A: (Answered by Rob Cheshire, Biological Science Technician) Today I woke up about 10am. I intentionally slept through breakfast so that I don’t feel guilty eating a sandwich at midnight. I laid around my cabin reading for about an hour. The cabin is an 8’ x 10’ room with bunk beds, a sink, and 2 dressers. My cabin mate, Mike Green, and I work opposite shifts so I had the room to myself. I ate lunch at 11:30 and took some pictures of the other shift putting the MOCNESS overboard. I watched a Robert DeNiro movie and then it was 3:00, time to come on watch. We started the watch with a CTD cast off the port bow down to 200m the bottom is 320 m but temperature and salinity don’t change much once you get down that deep. Frank scooped up some surface water with a bucket tied to rope. This water was filtered through fine filters. They look like very thick coffee filters about the size of a half dollar. The filters collect phytoplankton (microscopic plants) that contain chlorophyll, a green pigment. We then freeze and will process them when we return to determine the amount of chlorophyll in the water. This is an indication of how much production there is at the bottom of the food chain, primary production. Our first MOCNESS will not be until 8pm so we have some time to kill. Once we begin the sampling we will be busy setting the net, preserving samples or making labels for the sample jars until 3am. Shift over and bedtime.

A: Looking down from the sky, the eddy we are tracking turns counter-clockwise. This counter-clockwise rotation is caused by the location of the eddy in a trough of a Gulf Stream meander. As the Gulf Stream flows northward it meanders, much like a rope held tight at one end and whipped at the other. Where the Gulf Stream path is closest to the shelf is called a crest and where it is furthest away is called a trough. The eddy forms in the trough. The meander crest in front of the eddy can interact with the eddy and form a warm, southward flowing filament on the inshore edge of the eddy.

A: (Answered by Rob Cheshire, Biological Science Technician) Trial and error. I became interested in environmental issues and the ocean when I was living in Wilmington, NC. I decided to move to Chapel Hill, NC and take courses part time to see if I was interested in pursuing this route. I thumbed through an NC State catalogue one day and discovered they had a program in fisheries. I volunteered in a fisheries lab under the professor who eventually became my graduate school advisor. I worked as a technician polishing fish ear stones (otoliths) for 4 years while I completed my bachelors degree. Before I became a scientist I was a photofinisher, a waiter and a bartender. My career advice to anyone would be to start early to get our foot in the door to see what someone in that career actually does. Even now you could ask to tag along with someone for a couple of days to work (during the summer).

A: Yes, we see quite a bit of Sargassum weed. It is especially abundant right at the boundary of the Gulf Stream. This is due to the downwelling that occurs there. Most nutrients and plankton are carried downward at this boundary but the Sargassum weed remains at the surface due to its numerous “bladders” which keep it afloat. Sargassum weed has very distinct groups of fishes associated with it. It is a very important habitat for a number of juvenile fishes. Some of the ichthyoplankton species associated with Sargassum weed are jacks, filefish and red porgy. We haven’t caught any Sargassum weed because it is very patchily distributed in the area where we’ve been sampling.
A "raft" of sargassum weed floating on the open ocean