Back at C-MORE hale

The last two days out at sea were stressful, confusing and filled with different kinds of tasks. All of the labs on board needed to be prepared for disembarking and ultimately sample processing while my group (amply named "Triple Threat" by the way, or "Muscles and the Bears" if you ask Grieg Steward) needed to run our productivity samples from last night in the scintillation instrument. This clever instrument registers radioactive decay in our samples (which we spike with 14C to measure primary production) by measuring fluorescence (light) emitted from an added chemical when it's hit by the radioactive particles of the decaying 14C.
But hey, lets start from the beginning, shall we.

It was a sunny morning, like every other morning at station ALOHA (just kidding, but it is actually a whole lot of sunshine out there).
My group did the last day of science on the primary productivity sampling which meant that we had an early morning preparing all our bottles and vials for the 03.00 CTD, spiking the water filled bottles and vials with either radiolabeled leucine (an amino acid) or radiocarbon, 14C, depending on if it was for measuring primary productivity (phytoplankton - photosynthesis) or bacterial production (heterotrophic plankton - eat stuff). This is a somewhat difficult distinguishment to make in some cases since some of the photosynthesising plankton are known to be mixotrophic (they both eat stuff and photosynthesise). An example of this is interestingly enough the most abundant microbe we have in our oceans, Proclorococcus.
Since the ocean is such a vast and diluted place, it kind of makes sense in terms of evolution and competitiveness to do both, whenever either of the strategies is the most efficient. I'm not sure if we have that many terrestrial examples, but I instantly think of plants that catch and digest flies.
It's an amusing thing to picture on land though; how a plant happily would live off the sun's rays until all of a sudden, an aggregate of whatever biochemical compound potentially favoring the plant, flies by and the plant would take a bite at it. It's like a scene out of Super Mario Bros. (for all you nerds out there). Anyway, that's reality for Proclorococcus, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the many things that makes the ocean so intriguing.

After spiking our bottles and vials, they were fastened to arrays that ultimately went down at different depths along a line to be incubated, floating freely, for the most part of the day. In the evening we recovered them, or more specifically the deck group did, or as a matter of fact, they tried to.

Unfortunately the first mate steering the thrusters on the port side took the ship too close to the buoy marking the arrays and the floats attached to the buoy accidentally got caught in one of the back propellers. Needless to say, we were now sitting in a tight spot. Luckily someone had a GoPro with them and could lower it down to actually see how the line was entangled in the propeller, and it turned out it wasn't too bad. The crew got the zodiac in the water and pulled the whole array away from the ship, which solved all our problems, but of course, at this time we were almost two hours late and consequently me and my group had a late evening filtering our samples.

The next morning was early since I had already volunteered to help out recovering the sediment traps (which I was part of preparing and deploying on the first day). I was tasked with the grappling hook to catch and reel in the buoy and floats of the sediment traps. Suffice to say that it all went well.
The rest of the day was just a spectacle of preparing all our accumulated samples for disembarking and processing at C-MORE and then packing and cleaning the labs. The morning and noon was scheduled for different groups to have different tasks, but after that it was just a frenzy of people trying to find something to make use of themselves. After a couple of hours doing the same, I gave up (after at least cleaning and carrying around some stuff).

Since the sediment traps had drifted so far south-west during our week out at station ALOHA, the captain seized the opportunity to make a (by now) tiny detour west, along the eastern shores of one of the other Hawaiian islands, Kaua'i. Incredible scenery is all I can say. The cliffs seen in the picture are actually of mountain size, and by judging from some of the helicopters we saw flying along the cliff faces, I estimated the height to be approximately 1000-1500 m above the sea! To top that off we even had a group of dolphins putting up a show for us at the front of the ship. Amazing!

Next thing I knew, the last night at sea was gone, a great cruise was at its end and we were back in port, Honolulu, unloading the ship (where I fortified my new flattering nickname "Muscles") and heading back to C-MORE hale to plan for the upcoming intense lab days.