As promised after yesterdays excitement I have passed the blog duties to Lavinia and Connal.
I am Lavinia, a PhD student from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton. My project concerns bio-physical coupling at tidal mixing fronts off SW UK. Briefly, I am investigating how persistent fronts in this region influence the abundance and distribution of marine organisms across various trophic levels starting from the plankton up to top predators.
Although I am not directly associated with CEFAS, I joined the Peltic cruise as part of a collaboration with scientist (amongst others from BAS, CEFAS, NOCS, PML), who have an interest in the linkages between the physical environment and the marine biota. The Peltic cruise is one of the very few aiming to collected data on all aspects of the marine environment, including the oceanography site (see Elisa's contribution the other day), plankton, fish and megavertebrates. I am interested in this unique data set and what it can tell us about the ecosystem functioning in this area. In addition, we will be using data collected during this survey to aid the design and analysis of a glider survey in summer 2013.
So far I have been enjoying the survey a great deal. This is my first scientific cruise and I am still learning new things every day. I have been involved in the data collection of all aspects of the cruise, making my shifts quite diverse. Also, it is exciting to see, how the survey is organized, the different teams work together, and how everything comes together in the end.
Lavinia
Hi, I'm Conall and I'm from County Galway in Ireland. I am not a blogger, Rob has put me up to this so please bear with me!
I joined the Cefas Endeavour as an observer at the start of this cruise. My job as an observer mainly consists of watching what goes on and writing a report on the research cruise in which I include the aims, methods and findings of the cruise. Thankfully, this is not as boring as it sounds!
The scientific team has given me every opportunity to get stuck in and involved in nearly every aspect of the cruise. Everyone is kept busy thanks to a shift system. It took a while to get used to working the graveyard shift but now Paul, Joana and I work like a well oiled machine*.
Work consists of taking plankton samples along with water samples at pre-determined stations. This is sometimes interrupted by an hour or two of sorting through whatever fish we catch in the trawl. I have been told that sprat, pilchard and anchovy are all different fish but they all just look the same to me! We haven't had much luck with the fishing side of things but hopefully once the gear gets dialed in we will start to see some full cod ends!
The weather hasn't been great and I think that's the only thing I have to complain about! The entire scientific and ships crew are very friendly and have made life on board the ship very enjoyable. This is in no small part helped by the great food that gets plated up in front of us daily!
All in all the experience has been terrific so far. I'd like to thank the Cefas team for having me onboard and including me in their work. It has given me huge insight into what goes on onboard a research cruise and I am thoroughly enjoying it. We are currently half way through the cruise and I'm looking forward to the days ahead!*Open to interpretation.
Conall
We have now completed all of our planned survey transects and we are now heading back to the Scillies to pick up any plankton and rosette stations that we could not mange last week. See map below.
Once they have been done we will heading East to Mounts Bay and Eddystone and Lyme Bay looking for any good fish marks to fish over.
Rob
The Cefas Endeavour now does a great job keeping fishermen and others right up to date with her research trip - see the rest of the Poseidon Pelagic Survey posts on the blog here. Keep up the good work guys and thank you for taking the time off watch to complete the postings during the voyage!
The Cefas Endeavour now does a great job keeping fishermen and others right up to date with her research trip - see the rest of the Poseidon Pelagic Survey posts on the blog here. Keep up the good work guys and thank you for taking the time off watch to complete the postings during the voyage!