Instrumental Difficulties

I'm sorry to inform you all that there simply wasn't much activity on my end tonight. I awoke in the early evening with word from some of the others that we had done some moorings during the day while I slept. Moorings are where we place instruments that record data out at sea for extended periods of time, much like the NAS I told you about in an earlier blog. Well, come to find out, the first one they placed still had some sort of protective covering on it which wouldn't allow it to do it's job. I suppose an analogy to explain it would be to say it's like leaving the lens cap on a camera. It protects the lens but if you don't take it off, there's no point to using the machine. We can't leave a machine out on the sea that won't work so we had turned around to go get and repair it. Due to this interruption in the schedule, our work was put off a bit. I still labeled several amber vials for our later experiments for krill eyes, but then found out that our HPLC, which is crucial to our work and project here with lipofuscin, is inoperable at the time. It can be fixed, but of course with parts we don't have with us, so that work was put to a standstill. While sitting in the lab I talked to a fellow scientist named David who is testing ocean water and sediment for radon. It seems that radon is spawned from the deterioration of radium but has a much shorter half life. By his work of testing for levels of radon, he can go on and use the data he collects to do all sorts of things, such as gas diffusion measurements and predictions. We then cracked a few jokes and went back to work. I haven't been outside yet today but I hear the weather yesterday was pretty nice so maybe it will be this morning to. Farewell and have a pleasant day.

Late Night

Post written by Charlie:

So it seems that my previous blog was a bit premature. At the time I was writing it I was under the impression that my night was over a little early. As you can infer from the first sentence of this entry, it wasn't. Shortly after I wrote it, the call came in that we had netted several krill and that we were to right then and there cut off their eyes. There were 38 krill to do this to and while I had a little practice under my belt, it is still a delicate procedure and caution must be taken. I did half of the batch while my lab-mate did the other half. Still, with about 20 krill, the job took a little over an hour.

With those krill eyes, we were able to do quite a bit of work tonight. The eyes were dunked in a little bit of solvent and blasted with sound waves in a machine called a sonicator. It basically uses sound to beat up whatever sample you put into it, in our case it bashed around those eyes and helped get some of the lipids out of them. The compound we were looking for is, as you probably know from the last few blogs, lipofuscin. After we sonicated them, we did a few more steps to prepare the biochemical compounds for analyzing in our HPLC, or High Performance Liquid Chromatography. This machine, in a very simple explanation, detects and quantifies compounds in the sample that you feed into it, so with our lipid sample that we fed into the HPLC, the machine will tell us what is in it and give us an estimate about how much of it there is. It's rather complicated and I'm afraid I still don't know everything about it yet, so I'm sorry that I can't give you a super in-depth explanation about it, not that I would anyway.** I wouldn't want to bore you with a bunch of technical facts, so this simple example of the functions of the HPLC will have to suffice. Anyway, after working on all that krill stuff, which took just about the entire evening, we decided to eat some breakfast and call it a night. We're all really tired so I'm headed off to bed. Keep in touch. Morgan out.

**The webmaster will bore you with the details of HPLC, so for those that are interested, read on:

In general, chromatography refers to techniques that are used to separate complex mixtures into individual chemical compounds for purification or measurement. Here's a handy example: let's say you want to know how much cholesterol is in one Arctic krill. You would take the krill and extract its fat. But now you've got a huge mix of all its lipids, including fatty acids and alcohols, waxes, and sterols. Chromatography provides a way to separate these lipids so you can measure the amount of each individual lipid, including cholesterol.

There are many different types of chromatography that can be used, depending on the samples you are interested in and what chemicals you want to isolate or measure. Some common types are gas, liquid, thin-layer, ion exchange, etc. No matter the type, all chromatography has a stationary phase (a fixed substance that your sample moves through so that individual chemicals can be resolved) and a mobile phase (what you use to move your sample through the stationary phase).

HPLC, or high performance liquid chromatography, uses a liquid as the mobile phase, typically organic solvents or water. The stationary phase is usually a column packed with a type of solid material (often silica or aluminum oxide particles, or chains of carbon atoms bonded together). You inject your sample (a mix of chemicals) into the column. A pump is used to push the liquid mobile phase through the column, sweeping your sample along with it. As your sample moves through the column, some chemicals in the mix react with the column particles and stick or only move very slowly. Other compounds don't react with the stationary phase at all, and move right through. A detector at the outlet of the column allows you to measure the individual compounds exiting the column. You can adjust both the mobile phase and the stationary phase to optimize separation of your compound of interest. I hope this helps explain chromatography a little bit. If you have questions, feel free to post a comment and we will try our best to answer it.

Walking Through Jello

Post written by Charlie:

We had some inclement weather today, resulting in rougher seas than we've been having for the past few days. The ship has been rolling more that I'm accustomed to, which isn't much, but it's still a lot all the same. Walking has been made difficult since I can walk across the room and it feels like I'm walking up an incline but then the ship rolls and I speed up, since I'm trying to walk up a hill, and must arrest my momentum lest I run headlong into a station or somebody else. Not a good thing. I even described it to a few other people in such a way that they found it pretty funny. To me, it felt like walking through Jello; sometimes it wiggles with you, sometimes it wiggles against you.

This afternoon one of our pieces of equipment was lost overboard when the cable attached to it broke while it was being towed behind the ship. It was a piece of optics equipment used by a group of scientists who were studying phytoplankton. Apparently it helped in some way to detect levels of chlorophyll in the water. From what I've heard, it was a $200,000 piece of machinery and while we went in circles trying to fish it out, we were not able to recover it. We did plot its location with coordinates so hopefully we'll stop by later to try to get it again or we'll let someone know it's out there and let them come find it. It caused quite a stir around here, while we went 'round and 'round trying to snag it with our grappling hooks. They have monitors down in the lab to plot the ship's course and it was really funny to look at it when they were through trying to find it. It was just a bunch of red loops around one point marked "Optics" and was kind of neat to think that the ship could maneuver around a spot that's so tiny like that.

For all you people our there who really like maps and would like to look up where we currently are, we're about 30 or so nautical miles dead west of Nunivak island. If you need help finding it, just go to some image search engine and pin it down. Now that you know where the island is, you can roughly find out where we are.

There have been sightings of blue whales and fin whales along with sea lions swimming off from the boat. We were even lucky enough to snap a picture of the sea lion and you can even see his whiskers. There really hasn't been much action tonight, since we were doing several moorings and weren't able to do much stuff with krill. We should get some activity in here tomorrow. I sure hope so, since I've already taken a nap in the lab only to become camera fodder. Falling asleep in the lab is something of a common occurance and when it happens, everyone else is ready to snap a picture of you with your head cocked to the side and your mouth wide open. Anyway, like I said, not much traffic through our sector so what little work was required tonight has already been done. All I need to do in the meantime is wait for tomorrow night and I think I'll do that by sleeping. Have a good day,night, morning, afternoon or evening, depending on when you're reading this. Keep in touch and you'll hear some interesting stuff, I'm sure.

Blog Text Problem

Post written by the webmaster:

Good morning. It appears that some of you were having problems with Charlie's blog text not wrapping, causing a very irritating long line of text. The problem seemed to be with certain versions of internet explorer. I hope I have fixed this problem, but since the blog displayed fine on my computer (of course!), I am not sure. Please email me (Laura) to let me know if you are still having problems. mogel@cbl.umces.edu

Pictures and more krill

[Picture attached of MOGEL members on this expedition: left to right, Karen Taylor, Charlie Morgan, and Rachel Pleuthner].

Post written by Charlie:

This evening was short but oh so sweet. Like I explained in the previous blog, we're using krill eyes to determine their age due to the special lipids that they store in their neural tissues. This evening I actually got to remove eyes from krill. They were already dead, mind you. I didn't actually kill any, not that it would have bothered me if I had, but using the aid of a microscope along with a pair of tweezers and a scalpel, I cut their eyes from their teeny bodies and placed them into a small vial filled with a 1:1 solution of dichloromethane and methanol for storage. It was a very tedious procedure, as it was all to easy to mess up. We removed the eyes from two different species of krill, the two being Thysanoessa raschii and T. inermis italics for the taxanomic names would be great here). The inermis krill had more fragile eyes than the raschii did, since even a small amount of pressure on the orbs would cause them to rupture. The raschii, however, had much more durable eyes that allowed for intact removals every time I attempted it, which was somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty. We were scheduled for another bongo trawl tonight, but when it was performed, there were no krill in the collection nets. Unfortunately the krill didn't show up tonight. [Picture of T. raschii in a petri dish, ready for dissection].

In case you're wondering, The bongo net is composed of two large metal circles separated by a short cross arm and attached to each of these circles is a tapered net which leads down to a collection tube. It looks similar to a couple of windsocks that someone attached together. [Picture of USCG personnel and scientists deploying a bongo net off the rear of the Healy]. All together there are two collection tubes that can fill up with all sorts of animals, krill if we're lucky, but tonight we only got smaller zooplankton and a few juvenile fish. This is the last collection station we will be at tonight. The next one we're moving to is around 140 nautical miles away and at our current speed of 14.5 knots, we'll reach it in about nine and a half hours. That's well on into the afternoon when I'll be sleeping so I won't be articipating in anything then, but we should be sampling at another cluster of stations where hopefully we'll catch some more krill.

After that excitement wound down I was back to doing little jobs for later krill experiments. I was in the middle of one of these when one of the other scientists popped her head in the door and told us about the spectacular sunset. When we got outside the sun had already departed below the level of the horizon but left us with a remarkably beautiful scene of color and clouds spread out all over the sky. (I've had Rachel send a picture that you can use to put in the blog, I hope you get it as it's very pretty--[attached below left]) From the horizon the color started at red and swept through the entire spectrum up into the dark blue and purple of the upper glow on into the blackness of night. It was truly something to behold, especially with the wind and waves being as calm as they were.


Aside from that, tonight was, as I said before, short but sweet. I have to attend a meeting at eight, after breakfast, on some of the course changes we're going to take and I need to be there for that. I'm planning on fitting in a little nap before breakfast so I won't be too tired at the meeting. Until later.

Krill Project

Post written by Charlie:



Tonight was not as eventful as other nights, but I did get to do a few things of note. Like yesterday I woke up in time to eat dinner. Again, like yesterday, after dinner I went up to the bridge deck to take in the nice day, only unlike yesterday, the weather was not so nice. In fact, it was downright chilly, so I didn't stay up there for very long at all. I then came down to the science labs and helped out Calvin a little more with the NAS, but there wasn't much to do so we finished up rather early. I was able to help out doing little odd tasks for my lab director, but nothing spectacular.

There were, however, a couple of cool things that I did get to do. It seems that the bird watcher guys found a real gem of a bird: the short tailed albatross. From hearing them excitedly talk about it, it is apparent that there are only a couple thousand left and to be able to see one at all is very fortunate. I got to see one. It pretty much flew in behind the ship and landed on the water and there it sat until we pulled too far away to see it anymore. I did get a decent look at it through some binoculars though and it was a fairly large darker colored bird. The bird watcher guys said that it was still a juvenile due to the darker colorings on it but they were very excited about the sighting since neither of them have ever seen one in all their years of bird watching. I was also able to watch the sunset out here. Sunset comes around one in the morning up here and I was able to take a couple of photos. It was very beautiful and slow, but didn't seem to be accompanied by very many colors like reds, purples or other ones, such as I would see back home. The waves are a little larger than yesterday though and looking down from the bridge deck it almost looked like the water had an almost leathery appearance to its surface. It was all very beautiful to witness. [Webmaster note: We haven't received any pictures from Charlie yet, so I have attached a picture that I took of a sunset in the Bering Sea aboard the Healy from June 2007 for you to get an idea of how beautiful it is. Hopefully the Healy 2008 cruisers will be able to send pictures soon.]

Other than that, we filtered some more sea water and did a few more odd things for the rest of the night. Near the end we were preparing to cut the eyes off some of the krill captured in our bongo net run the same evening. Perhaps I should explain just exactly why we're cutting the eyes from these krill. It's a little long winded but I'll try to summarize. Aging animals, such as crabs or krill, can be difficult as there are really no physical parts to their body to determine their age. The old way of aging them was to measure their shell, but that is often inaccurate because these animals often grow at different rates from each other. For example, you could have a runt of a crab and a huge crab and while they are the same age as each other, they grew differently, so we cannot accurately find their age by measuring their carapace (shell) length. Knowing the age structure of a krill population is very important for understanding how they live and grow, and how climate change might affect krill populations. As a dominant food source for higher trophic levels like whales, seals, etc., krill are small but important! Fortunately all of these animals make these chemicals called lipofucsins as a by-product of oxidative metabolism, by dissolving free radicals in the lysosomes of cells. These products accumulate in a roughly linear fashion per time, so by measuring how much of this lipofucsin has been produced and stored, we can figure out how old the krill was. Krill store these lipofucsins in the neural tissues of their eyestalks so we are able to pull out these lipids by cutting out their eyes and going in there to get them. Unfortunately the krill were still alive and were just not ready so we'll get to practice our cutting tomorrow night right after supper. As for me, it's been a long night and I'm pretty tired so I'll sign off for now. Stay tuned.

Some pretty sights and Nutrient Analyzers!

Post written by Charlie:

Good evening everyone, I hope you're all anxiously awaiting another Bering Blog because I've got one for you. I've begun the process of getting into a nighttime working schedule, and while it is difficult, I believe I'm making some headway. I went to bed after breakfast around 7:30 am and woke up shortly before supper at 5:00 pm. Thankfully I was refreshed and ready to go to work, however I took a slight detour to the bridge instead. For all of you who aren't familiar with layouts of ships, the bridge is basically the control room of a ship. That's where the captain drives it, steers it and controls its speed and direction. It is also very large and the crew members are very accommodating in showing you around. [From webmaster: picture of Healy bridge (inside) attached].

The weather here in the late afternoon was spectacular and much different than you are used to seeing on television. There was a wide open sky filled with the soft glow of a waning sun accompanied by a gentle springtime breeze that was neither too cold nor warm. The sunlight shimmered off the relatively calm waters on into the horizon. All in all, it was a very beautiful day and from what I gather from talking to the various crew members, it was a rare one as well. Hopefully we'll have a few more days like that before I get off the ship.

After my sightseeing tour was done, I delved back down into the bowels of the ship, commonly referred to around here as the science labs. My 60 year old roommate even went so far as to call it a dungeon and I'm disinclined to disagree with him. Anyway, I went to help my lab mate get some sediment samples from the sea floor that we pulled up a few hours previous. It's a nasty business which is almost sure to get you wet and muddy. That didn't take too terribly long, especially since we practiced on an empty container the night before. After that was finished, I decided to take a look around and ask a few people what they were up to. I asked a guy named Calvin that I had met a few days ago what he was doing. Cal's a funny guy and nice to hang around so I figured that he'd tell me what it was he was working on, crack a few jokes and I'd leave all the more educated. Not so. It seems I found him in need of help and eventually, sleep, so being the nice and curious guy that I am, I helped.

It seems that he was trying to get a machine called an NAS, which stands for Nutrient Analyzing System, or something along those lines, to work. Apparently this machine had an on-board colorimeter, complete with all necessary chemicals to operate it and a computer to run it. For those of you who don't know, these chemicals are added to sea water to test for different things. For instance, if it was testing for nitrates in the sea water, it would add different chemicals to the sea water than it would for something else. When these chemicals meet the water, a chemical reaction takes place that turns the sample of sea water colors. This colored sea water is then injected into the colorimeter and the more colorful the sample of water is, the more nitrates are in the water, for example. All of this is mounted onto a single device and this machine is meant to be deployed out to sea for from 2 to 12 months at a time, all the while performing its programed duties over and over until the scientists come back to retrieve their machine, now full of recorded data from all of its automatic experiments. It's a fairly complex device and still has a bit of work left to be done to it, but that can wait for tomorrow. Working with Cal on that took most of the night and now I'm out of work to do for now. Tomorrow there will be krill to experiment on, or to practice experimenting on, so the fun begins then! Stay tuned in and I'll let you know how it goes.