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Sunday - Day 8
Jul. 29th, 2007 11:49 amRoomie's Teacher@Sea log: (apparently took a break today)
Btw, is Vista supposed to start so slowly? I bought a bargain laptop the day before I came out here, and jeez it takes forever. Maybe I just have too little memory or something, but sometimes it takes about 10 minutes...
Woke up leisurely this morning - for once I didn't have to pee in the middle of the night. I reached the my last clean shirt and the sweatshirt that I keep especially for wearing out on boats was starting to smell like fish, so it was time to do laundry. Unfortunately, all of my dirty clothes didn't quite make a full load (required) so I added my bath towel and considered my sheets as well, but they weren't necessary. I was paranoid about it being done before the next haul, as I didn't want to be taking up the dryer if someone needed to use it. I kept running down to check where the cycle was and since the laundry room is three decks below my cabin, I think I got quite a workout running up and down the steps. In spite of that, I finally finished the book. Yay! Actually I thought I'd finish it quite a bit before this, but it's not quite as fluffy as some others, and besides is 800 pages of fairly small print.
The high flyer and sea anchor in the water.
We're a bit northwest of the north end of San Clemente Island today, and the weather is quite a bit calmer than what we we've gotten the last two days. The haul this morning seemed like we hit a mako swarm. Ten were tagged and released and one escaped; unfortunately, four seemed to have struggled too hard and died. I did the data recording of how each hook came up; still with bait, half a bait, no bait, or what species it had caught.
Mako on the line.
Float coming - splash is a shark below the surface.
Pre-lunch was busy as each dead shark was weighed, measured in several different directions, DNA samples taken and the grad students all took all kinds of blood and tissue samples from each shark.
Weighing a dead blue.
Parasitic copepod - sometimes there are so many of these on the trailing edges of shark's fins, they look like they're wearing fringe.
Preparing to take blood and DNA samples.
Apparently after this cruise gets back, they are supposed to take a bunch of congressional staffers out the next day for a few hours - there'll be a bunch of stations with project descriptions all over the ship, like a self-guided tour. In preparation for this, last night a bunch of people were making little drawings on Styrofoam cups, which we'll be sending down with the CTD to 1000 fathoms, where they'll be crushed to the size of shot glasses. I did one too - we'll see how it looks after tonight.
I baited hooks for the afternoon set because I felt a little guilty about standing around and not helping with the processing, however, there were so many people busy taking data and collecting samples, there wasn't much for me to do. The afternoon haul only resulted in four sharks, two makos and two blues, but I got to help tag! It's been a long time since I've done this - while the other biologists held it down, covered its eyes with a damp cloth and worked on getting the hook out, then had me poke the tag in, give it an oxytetracycline shot, and then rototag its dorsal fin. One large male mako got satellite tagged, with a SPAT tag through its dorsal fin and a satellite tag in place of the spaghetti tag. These makos seem so fat compared to the ones I've seen before, but that may be because when we used to do this, we had no way of raising larger sharks out of the water, and we tagged them with a pole. A couple of these big guys had little remoras attached to them. They are so beautiful close up. Photos of that in the next post! Whee!
Well, I'm waiting for my camera card to finish downloading and I'm going to go climb in bed with Harry Potter. The book, I mean.
The view while lying in my bunk...
*mako satellite tagged
Btw, is Vista supposed to start so slowly? I bought a bargain laptop the day before I came out here, and jeez it takes forever. Maybe I just have too little memory or something, but sometimes it takes about 10 minutes...
Woke up leisurely this morning - for once I didn't have to pee in the middle of the night. I reached the my last clean shirt and the sweatshirt that I keep especially for wearing out on boats was starting to smell like fish, so it was time to do laundry. Unfortunately, all of my dirty clothes didn't quite make a full load (required) so I added my bath towel and considered my sheets as well, but they weren't necessary. I was paranoid about it being done before the next haul, as I didn't want to be taking up the dryer if someone needed to use it. I kept running down to check where the cycle was and since the laundry room is three decks below my cabin, I think I got quite a workout running up and down the steps. In spite of that, I finally finished the book. Yay! Actually I thought I'd finish it quite a bit before this, but it's not quite as fluffy as some others, and besides is 800 pages of fairly small print.
The high flyer and sea anchor in the water.
We're a bit northwest of the north end of San Clemente Island today, and the weather is quite a bit calmer than what we we've gotten the last two days. The haul this morning seemed like we hit a mako swarm. Ten were tagged and released and one escaped; unfortunately, four seemed to have struggled too hard and died. I did the data recording of how each hook came up; still with bait, half a bait, no bait, or what species it had caught.
Mako on the line.
Float coming - splash is a shark below the surface.
Pre-lunch was busy as each dead shark was weighed, measured in several different directions, DNA samples taken and the grad students all took all kinds of blood and tissue samples from each shark.
Weighing a dead blue.
Parasitic copepod - sometimes there are so many of these on the trailing edges of shark's fins, they look like they're wearing fringe.
Preparing to take blood and DNA samples.
Apparently after this cruise gets back, they are supposed to take a bunch of congressional staffers out the next day for a few hours - there'll be a bunch of stations with project descriptions all over the ship, like a self-guided tour. In preparation for this, last night a bunch of people were making little drawings on Styrofoam cups, which we'll be sending down with the CTD to 1000 fathoms, where they'll be crushed to the size of shot glasses. I did one too - we'll see how it looks after tonight.
I baited hooks for the afternoon set because I felt a little guilty about standing around and not helping with the processing, however, there were so many people busy taking data and collecting samples, there wasn't much for me to do. The afternoon haul only resulted in four sharks, two makos and two blues, but I got to help tag! It's been a long time since I've done this - while the other biologists held it down, covered its eyes with a damp cloth and worked on getting the hook out, then had me poke the tag in, give it an oxytetracycline shot, and then rototag its dorsal fin. One large male mako got satellite tagged, with a SPAT tag through its dorsal fin and a satellite tag in place of the spaghetti tag. These makos seem so fat compared to the ones I've seen before, but that may be because when we used to do this, we had no way of raising larger sharks out of the water, and we tagged them with a pole. A couple of these big guys had little remoras attached to them. They are so beautiful close up. Photos of that in the next post! Whee!
Well, I'm waiting for my camera card to finish downloading and I'm going to go climb in bed with Harry Potter. The book, I mean.
The view while lying in my bunk...
Lat: | Long: | Mako | Blue | Pelagic Stingray | ||
| Morning set : | 810 | 33.182°N | 118.95°W | 15 | 0 | 0 |
| Afternoon set *: | 832 | 33.097°N | 119.033°W | 2 | 3 | 0 |
