Lions, and Bears, and ... Ctenophores! Oh My!

Except for the occasional storm that draws us off track, the days are relatively similar. From an outside perspective, this might seem rather dull and monotonous. However, we have developed clever ways to spice up life on the ship. For instance, we are currently in the middle of a “coolness” war between the different labs. There are three lab rooms and the scientists of each room go to extremes to decorate the lab and add some spunk. Armed with coloring books, colored pencils and tape, the Duke scientists have added some bright colors to the walls of the lab. 

Furthermore, we started to name all of our scientific instruments. We are going with an UP theme. Our filter is named Kevin, our pump is named Russell, and our fluorometer is named Ellie. I have even drawn name tags for our beloved equipment!

Most importantly, we have a few sets of Christmas light strung up around the room.

One of the University of Tennessee lab rooms has a hammock hanging from the ceiling, but I still think the Duke lab is winning!

Each day also holds surprises that can spice up even the most tedious filtering session. Most exciting is the wildlife! No, we haven’t seen any whales or giant squid. Yesterday, we saw something much more exciting… Ctenophores! We collected seawater in 39 clear plastic bottles. Three of those bottles were filtered yesterday while the other 36 bottles we put in the incubators to be filtered at a later time. In one of the bottles we filtered yesterday, we noticed about 10 ctenophores happily swimming in the water. Ctenophores are comb jellies and are notable because they are the largest species to propel themselves using rows of cilia. These ctenophores were less than a centimeter long and were transparent except for a little red spot at one end. We tried not to pour any of the little creatures into our filtering system, but we failed. At the end of the filtering process, we noticed four deflated ctenophores lying on our filters.

We are MURDERERS!!!!!! :( I felt so sad.

If you look closely, you can see a few
transparent ctenophores in the water

Ctenophores on our filter!

Each day contains new wonders to behold! I can't wait to see what tomorrow has in store. (Considering that we decided to have 80's day tomorrow, I think it will be AWESOME!)