by Today I woke up to crashing waves as our boat rode 8 foot swells. I thought I was done with the seasickness, but it took me a while to get up and I just about made it in time into the lab. My day brightened up when later in the day I got a chance to launch the expendable bathythermograph (XPT). Right after, off to the starboard side (which is the right side when facing the front of the boat) we saw large clumps of vellela vellela larvae. Turns out vellela vellela migrate to the Pacific Northwest (PNW) beaches primarily during the March–May season, which matches with our route exactly.
We learned a lot about the water column and how sunlight and nutrients travel through it. I asked if we were gonna get a chance to do a plankton tow, it turns out we actually planned to do one today, which I was super excited about. Our sample was teeming full of plankton. We were able to identify some copopods, anthropods, and even caught a fully grown arthropod which nearly jumped out of our sample tube. We then used math to figure out how much water we had to filter through to get one liter of plankton, which took a while and some Lord of the Rings lore to explain.
The waves have definitely increased and the seas are getting pretty rough in general. Loud crashing from the waves hitting the deck keep on distracting me while I write this. I’m curious to see if the weather gets better or worse as we get closer to Alaska.
