Man Overboard!

The sunsets have been unbelievable
out here in the North Pacific!

I know it has been an awfully long time since I last posted, but the days fly by here and I remain insanely busy. So last time I posted, I had a set schedule and things were looking great. Since then, we have added another experiment (and approximately 2 more hours of filtering in the afternoon). Last cruise, Jennifer was in charge of this experiment but because the number of scientists has greatly decreased, I have taken it over. Basically, we collect water in a bunch of different bottles during a 4 am cast. These bottles are placed in 3 different incubators – one at the normal temperature, one 2 degrees colder, and one two degrees warmer. Every day, over the course of 4 days, we test the water to see if the abundance of phytoplankton (or any other characteristics of the phytoplankton) have changed. It been crazy busy aboard the Kilo Moana! So again, I apologize for leaving you hanging and not posting for a while. I’ll try to update you on the last week!

More storm petrels!

The animal sightings have continued. Not with whales this time, but with sharks and dolphins! One afternoon we saw a group of dolphins merrily splashing close to our boat. Then, during one of our 2 am casts, a few us saw a shark cut through the surface water above the CTD. It was only 4 or 5 feet long, but it was awesome! The following day, several of the scientists and crew members saw a large fin come of the water near the stern of the ship. Only one of the crew members got a good look at it and he claims it was a 10-foot great white shark!!! No one else could confirm it, but I choose to believe it because it is so exciting!! Remember the bird I talked about lat week? Well, that was just the beginning. One day this past week we ran into a flock of the storm petrels and at least 30 of them had hit the deck by the end of the morning CTD cast! This time, we threw them upwards when we tossed them overboard. When heaved up, they spread out their wings and flew away, instead of just splashing into the water. After dozens of birds flew right out of my hands, I felt a little like Snow White! 

Ellie in surgery :(

On sadder news, tragedy struck a few days ago in the Johnson Lab. My trusty fluorometer, Ellie, bit the dust. She suddenly started beeping alarms and flashing numbers that didn’t make any sense. Dr. Johnson and I immediately began surgery, trying to revive her by replacing the fuse, power cord, bulb, and other small parts. That day ended in failure. I started to use the Tennessee fluorometer, but it felt like I was cheating on Ellie. It was calibrated differently and I was getting crazy numbers! We decided to try a more complex surgery the next day and if it didn’t work, we would give up. After completely disemboweling Ellie we managed to get to the motor in her innermost compartment. A few adjustments and a dab of lubricant and suddenly, her heart started to beat again! She survived!! I am back to using her for my chlorophyll numbers and she is working perfectly! Happiness! Even though it was a tragic incident, it was kind of exciting. It perfectly demonstrates how difficult it is to perform research out here in the middle of nowhere. You can’t send it off to a repairman. You have to try and fix it on your own, usually by trial and error, and it feels amazing when you are successful!

In other news, Sunday was Hump Day! We are halfway there! We had our hump day presentations after dinner just to give everyone an idea of what our results looked like and where our research was headed next. It was fun and for a reward, we were given a Styrofoam head! Sometime in the next few weeks, we will send the CTD down to 4000 meters. We’ll attach the heads and other Styrofoam objects to the CTD and the pressure will shrink them! Obviously, if you give a bunch of cabin-fever-infected scientists a bunch of foam heads, mischief is bound to happen. I don’t think we have laughed this hard in a long time!

Me and Alyse. This is what swag looks like.

I definitely crawled down the hallway
like this, scaring any crew members that
happened upon me. It was hysterical!
(I think I'm going crazy!) 

P.S. No one fell overboard. I just couldn't think of a cool title for this blog post! :)