish, which are dark in color and contain photophores to provide them camouflage in the night. Cephalopods (squid) are also quite common along with gelatinous creatures such as jellyfish and crustaceans over 4cm in length, such as shrimp. The final category of interest to us is the shore-fish, which are juvenile fish that will eventually move more towards the land or reefs once they are bigger. The shore-fish are typically the most beautiful looking of the catch.

Shore-fish sorting
Shore-fish sorting

Everything that is left over is then lumped into a general category called miscellaneous, which is mainly composed of krill. Some cool stuff we’ve gotten in the bag that don’t really have their own category have been two cookie-cutter sharks, a seahorse and two remoras.

Blog4 (4)
Examining a Cookie-Cutter Shark

Shark
Close-Up of Shark

So what does this all have to do with cetaceans? I have yet to mention them in my blogs. By studying the composition of the mesopelagic layer we can better understand the food chain and ecosystem that the whales and dolphins depend on. Next week when we begin actively searching for cetaceans we will be able to better understand their behaviors because we have background data on where their food is, what it is composed of and how it behaves. Hope all is well back on land…

 
Best,
Adam Renick
NOAA Teacher at Sea

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Sue Cullumber: Testing the Water and More, June 19, 2013

NOAA Teacher at Sea
Sue Cullumber
Onboard NOAA Ship Gordon Gunter
June 5–24, 2013

Mission: Ecosystem Monitoring Survey
Date: 6/19/2013
Geographical area of cruise: The continental shelf from north of Cape Hatteras, NC, including Georges Bank and the Gulf of Maine, to the Nova Scotia Shelf

Weather Data from the Bridge:
Latitude/longitude: 3853.256 N, 7356.669W
Temperature: 18.6ºC
Barometer: 1014.67 mb
Speed: 9.7 knots

CTDscreen
CTD reading on the computer. Blue is density, red is salinity, green is temperature and black indicates the depth.

Science and Technology Log:

Even before the plankton samples are brought onboard, scientists start recording many types of data when the equipment is launched. The bongos are fitted with an electronic CTD (conductivity, temperature and density) and as they are lowered into the ocean the temperature, density and salinity (salt content) are recorded on a computer. This helps scientists with habitat modeling and determining the causes for changes in the zooplankton communities. Each bongo net also has a flow-through meter which records how much water is moving through the net during the launch and can is used to estimate the number of plankton found in one cubic meter of water.

ZIplankton
Zooplankton (Z) and Icthyoplankton (I) samples.

The plankton collected from the two bongo nets are separated into two main samples that will be tested for zooplankton and icthyoplankton (fish larvae and eggs). These get stored in a glass jars with either ethanol or formalin to preserve them. The formalin samples are sent to a lab in Poland for counting and identification. Formalin is good for preserving the shape of the organism, makes for easy identification, and is not flammable, so it can be sent abroad.  However, formalin destroys the genetics (DNA) of the organisms, which is why ethanol is used with some of the samples and these are tested at the NOAA lab in Narragansett, Rhode Island.

sueplankton
Holding one of our zooplankton samples – photo by Paula Rychtar.

When the samples are returned from Poland, the icthyoplankton samples are used by scientists to determine changes in the abundance of the different fish species. Whereas, the zooplankton samples are often used in studies on climate change. Scientists have found from current and historic research (over a span of about 40 years) that there are changes in the distribution of different species and increases in temperature of the ocean water.

At the Rosette stations we take nutrient samples from the different water depths. They are testing for nitrates, phosphates and silicates. Nutrient samples are an important indicator of zooplankton productivity. These nutrients get used up quickly near the surface by phytoplankton during the process of photosynthesis (remember phytoplankton are at the base of the food chain and are producers). As the nutrients pass through the food chain (zooplankton eating phytoplankton and then on up the chain) they are returned to the deeper areas by the oxidation of the sinking organic matter. Therefore, as you go deeper into the ocean these nutrients tend to build up.  The Rosettes also have a CTD attached to record conductivity, temperature and density at the different depths.

Chris-DICtests
Scientist, Chris Taylor, completing the dissolved inorganic carbon test.

CO2test
The dissolved inorganic carbon test uses chemicals to stop any further biological processes and suspend the CO2 in “time”.

Another test that is conducted on the Rosettes is for the amount of dissolved inorganic carbon. This test is an indicator of the amount of carbon dioxide that the ocean uptakes from outside sources (such as cars, factories or other man-made sources). Scientists want to know how atmospheric carbon is affecting ocean chemistry  and marine ecosystems and changing the PH (acids and bases) of the ocean water. One thing they are interested in is how this may be affecting the formation of calcium in marine organisms such as clams, oysters, and coral.

New word: oxidation – the chemical combination of a substance with oxygen.

canal
Cape Cod canal.

Personal Log:

This week we headed back south and went through the Cape Cod canal outside of Plymouth, Massachusetts. I had to get up a little earlier to see it, but it was well worth it.  The area is beautiful and there were many small boats and people enjoying the great weather.

smallboat
Small boat bringing in a new group to the Gordon Gunter.

We also did a small boat transfer to bring five new people onboard, while three others left at the same time. It was hard to say goodbye, but it will be nice to get to know all the new faces.

dolphinsthree
Common Dolphins swimming next to the Gordon Gunter.

So now that we are heading south the weather is warming up. I have been told that we may start seeing Loggerhead turtles as the waters warm up – that would be so cool.  We had a visit by another group of Common Dolphins the other day. They were swimming along the side of the ship and then went up to the bow. They are just so fun to watch and photograph.

We have been seeing a lot of balloons (mylar and rubber) on the ocean surface. These are released into the air by people, often on cruise ships, and then land on the surface. Sea turtles, dolphins, whales and sea birds often mistake these for jelly fish and eat them.  They can choke on the balloons or get tangled in the string, frequently leading to death. Today, we actually saw more balloons than sea birds!!! A good rule is to never release balloons into the air no matter where you live!

balloon
A mylar balloon seen in the water by our ship.

Did you know?  A humpback whale will eat about 5000 pounds of krill in a day. While a blue whale eats about 8000 pounds of krill daily.

Question of the day?  If 1000 krill = 2 pounds, then together how many krill does a humpback and blue whale consume on a daily basis.

Blue Whale, Balaenoptera Musculus
Blue Whale, Balaenoptera Musculus

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Marla Crouch: The Mystery and Surf Your Berth, June 14, 2013

NOAA Teacher at Sea
Marla Crouch
Aboard NOAA Ship Oscar Dyson
June 8 – 26, 2013 

Mission:  Pollock Survey
Geographical area of cruise:  Gulf of Alaska
Date: June 14, 2013

Weather Data from the Bridge: as of 1900
Wind Speed 9.57 kts
Air Temperature 6.84°C
Relative Humidity 81.00%
Barometric Pressure 1,030.5 mb

Latitude:  53.52N   Longitude: 166.34W

Science and Technology Log

The sonar on the Oscar Dyson recently created the graph below.  The graph displays the sea floor, the red, yellow, and green bands toward the bottom and along the top a few meters from the surface the layer of green and red, is the mystery.

Graphic provided by NOAA
Graphic provided by NOAA

The echoes, that create the graph do not look like fish.  The scientists recognize that something is there, the questions is, what?  Further exploration is done, but nothing definitive is found. This creates a bit of a dilemma, which initiates a whole series of conversations about trouble shooting the equipment, using different data gathering techniques (something different than a trawl), and hypothesizing about what is creating the image since there are no apparent biology.  Could the image be created by something physical in the water?  Until the make-up of the image can be identified the sonar signature, is titled and recorded as Mystery Mix One.

Taina Honkalehto, one of the scientists on this cruise, tells me that they have been encountering Mystery Mix One for a number of years here, in the Gulf of Alaska, and in different parts of the ocean at different times of the year. Mystery Mixes Two and Three are floating around as well.

Investigating Mystery Mix One:  Time stamp 12 June 2013, 050952 GMT (This time stamp equates to 8:09 almost 8:10 p.m. June 11, 2013 PDT.)

The stereo camera, which I talked about in my last blog, is a new piece of equipment that scientists are using to collect data about the ocean floor and the biology of the region.  The stereo camera was launched and submerged to a depth of 50m into the middle of Mystery Mix One, and left at that depth for 30 minutes while the Oscar Dyson drifted with the mix.  When the pictures were downloaded, the only identifiable objects were copepods, big copepods. Remember “big” is a relative term, big compared to what? Copepods can be smaller than 1 mm in length.  These big copepods are probably 6 to 8 mm.

The light image in the upper left-hand corner is a copepod. Picture provided by NOAA
The light image in the upper left-hand corner is a copepod. Picture provided by NOAA

This is a clearer picture of a copepod. This is a clearer picture of a copepod. Picture courtesy of comenius.susqu.edu
This is a clearer picture of a copepod.
Picture courtesy of comenius.susqu.edu

The strong sonar image created by the copepods heighten the mystery; starting another round of questions and discussions by the scientists.  Why are copepods creating such a strong sonar signature?  Why are the copepods so prominent on 18 kHz? (18 kHz is a low frequency that usually captures echoes from large objects, while small things like copepods would be seen at higher frequencies, like 200 kHz.)   Could something else be in Mystery Mix One, something that was not seen by the camera?  The discussion goes on creating a working hypothesis; the signature is being created by a combination of the copepods themselves, whatever they are feeding on and gases, being produced.  Not all the scientists are in agreement.  If Mystery Mix One was to be sampled again, would you get similar results?

Pictures from the stereo camera provided one piece of possible evidence that may lead to answering the question, “What is in Mystery Mix One?”

The next day another piece of possible evidence is added.  Oscar Dyson’s sea water intake filter is cleaned and what is found?  Krill and big copepods.  Pictures are taken and the evidence is recorded in the scientists’ journal. More evidence needs to be collected, but advances are being made to identify Mystery Mix One.

Krill are in the red ringed filter. Copepods can be seen at the bottom of the bucket.
Krill are in the red ringed filter. Copepods can be seen at the bottom of the bucket.

Personal Log 

The first few days out at sea the waters were really calm, 1 to 3 foot swells or seas, which feels like the soothing glide of a rocking chair.  Now however, weather is moving in; wind speed is up around 15kts and the swells are about 9 ft.  Friday’s forecast is for 30kt winds and 12ft. seas.  Looking at the big picture, 9 to 12 foot seas are not very big.  But, walking around the ship with seas of that height requires due diligent to safely navigate the passage ways and steep stairs.  And you definitely need to mind the doors, make sure the door is securely latched and when opening hold on tight, as you don’t want the door to get away from you. Somebody might be standing on the other side.  Another activity that can prove challenging is getting into and out of your bunk.

The berths, or rooms, aboard ship are, for the most part, designed for two people. Look at the picture of my berth.  You can see a desk, chair, dresser and two draped bunk beds.  Mine’s the top bunk.  Our room is just about even with the water line.  That is important to know, because the lower you are in the ship the less dramatic the motion.  I’ll talk about the pitch and roll of the ship in a future blog

This is my berth.
This is my berth.

Now imagine yourself lying on a teeter totter.  You are right above the fulcrum, so you are nice and level.  An unbalanced force is now affecting your teeter totter, your feet go up your head goes down and you slide a little.  Then there is a change and you head goes up your feet go down and you slide back.  This back and forth motion is continuous, and the motion presses you into the teeter totter.  I call this the sloshing phenomena, because all the while you are teeter tottering you hear the sea water rushing pass the hull.  But wait, there is more.  Your teeter totter only moves in two dimensions, but we live in three dimensions.  Keep your teeter totter going, up and down, hear the water stream by and add a sideways roll, back and forth.  Don’t fall off your teeter totter.  You are not quite ready to surf your berth yet, sometimes the up and down, and side to side movements occur so quickly that you actually loose contact with your teeter totter.  Now you’re surfing!  I have yet to find the seat belt for my bunk.

Remember I said that my berth was low in the ship, there are only a few berths on this level, and more berths are two and three floors above me. Now think about a metronome.  If you’re not sure what a metronome is think about a windshield wiper on a car.  Both the metronome and the windshield wiper make small movements at the pivot point or fulcrum; the further away from the fulcrum the greater the range of motion. Think about how the motion is magnified as you move up from the water line.  Those folks above me are really surfing.

Did You Know?

When Taina and I were talking about Mystery Mix One she said the 18 kHz frequency ensonifying the larger fish.  I think ensonify is a cool word. I wonder if Mrs. Sunmark or Mrs. Delpez (our school’s band and orchestra teachers) have used the word ensonify in their classes?  Can any of you tell me what ensonify means?

Did you know you can follow my voyage on NOAA’s ship tracker website?  Here is the link.

http://shiptracker.noaa.gov/shiptracker.html

In my next blog, I have another fashion statement – Gumbi Marla!  And maybe something about the moon and Apollo 17.

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Marla Crouch: Checking Out the Fish! June 12, 2012

NOAA Teacher at Sea
Marla Crouch
Aboard NOAA Ship Oscar Dyson
June 8-26, 2013 

Mission:  Pollock Survey
Geographical area of cruise:  Gulf of Alaska
Date: June 12, 2013

Weather Data from the Bridge: as of 2300
Wind Speed 12.30 kts
Air Temperature 6.10°C
Relative Humidity 98.00%
Barometric Pressure 1,009.6mb

Latitude:  54.22N   Longitude: 164.65W

 Science and Technology Log

Here I am all decked out in my rain gear in the wet lab, ready to sort the catch of our first bottom trawl.  Quite a fashion statement, don’t you think?

Me in my slime gear.
Me in my slime gear.

Walleye Pollock (latin name Theragra chalcogramma), a fish that lives both on and above the seafloor, is the main target of the Pollock survey, but information about other sea life is also collected.  When we start sorting the catch from this bottom trawl, the primary population is Pacific Ocean Perch (POP, Sebastes alutus).  The POP is a member of the Scorpaenidae or scorpionfish family and has poisonous spines.  When handling the fish I have to be really careful of the very sharp spines to avoid injury.  Fortunately, the POP’s teeth are not as formidable as their spines, so I can grab them by the mouth to safely move them around.