7/31/2013: Headed to Jacksonville

A research vessel is a little like a rental house. Of course, the ship’s crew has all of their spaces where they keep their gear & the ship’s gear. However, the science labs are largely empty & the science crew brings all of their own research materials. Before the cruise, the science crew must think ahead and plan for the most samples they think they will collect. The must bring all of the tags, bags, markers, memory cards, preservatives, etc. that they think they might need during the entire trip. When leaving the ship, all of this gear must be packed away into containers, prepared to be taken off of the ship, trucked back to home base, and stored for the next cruise. 

 

We completed three trap sets today. In those traps we caught a whole bunch of black seabass, and a fair number of jellyfish. Red snapper continue to be seen on camera, but not enter the traps. In between trap sets, we washed all of the buckets, containers and most of the other gear. Once we finished with the last fish, we packed away all of the sample containers, and other equipment. We also scrubbed the wetlab clean. It is always amazing to see how far the slime can fly when fish are flopping around being measured. It’s also amazing to witness the extreme transformation of a space from dirty to clean with the effort of just a few people.  Cleaning and packing took us until dinner time.

The evening was a low-key one. Folks were cleaning their cabins, and the mates made cookies, so everyone had cookies and ice cream. There are only a minimal number of people who need to work right now, so the ship is pretty laid back. The science night crew is hanging around a little bit, trying to get back on schedule. The ship’s crew is preparing the boat & themselves to get back into port. We will be arriving back at our same dock space in the Mayport Navy base by around 0730 tomorrow morning.

7/30/2013: Winding Down

I have found that there is a trajectory to each research cruise. It doesn’t seem to matter much how long the cruise is. It tends to follow the same path. The first few days, people are getting into the groove, figuring things out, finding their jobs. The middle of the cruise, everyone is pretty well coordinated. There are often some mistakes at this time because people start to get complacent. They are pretty sure they know what their job is & it seems like they could do it in their sleep. Of course, this isn’t exactly true and mistakes are made. Toward the end of the cruise, the entire ship’s company is looking forward to home, even if they will be headed back out to sea again in a few days. 

Toward the end of the cruise, people start talking about their families. They make plans for what they will do after they get home. If the ship is close enough to land, people start trying to find cell signal & call home. The metal preparation seems to take between 24 and 48 hours.

We will be setting traps three more times tomorrow, but the preparations for home have already begun.  Plans are being made for when gear can get washed, when it can be stored. There will be one final push to get as many samples as possible tomorrow, but after that everyone will start to think about the things that need to get done back on land. 

 

Despite the fact that NOAA’s vessels are connected to the outside world in a variety of ways, there is a feeling at sea that the world is no bigger than the vessel you are working on. Inside these bulkheads and on these decks is the only thing that really matters. Work is work and nothing can change what needs to get done. No matter how mad you may be at someone, you still have to work next to them tomorrow. Once a voyage is almost over, dynamics start to shift. People let their feelings show a little more. They focus a little less on the task at hand and spend a little more time thinking about the end. If the cruise has been an upbeat one (as this one has), this often involves a little extra joking around, a little extra frivolity. No matter what, the last 24 hours of a research cruise involves a lot more smiling than the few days leading up to this point.  The end is near! The end is in sight!

7/29/2013: Fishery-independent surveys

Today we caught our first red snapper in a trap for a week. We have seen several on the videos, and I have blogged about some of the reasons we may not have been catching them. However, the question came up today, “Why send scientists out here at all? Can’t we just get the data from commercial and recreational fishermen?” This question always comes up because sometimes it feels to the science party that we are maybe spinning our wheels when commercial fishermen make their living doing this stuff.

 

The short answer is “not really,” and I’ve explained some of the reasons in my first post from this cruise. The fishermen are impacted by factors other than the numbers of fish in the water when they are bringing fish to market. The price they will get (for commercial fishers), regulations, the price of fuel, etc. NOAA’s goal is to set the limits for numbers of fish that can be harvested from the populations while still maintaining a healthy ecosystem.  In order for NOAA to collect information on the overall population, the surveys must be able to capture as many sizes of each species as possible. They must be able to track the size of the population over time. Many fish species experience boom-and-bust cycles in their populations. This is a natural phenomenon which can be influenced by everything from water temperature to food availability to amount of rainfall. Therefore, it’s important to get an accurate count of fish numbers without the confounding factors of price or weather getting in the way.

Another advantage of fishery-independent surveys is that these surveys can give the scientific community information about species that are not currently commercially valuable. There are many species for which we collect data that are not currently fished. Videos are especially handy tools for quantifying species which would never be attracted to a baited trap. All of these species are important to the ecosystem. They may be food for a fished species. They may be a species which is not currently fished, but a future fishery may develop. They may be the predators of a currently fished species. The more we understand about the ecosystem and all of the different species which inhabit it, the better we will be at predicting trends & preventing crashes in the stocks of individual species. Despite the fact that the people involved in a single survey cruise may be frustrated by their idle hands, the endeavor is creating valuable data for the future of fish populations.

7/28/2013: Translating to High School

We were able to set four sets of traps and cameras today. While gear was soaking, Paul (the high school teacher) & I worked on a lesson plan to translate the work we do into something that high school student can easily understand and utilize. It will include a variety of different skills that are important to science as well as interesting to students. The lab we have designed will focus on using video data to count numbers of fish that appear on videos. Paul chose triggerfish & tomtate, which seemed highly appropriate based on the videos that we have collected on this trip. However, this lesson could easily be modified to count any species which is very commonly seen on a particular set of videos. Based on the videos I posted here, black seabass would be an excellent choice.

In our lab, the students will count numbers of two species of fish present on the videos each minute for twenty minutes. Once they have finished counting, the students can then find the average number of individuals on the video, graph the presence of fish over time, and even compare their data to the data of others in the class. Using the class data, they can discover the preferred habitat for each species. This can all be written into a laboratory report & “sent to the researchers.” I am pretty excited about this idea because I have been trying to come up with a way to incorporate video observations into an accessible lab. I think Paul has come up with a methodology which will be perfectly suited to the high school classroom. We have worked together to incorporate skills that are essential to students in the science classroom along with using real videos to create “data.”

I have an additional idea that I think would be a great lesson. That idea is having students plot the position of the ship each day. I would give them a list of positions for the trip & they would have to plot where the ship is located, find water depths, distances traveled and other parameters. I think this would be a great lesson for an Oceanography or Earth Science class. If I get to teach a research course, I will definitely incorporate some of these skills into the lessons that I design for that course. Ideally in that case, students would participate in their own research cruise for a few days. One of their projects would then be to go back and plot our position on a daily basis. The students would also complete their own oceanographic research projects, such as quantifying plankton, benthic worms, physical oceanographic profiles, and other parameters. I think that this would be an exceptionally enjoyable course to teach, and I think that the students would get a great deal of value out of completing their own research projects. I would have really loved to have that sort of experience during my high school career.

7/26/2013: Twenty-four Seven Operations

When working with such a large, capable, affable crew, it is easy to forget that someone is on watch 24 hours a day, every day, making the ship function. It is easy to forget when working in such a smooth environment that someone is working all of the time. The entire ship’s company cannot sit down for a meal together. Someone has to be driving the ship and making sure we are all safe.

 There are three NOAA Corps officers who stand watch in the bridge throughout the day. Each of their watches is 4 hours long & they happen twice a day, every day. During these watches, the officers steer the ship, watch for other vessels in the area, keep track of our location, and generally get us where we need to be. There is also a captain (or in this case, Chief Officer or C.O.), who doesn’t generally stand a watch, but oversees everything going on in the vessel, especially the ship’s interactions with the outside world, such as other vessels in the area. In addition to the officers, there is also a deckhand who stands a watch in the ship’s bridge during the night. During the day, the deck crew works on the back deck setting and hauling gear, etc. However, at night the ship is required to have extra eyes watching from the bridge as well.

During the night the officers rotate who is on watch. The deckhands also rotate who is awake. The engineers rotate who is awake as well, making sure that the engines, generators, water-makers, etc. continue to function. The science crew splits into a day shift and a night shift. I have described a lot of what the day shift does & mentioned what the night shift does. The day shift deals with the traps and the cameras. We get the bait into them, attach the cameras to the traps, get them in the water, retrieve them, and count, weigh, measure & dissect the fish that are captured. The night crew maintains the acoustic mapping equipment to provide maps of the bottom of the ocean so that we can set the traps in areas that are likely to hold reef fishes.

This ship is like a floating city. It really contains just about everything you would need to stay comfortable.  Every stateroom has a head (bathroom) with a shower. The ship makes fresh water from the salt water around us, so there is never a real shortage. There is a laundry room in the bow with three washers and three dryers in it. Plenty of power to run computers, negation equipment, lights, etc. Even satellite TV, internet, and phone service.  It’s pretty remarkable how much like normal life being at sea is. You just get too see some cool things if you look out your front door. Today we saw a leatherback turtle and several mahi mahi. Yesterday we saw a pod of spotted dolphins. You never know what you are going to see at any given moment, which makes it very interesting.