Mobilisation, baby!

Saturday morning rolled around, bringing with it a change of scenery as today was the first day I stepped aboard the R/V (Research Vessel) Atlantic Explorer, BIOS’s research ship. I met Rod, chief scientist of this cruise and PI of the Bermuda Atlantic Time Series on board in the morning, and had the pleasure of meeting many of the BATS and AE techs and scientists over a delicious lunch prepared by the ship’s chef, Dexter. Alongside the regular BATS sampling and my own sampling, we have a team on board led by Kristen Buck, OSU, looking at iron in the ocean. Rod gave us an orientation of the ship and then passed us over to the first officer, Jack, for a safety briefing.

Having prepared my boxes the week before, once the safety briefing was up I set about unpacking into the lab that will be my home for the next 7 days. My main job for the day was to set up my peristaltic pump and filter rig, which I’ll use to process my samples for genetic analysis of phytoplankton in the ocean. This is the same set-up I’ve used on both my previous cruises, so it’s becoming a pretty slick operation, but I am borrowing a peristaltic pump from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, so I had to spend a little time getting to know it.

I’ll also be taking samples for flow cytometry, a technique that allows us to identify different groups of phytoplankton based on their size and chlorophyll fluorescence. Chlorophyll is the pigment which makes plants and phytoplankton green, and allows them to photosynthesise – turning carbon dioxide into oxygen for us to breathe. It also fluoresces when you shine a blue or red laser at it, and we can detect that fluorescence to detect the presence of chlorophyll-containing phytoplankton in our samples.

We don’t have the machine we need for this on the ship, so we have to ‘fix’ the samples – freezing them in time at the moment we collect them. For this we use a chemical called glutaraldehyde. Glutaraldehyde is really horrible because, for the same reason we use it as a fixative – it binds and immobilises nucleic acids – it will do the exact same thing to a human should it accidentally come into contact (we very much need our nucleic acids to be alive and well!). So, to minimise my contact with it in its stock concentration, I pre-prepared my sample tubes with a little in the bottom of each, so when I get the samples on deck, I can simply add them into the pre-‘spiked’ vials.

After mobilisation was done, everything set out and tied down, we headed out to Nonsuch Island for a snorkel and a spot of whale watching. We snorkelled around the reef, seeing parrotfish, butterfly fish and sheepshead fish, and were even treated to another sighting of a pod of whales. The weather was absolutely beautiful so we headed out to the northeast of the island to catch the sunset, where we bumped into some pals from the research station and rafted the boats together to watch it go down. Then it was home for some much needed rest before the big day tomorrow!