production of DMSP? John is carrying out a set of extra incubation experiments try to answer these kind of questions.
John carefully placing his experimental bottle in the incubation container @ Jeremy Young
This isn’ t quite the whole story, and there’ s another piece of the jigsaw we hope to tackle. DMS and DMSP in seawater are a source of food for bacteria – potentially a very important source of food as they provide both carbon and sulphur, essential elements for bacterial growth. So we are performing a further set of side experiments to understand the effect ocean acidification may have on the rate at which bacteria devour DMSP and DMS.
All in all, this keeps John and I pretty busy!
It’ s a bioassay sampling day today – day 3 of experiment 2. So it was an early start followed by a long day of sampling, incubating and analysing for a lot of us. We’ re still heading north, in the general direction of South Georgia, and we have hit rough seas again overnight. It’ s a stark contrast to our days in the pack ice – angry seas, dark skies, a wild wind …. and not a penguin in sight.
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