High frequency sampling a massive bloom

After 15 hours of almost constant work, barely enough time to have lunch and dinner, the 48 time points of our north-south transect are finally completed.
The actual lab work was an ever-flowing routine of fixing microscopy filters in formalin while filtering water for DNA archival. Inside of the bloom my 0.2 µ pore size filters clogged already after 1 liter filtered most of the times! Usually I filter 2.5 liters without a problem.

In addition to my 5-6 hours of shift-work in the lab, I also ran two DNA extractions in parallel with each other after my first shift. When both extractions were completed I did a qPCR run on them which was followed by a meeting to try and decide upon the location of our next long duration station (LD) which we will start at midnight, 14th of March.

Unfortunately I could not attend the whole meeting due to my next shift starting so at this time I don't know what was decided.
The bloom turned out to be mainly diatoms and some Trichodesmium, which apparently have been blooming in this very area for at least a month, probably more. However, everyone seemed at a loss as to what was sustaining this bloom of diatoms, in terms of nutrients like nitrogen, since there seemed to be very few diazotrophs present. The natural conclusion, if not biological is then physical, like upwelling. Someone even mentioned volcanic activity, either on land or at the seafloor. This is extremely interesting but not really within the scope of the cruise since we are focusing on oligotrophic waters where diazotrophs sustain bloom formations at places usually devoid of sufficient nutrients.
This is where my qPCR data over the presence of the diazotrophic UCYN bacteria comes in and the reason why I ran two DNA extractions was for the chief scientist to have numbers to compare outside and inside the bloom of diatoms. To everyone's surprise the abundance of UCYN was almost 10 times higher outside (300k) of the bloom than inside (35k). However, I was sure to point out that the sampling we had conducted was only made at a single depth (5 meters) and was therefore very limited in terms of picturing the abundance of all UCYN in the water column. Data throughout the cruise have shown a clear trend in having the highest number of cells/liter around 35 meters of depth, so we could possibly miss out on a larger community here. To clarify, 35 000 cells/liter is not enough diazotrophs to sustain a bloom at this magnitude for such a long period of time.

There is so much more I would have liked to look into, specially in terms of a depth profile, but time wouldn't allow it. A gradient of abundances from the edge of the bloom to the middle would have been nice too. I have the filters for that at 5 meters at least, but there was no time for me to investigate it on board (and UCYN is not the main subject of my project either).

After I left the meeting to continue my lab work people were trying to find reasons justifying having the LD inside the bloom. In my opinion I hope we do.