Cruise prep is underway

With all this snorkelling, boat days and sunset cruises, you must be wondering, when am I actually going to do some work? But fear not, for I have (believe it or not) been working away during the trusty 9-5 to ready everything for our first expedition. This cruise is different from others I’ve been on since I’m going ‘alone’ (ie, not with anybody working on my same project), it’s testing my organisational and experiment planning skills to get everything ready.

Doing science at sea is very different from on land – if you don’t have something you need, even if that something is as small as pipette tips, or sample tubes, or gloves, it could put a stop to the whole shebang. There’s no going downstairs to stores, or into the next door lab, or looking in the back of a cupboard. Everything you could possibly need, you have to pack. So, with that in mind, I’ve spent the last week gathering everything I need, from sample collection containers, to storage, pipettes, tips, chemicals, tubing, boxes, tape, gloves, wipes and much more, to make sure I’ll be able to do all the work I want to whilst I’m at sea this time.

On this cruise, we’ll be going out to the Hydrostation S and BATS sites (for more information see this blog), the former of which is the longest running oceanographic time series in the world. In total, whilst I’m here in Bermuda I’ll go out on four research cruises to hopefully capture precisely how the phytoplankton community in the surface to the ‘deep chlorophyll maximum’ is behaving over the spring bloom, the blooming of microscopic life in response to increased nutrient supply in the early part of the year.

In order to do this, I have 2 main types of samples I’ll be collecting: genetic samples, for DNA and RNA analysis, and flow cytometry, for cell counts of different types of plankton. The latter will give me my fundamental understanding of what’s happening to the numbers of the smallest plankton in the ocean – our cyanobacteria and pico/nanoeukaryotes. These bugs are small in size but so numerous that they have a huge impact on global biogeochemical cycles, and the ability of the ocean to store carbon. So, it’s important to know how their community structure and distribution is changing through the vertical water column over time.

My second type of sample is for genetic analysis. This will allow us to ask two very important questions: who is there, and what are they doing? The who is there can tell us about all the different types of plankton, regardless of size (because we sequence the DNA of the whole community), which matters because different plankton play different roles in the ocean, so knowing who’s there impacts what sorts of processes they can carry out. And the what are they doing can tell us which genes and gene pathways different plankton are using in response to different environmental stimuli, like light, nutrient supply and mixing of the water column. We care about this because it helps us to understand not just what the plankton might be doing based on all their genes, but which ones are actually active and carrying out those processes.

The rest of this week will be spent in meetings and the lab, preparing to sail on my first cruise this weekend.