Curiosity and collaborative work

The first day of the second long duration station (LD) has certainly been an intense one. I've been working more or less non-stop since 03.00 in the morning (except for a couple of hours of sleep after lunch). Now it is already past midnight and I have another sampling in 3 hours. Thankfully I can sleep after that since there is no need for me to do anything more with those samples than either quickly filter them or incubate them on front deck for filtration during the coming day.

This LD has the same schedule as the first one, which means that I have a lot to do. This first day I might also have gotten a tiny bit over-ambitious, but I'm just too curious about the UCYN abundance in a depth profile at this location since it turned out that the science team listened to my recommendations to place the LD within the large bloom of phytoplankton.

So in summary we collected RNA, microscopy and FISH samples (in a depth profile) for archival and DNA samples for my qPCR run. This meant using some 23 bottles followed by a lot of water filtration. An equal amount of cleaning is then required afterwards, which is probably the most tedious part of my lab work. After that was done, I started extracting DNA for the planned qPCR. I wasn't overly keen on running the qPCR straight after extraction since I by this point was very tired. So I stored the extracted samples in the freezer and went to bed for a few hours. But it didn't end there. I also started up the nutrient amendment experiment after my nap. An experiment which is collaborative work together with a French lab. In practice this means that they fill up all the bottles and add the nutrients (which in my case is only 5 bottles - silicate, iron, dissolved organic phosphate, dissolved inorganic phosphate and control - plus 5 untreated time point zero), and then measure the bulk nitrogen uptake for me when we later spike the bottles with 15N2. So what I did today in addition to filtering my own T0's was also taking care of their DNA/RNA bottles for T0. This will be my responsibility for the breakdown of the experiment too. At the end of the cruise I will ship their archived DNA/RNA together with mine back to Stockholm where the collaboration will continue.

There have certainly been a lot of waiting for filtration today, and I'm happy tomorrow will not be as heavy on that as today. I suppose overseeing water filtration is the biologists equivalent to the saying of something being as "boring as watching paint dry". Filtration is just as exciting.

Oh, and when we're on the subject of excitement. I got the address to my American friend (middle in above picture) Kyle Frischkorn's blog. So if you want to have some further reading and another angle of approach to the same cruise, then check it out. It is really good (although I might be biased, haha). He's a Ph.D. candidate like me, but mainly works with questions concerning the filamentous and colonial diazotroph Trichodesmium, which has been fairly abundant so far during the cruise.

http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/tag/south-pacific-marine-ecosystems/

Now I'm almost finished with my qPCR run and eagerly awaiting the results, stay tuned.
In the meantime you can enjoy two more really good pictures from the Ship Games, just to prove that you can have great fun with very little means irrespective of who you are and where you are.