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 .
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