June 17, 2009

6-17-09

One of the great aspects of working at night in an area where the night is so short is getting to see both the sunrise and the sunset every day. The fiery sky is something you never get tired of. It's like saying goodbye to an old friend and being reunited hours later. The weather the last two days has been absolutely gorgeous, a balmy 6 degrees Celsius, which works out to about 43 F. The wind has been even calmer than the first night. Rachel informed me that last summer the cruise started with two weeks of clouds and overcast. I feel fortunate to have such pleasant whether while I learn the ropes on this ship. It would be much more difficult with waves crashing on my head.

"Did you see the jellyfish on the CTD? They were nasty." This was one of the last things I heard before heading to bed yesterday afternoon. We were unsure if the cnidarian invasion would be a brief encounter or a constant challenge during our sampling stations. As the bongo nets were hoisted up by the crane we looked out to see clear waters. A good sign, if we didn't see jellies at the surface we would probably not find them at depth. When we pulled in the bongo nets I didn't see any jellyfish, but I was a little worried about catching any krill because there was not much phytoplankton (food for krill) in the nets. When we detached the cod ends and poured their contents into the cooler for sorting it was a different story. Paydirt! Over a hundred, possibly two hundred krill. Blue whales can grow up to 190 tons on these animals (almost exclusively), so we were bound to find them eventually. These small shrimp like crustaceans are easy to identify because of their ?googly? eyes, as Megan put it. To fish them out of our cooler we simply used large soup spoons like the kind you would find at a Chinese restaurant. My apatite was not exactly piqued by the krill, but that did not diminish my excitement!

It was a little tricky to scoop up the krill as they swam around the cooler. The numerous black spots in the picture are crab larvae. We also spotted some mysid shrimp and fish larvae. Megan, Tracy, and Rachel are all much more experienced at krill spooning than I am, and it showed. In the picture you can see that I had a lucky scoop and was able to get three at once (the clear tube-like animal below the ripples is a chaetognath). I got two at once a couple more times, but was not able to replicate the threesome (good in front of a camera I guess). The krill were taken for analysis and we collected water particles to go along with the krill samples for this station.


As we collected the water from the Niskin bottles attached to the CTD rosette a couple crewmen looked over the side of the ship alerted us ?there?s a whale!? We looked out at the water and sure enough there was a Minke Whale about 20 feet from the ship. Under the light of the ship we could make out the pale shadow of the whale. I was not quick enough with my camera to take a picture, but after the whale left our view it surfaced briefly for a breath and continued on out of sight. Minke Whale?s can grow up to 35 feet long and 14 tons. Despite their size they are still the smallest baleen whale. Judging from our success catching krill, there should have been enough to provide at least a snack for the Minke. At one point the crewmen said the whale was right next the ship (within 5 or 10 feet). With the edge of the continental shelf in our near future and the potentially curious nature of the beautiful marine mammals, this first whale sighting could just be a small taste of what lies ahead.

-Eli