June 23, 2009

6-23-09

As a consequence of having a radical sleep schedule (radical by my standards), my internal timeline of events is a bit off. Many of the experiences in this blog actually happened later in the day on the 22nd, but they seemed like they occurred during a new day because I had already been awake since before midnight on the 21st. Consider if you will, a confused graduate student, on a boat, in the Bering Sea. Now consider that his sleep schedule has been turned upside down. How would he be able to decipher the date? Would time and space still have meaning? ... Well, it's not exactly "The Twilight Zone," but the confused part is pretty accurate.

After the initial krill eye extractions described earlier, Rachel and I were able to continue processing the extracts to be analyzed with the liquid chromatography (LC) instrument. The extracts were exchanged from one solvent (2:1 dichloromethane:methanol) to another (100% methanol) and then half of the volume was pipetted into small autosampler vials (the other half to be analyzed later). The orange colored liquid in the end of the pipette tip (in photo to left) is the final lipofuscin extract. Lipofuscin is an oxidation product of proteins. As the krill gets older, more lipofuscin accumulates in the eyes. On average, the more lipofuscin you measure from a krill the older it is. Once we fill the autosampler vials with extract, they are loaded into the LC autosampler to be injected, by the robotic arm in the picture, into the instrument. The amount of lipofuscin is measured by a fluorescence detector. Later we can use all of the data to go back and age all of the krill individuals whose eyes we extracted and analyzed.

While the analysis was running I went outside to check out the water. The word on the ship was that there had been an orca (killer whale) sighting earlier in the day 400 m (about a quarter mile) from the ship. When I got outside there were no orcas, but the ship was surrounded by hundreds of sea birds. They look like light and dark specks in the water from the top of the ship.
It was a bit eerie seeing so many birds with no land in sight. I am used to seeing high bird numbers at the beach. I couldn?t help but think about the scene from Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" where a murder of crows covers the jungle gym, while the lead character waits unsuspectingly by the school. Despite my efforts to live inside a movie or TV show again, the birds just circled and waited calmly in the water. They could have been waiting for the latest sampling nets to stir up some potential food. Other scientists onboard mentioned that birds will hang out by boats because they block the wind. I guess my hopes of seeing mid air collisions of breaching orcas and humpbacks in a seasonal battle for Bering Sea supremacy is not very likely. I?m still crossing my fingers, we have 20 days of cruise left.

-Eli