Bottles and birds Jeremy Young, January 16, 2013 Bottles
Today started for me at 5am, getting up in order to help with sub-sampling of the bioassay experiment – or in other words pouring water. A lot of the science on this kind of biological cruise is done by small teams or individual scientists in their own lab areas – or nests as they tend to become. Laura Bretherton uses flouresence to measure how much algal matter there is in the water, I use a microscope to see which micro-organisms are present, Richard Sanders measures the concentration of nutrient elements and so on. So, a lot of the work is a bit solitary, but there are some major communal endeavours and especially running our big culture experiments. These are the infamous‘ bioassays’, where we look at the effect of different carbon dioxide levels on the plankton.
Jeremy helping Sophie with the bioassay sampling @ Mark Moore
As specialists we all look at samples from the experiments but we also all help with running them – and my contribution every couple of days is to help with taking the samples. This involves getting dressed up in a fetching lab coat and hair-net and pouring water from big bottles into little bottles for an hour or so. After that it is back to the daily routine of filtering sea-water, preparing microscope slides, curating the growing mountain of samples and doing a bit of microscopy. But when it gets a bit much and we need a break there is the compensation of being able to walk outside into the world of the Southern Ocean and its regular inhabitants.
23