Hi Everyone,
I hope you are all settling in well to the new year! Today was our last day before heading towards South Georgia proper. We spent most of the day doing fishing so that the biologists on board could get enough samples. They use a variety of nets, with great names like BONGOs (because they look like bongos).
We all chipped in to help out with the sorting of the catch afterwards, which was really good fun. This involved hauling around buckets of the catch, sorting the catch and identifying different species. We began by separating out some of the rarer creatures like ice fish and squid, before focusing on separating and counting out some of the smaller (but more numerous creatures) like krill, euphasids, amphipods and copepods (hopefully pictures attached soon). Some of these animals were taken for biomass calculations, some taken under the microscope to determine species types. We have seen huge numbers of Antarctic krill (euphasia superba) which is much bigger than the similar-looking euphasids and forms a fundamental component of the Antarctic food web (as well as making up much of its biomass). Most Antarctic organisms depend on Antarctic krill, either by eating them directly or eating their predators. It was good fun trying to identify, separate and count these different species and feel like we were contributing to some fascinating science at the same time.
Other than this, throughout the day there wasn’t a huge amount of physical oceanographic work to do (though I did manage to keep myself quite busy fixing the ADCP instrument I am responsible for, some quite concerning errors….). In case I haven’t explained in detail yet, the ADCP (Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler) uses sonar waves a bit like a bat to measure the speed and direction of the water relative to the ship and report back, some of the values today seemed like they were plucked out of a hat. We spent the time quite pleasantly watching some chinstrap penguins from the deck, humpback whales at a greater distance and a particularly camera-friendly giant petrel which insisted on photo-bombing our whale pictures and flying a couple of metres away from us, which did help us to get some great pictures of it, so I can’t complain too much.
In the evening, I was quite busy fixing the ADCP I am working on but I did manage to find the time for a really nice little jam session with Chris. I played the piano and he grabbed a guitar from the bar and we played through some of the music lying around the conference room (including “Your Song”, “Hold back the river” and “Hallelujah”). I also had a few chords on my phone, but unfortunately most of them had no title, just a number, so we ended up playing chord roulette, with some fun results. We were treated to “You’ll be back”, “Let it be” and “I believe in a thing called love”, some very fun vibes for an evening jam session that stretched to about 1am (in our defence, the conference room is a long way away from accommodation, and everyone is on different shifts anyway so this isn’t quite as antisocial as it would be on land). I have been very much missing my musical pursuits so this was a welcome activity, I look forward to many more fun singalongs in the future.
03/01/23
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