Life Beyond the Beaker

I've been at the Scottish Association for Marine science in Oban since Septemember and time is going quickly...as is the light! It was great starting at SAMs with the Arctic cruise as it meant that I had already met lots of people which made settling in much easier (thanks Emily and Marie)! Since moving to Scotland I have been living with my friend Ali Rose in Fort William which has been great fun, but now it's time to move to Oban as the 2 hour commute everyday is getting very tiring! It's such a beautiful place to work, I am very lucky. Especially as at SAMs there are a group of fun people who like climbing, mountain biking (I have found a love for this sport), running and snorkelling! So I feel like I am seeing Scotland in all it's glory.  View over Dunstaffnage bay looking up towards Loch Etive where we go sampling  Loch Etive - this is where I do weekly trips out on the SAMs boat Seol Mara  We are currently working with a collaberator call...

  Here's a bit more of a detailed blog to show you what we have been doing on the cruise for the last 3 weeks whilst traveling up to 81.46' North; which I believe is the furthest that the JCR ship has been! Check out Celeste's blog for a photo of a Walrus and a cool photo of a minke whale!   http://celestethelion.blogspot.co.uk/  On a ship it's definitely easy to stay indoors so we all make a habit of sitting outside watching the world (mostly the wildlife) go by.   One of my best moments of the trip so far is just before we reached the ice at 2 am after a zooplankton net a few of us were outside enjoying the sun when we noticed humpbacks breaching. It was an astonishing site that actually made me cry with happiness because it was nature at it's best - how can something so big pull it's self out of the water like that. The biggest question is why do they do this? Scientists think it is to show an emotion, mostly likely happiness, which makes ...

After 2.5 weeks of no communication we are now back online as we have headed back South. For the last two weeks the RRS JCR has been sailing up the Barents sea where we reached 81 degrees North! I will upload a full science blog about all that we got up to in the next few days when the internet has fully recovered. For now, here are some epic shots kindly given to me by Johan (as usually I forgot my camera or just wanted to sit and enjoy the presence of such a big apex predator) of some polar bears we saw along our way ice breaking and transiting through the pack and fast ice of the Northern Barents Sea.  Their scientific name is Ursus maritimus , translating to maritime bear which as we saw is a very fitting name for them as they navigated around broken up pieces of fast ice, rotting pieces and also big areas of open water. They are very powerful swimmers using their front two legs for the power and their back legs as rudders to assist with steering. As y...

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 fuell...