Day Two Aboard r/v Kilo Moana - Evening

3 September 2010

7:08 pm HST

Aloha!

We have been holding position at Station ALOHA since late last night.  Station ALOHA is A Long Term Oligotrophic Habitat Assessment.  The term oligotrophic means a low nutrient, low biomass area.  The reason why scientist have been studying this area since 1988 is because it is upwind and upcurrent from the Hawaiian Islands, it is easily accessible and it is in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, one of the largest ecosystems on the planet.  The Kilo Moana makes trips out to Station ALOHA about every month to take measurements of ocean physics, chemistry and biology. The time series study data can be accessed by the public at the HOT-DOG website http://hahana.soest.hawaii.edu/hot/hot-dogs/interface.html

Plankton Tow

Shrimp like zooplankton

Today we were able to take samples from a plankton tow. When Marine Engineer Blake Watkins took the plankton tow sample off the net, he promptly spotted a species that was not easily identifiable to him. It was a small, blue shrimp like zooplankton that he scooped out of the sample with a spoon.

Sea Soup

copepod with eggs

We looked at the microbes under microscopes with the range of  7 to 45X. At first, it looked like sea soup! We were given dichotomus keys to determine what type of microbes we were looking at. We found zooplankton, phytoplankton, bacteria and viruses. Keying out the microbes is an interesting, but slow process for people new to the microbial world. After a while, one starts to recognize certain microbes that are more abundant. One of these is a zooplankton named copepod.

Microbes are among the oldest organisms on earth. They comprise 98% of the biomass of the ocean. Much of the earth's cycles are dependent upon microbes. They provide oxygen, maintain global climate and are the start of the food chain. Bacteria help recycle the ocean. There is thought to be 36 nonillion bacteria in the ocean. That is 30 zeroes!

Niskin bottles that didn't fire closed

One interesting thing that happened this morning was that the deepest CTD deployment, 4800 meters, had Niskin bottles that didn't shut as was planned. The scientists had to figure out what the problem was and try to fix it.  Through a process of inquiry, they discovered that the communication cord had corroded and was not working properly. They were able to replace the cord and continue with CTD deployments. CTD deployments are vital to most of the scientists research on board so it was very important to solve the problem.



I am wanted out on deck to help with dissolved oxygen sampling from the CTD right now.... I'll post more tomorrow.

Mrs. Spink