Day 2 on the research vessel/Day 3 analyzing samples

And the real adventure begins! 

Yesterday was veryyy long and full of excitement as we boarded the research vessel and began to be prepped on the ins and outs of the ship, and of course the safety procedures we were expected to follow throughout our entire duration of the cruise. We started out right with lunch! I was very surprised that the food onboard was amazingly delicious. After being briefed on methods and data collection by Dr. J we began our four hour journey to our first station about 30mi SW. During this, many fell victim to motion sickness even with the use of dramamine, though a few of us were fine and proceded to nap on the deck infront of the bridge, made for an excellent nap. :) We got to our first station maned our positions assigned to us. We deployed a CTD, which takes multiple abiotic factors, a neuston net which collects plankton at the surface, a bongo net which collects midwater plankton, a Capetown dregde which collects many benthic dwelling organisms, and an Otter trawl which collects organisms living at or just above the benthic level. We gathered and sorted all specimens and began identifying them with the use of numerous soggy field guides. We replicated this procedure at station two which was located just outside the Sunshine Skyway. We finally docked around 3am this morning. 

In this pic you can see three of our four methods, the guys are actively deploying the bongo net, bottom left is the Capetown dredge and bottom right is part of the large otter trawl.

Sorting through the samples.

Identifying the species!

A tour of the bow.

Today we began to analyze our plankton samples and continue identifying the multiple shell species. We pulled samples from the neuston and bongo nets from station #2 and began identifying them under the microscope. We used gridded petri dishes and went through square by square identifying and taking counts of the different families to get an idea of the biodiversity at our second station. This task is quite an intensive process. My partner and I were at our plankton identifying station for over an hour and collectively made it through three squares. Needless to say our plankton composition was quite diverse. My word of the day is marsupium. Marsupium is a pouch on some decapod females that carry their eggs and brood (internal fertilization and development of embryos) them until they're basically miniature versions of themselves, juveniles; quite like the mammalian version such as kangaroos.

Look at all that plankton!

Dissecting microscope and sample in gridded petri dish.

The boys hard at work identifying our shells!