Preparing for a research cruise

Tomorrow morning a pod of Oceanographers (including me) will gear up and go to sea for two weeks to gather samples from the deep-ocean floor and the water column.  Today was packing day – and lets just say Oceanographers need a lot of stuff

That’s just from our lab!  Three other lab groups will be on board as well.  Our lab does take the most stuff though 😀  My co-worker is collecting sediment from the sea floor with a Multiple Corer in order to count the number of animals living in the mud.  These animals are called infauna, because they live IN the mud rather than on it, and are also called macrofauna.  Macro refers to the size of the animals, and the cut off points were designated by taxonomists decades ago based to sieve mesh sizes.  Collecting them takes a lot of sample bottles and supplies.

The Multicorer of DOOM! Well for macrofauna at least.

I’m basically going along for support and grunt work.  Other labs are collecting mud for environmental data like chlorophyll levels (how much food is there), Nitrogen (how much could be recycled into the surface water for phytoplankton – also called a nitrogen budget), and the favorite basics of Temperature, Salinity, and Oxygen concentrations. I’m told there is also going to be Bongo net sampling:

Anyone else have “Cuban Pete” from The Mask in their head? I guess I see the resemblance –

Admit it – you were thinking something more like this!

All in all this will be a very busy cruise for the for the Science and Ship crews, but hopefully it will both be informative and fun!  We will be on the R/V Weatherbird II owned by the Florida Institure of Oceanography, and I will be keeping everyone up to date as best I can throughout the cruise.  We shall do Science together!

Now that’s a beauty shot. From the FIO webpage