Tug Life

We're back in St. Petersburg and this week is going to be bittersweet - it's the last week with this amazing crew and in this incredible course (so sad), but we had some amazing things planned for us!

After meeting up on Monday and learning/reviewing about the open ocean, we took our little scientist selves and boarded the R/V Weatherbird II - a 115 ft research vessel! We've been out on a few boats throughout the course, but the Weatherbird was a real treat. The crew was very welcoming and even better was that they were really interested in what we were doing (not to mention that the chef was ridiculously talented!!).

The excursion was split into two stations; it started with Station 1 about 18 miles off-shore and ended at Station 2 near-shore closer to Tampa Bay (next to Sunshine Skyway). We divided up into groups to perform all of the tasks/tests needed to collect data. When the otter troll net or dredge was pulled, one team was in charge of deploying it and keeping track of when to pull it back up. Once hauled back onto the ship, everyone would come to help sort, identify, and measure the organisms that were retrieved.

I did appreciate the otter troll and dredge because it was the first time I had ever seen , but to my own surprise I really enjoyed the water quality testing that our group was assigned to at Station 1. Another group was in charge of deploying and collecting water samples from the CTD machine (an instrument that measures the Conductivity, Temperature, and Depth in the water). When they brought us the water samples, it was game on! We ran tests to determine the levels of phosphate, nitrate, nitrite, carbon dioxide, salinity, and ammonia concentrations in the water at different depths. The most significant change that was seen occurred between salinity and phosphate levels. As the sample depth increased, the water became more saline because higher salt concentration in a solution makes the water more dense and therefore heavier. The phosphate levels decreased as the sample depth increased because phosphate was being consumed faster than it could fall to the bottom of the ocean.

Cheesin' with the CTD (the tubes on top collect the water samples at different depths)

Captain Boomer explaining the radar images to us (left)  Dana sittin' pretty on the Weatherbird (right)

 One of the crew members was nice enough to give a tour of the engine room - check out the $15k Reverse Osmosis machine that purifies the water for the boat crew!

 Thank you so much for this opportunity FIO!