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.