Marine bio Camp - day 3 recap
Today's Itinerary:
Morning session
take RWU's two small boats (a 19' Lema Skiff and a 29' Master Marine) out on the Bay;
on one boat - take CTD and Secchi disk readings from three different stations; collect surface, mid-column, and "deep" water samples using a Van Dorn bottle (for chlorophyll analysis back in the lab);
on 2nd boat - deploy Van Veen Grab and small otter trawl, identify and discuss critters found
Afternoon session
discuss productivity, photosynthesis, and ways of measuring both;
process water samples collected in morning - for each sample, filter 1L through 0.5μ membrane, place membrane filter in 10ml acetone to extract chlorophyll, let sit overnight (will quantify chlorophyll spectrophotometrically tomorrow);
discuss what characteristics make a good graph;
create depth profiles using CTD data from morning (salinity, temperature, and dissolved oxygen vs depth);
interpret depth profiles and relate to the geography of the Bay;
Evening Lecture
Phytoplankton, primary productivity, and marine invertebrates (characteristics of major phyla) - presented by our two senior undergraduate camp assistants
Issue of the Day
Lost a kid. OK, not really, but one kid did decide that he hated the camp so much he didn't want to stay. So, his dad came by this evening, picked him and his stuff up, and took him home. Oh well. Maybe he was expecting dolphins and sharks or something.
3 comments:
Heh, my high school invertebrate class will finally get to chordates tomorrow, but I found the ugliest possible critters to illustrate Subphylum Vertebrata. I scorn you, dolphins and sharks!
during my nearly 10 years of doing a summer "marine bio" program to introduce hs students to potential careers in marine science, i can't begin to tally how many dolphin huggers got the rude awakening that invertebrates exist... or that there actually SCIENCE involved in marine science...
we lost a few too, though that's part of the job too... maybe it saves the kid a few years of indecision in college...
I think the kid had some serious issues with his dad and had decided, no matter what we did, that he was going to hate it. I bet that if we got him a dive on the Alvin where he discovered and named a new species, he'd very eloquently say, "This sucks."
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