 |
| Midnight zooplankton nets! |
Thank you to Celeste for these lovely photos...you can read her blog here: http://celestethelion.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/let-arctic-science-begin.html
Louisa and I complete vertical plankton net trawls at midnight and midnight on each sampling station, which has so far been every day for a week!! The great thing is that there is almost 24 hours of sunlight, except now it's getting a tad colder. From a biological perspective this is extremely important as we are trying to understand an reaction called diapause, a very important vertical migration through the water column during the winter that we want to understand, predict and model so that we can see what changes will happen if the Arctic sea ice keeps retreating at the same rate is is now. SAMs explain why this is so important, ''
Calanus seasonally migrate into deeper waters to save energy and
reduce their losses to predation in an overwintering process called
diapause that is fuelled entirely by carbon-rich fat (lipids). This
vertical 'lipid pump' transfers vast quantities of carbon into the
ocean's interior and ultimately represents the draw-down of atmospheric
carbon dioxide (CO
2), an important process within the global carbon cycle.''
 |
| The lovely Louisa who is working on the ARIZE project which is in collaboration with the DIAPOD project, we've got through these hectic days together! |
Sometimes the nets are full with a substance called Extracellular polymeric substances (EPS), basically waste organic material and also lots of chain diatoms
 |
| We get absolutely soaked every time we do this! Here we are hosing down the plankton net to try and get all of the pelagic sample into the codend. The codend is the end of the zooplankton net, it has a 200 micrometer mesh on it to filter out all the big plankton and leave us with the plankton that we want to look at...the mighty copepods! |
 |
| After each |
As the leader of this project Professor David Pond explains, '' Continued global warming throughout the 21st century is expected to
exert a strong influence on the timing, magnitude and spatial
distribution of diatom productivity in the Arctic Ocean. Little is known
about how
Calanus will respond to these changes, making it
difficult to understand how the wider Arctic ecosystem and its
biogeochemistry will be affected by climate change''. Hence, the need to study this area of the Arctic insitu. You can read more about the DIAPOD project here and it has a bit more information about the little beauties that I will be studying when I get back to Oban. http://www.sams.ac.uk/diapod
