Blogs

We pulled the drifter out of the water at 06:30 and motored back to the mouth of the Columbia to do it all again. At 08:00 we deployed a drifter off the stern - the same as yesterday - but it was immediately swept under the ship and broken by the ship's bow thruster. The lesson here is to face the ship into the current when deploying off the stern. So we turned the ship around and deployed the other drifter at 08:30 and set about following it for the next 24 hours. This time the drifter moved northwest and later began to curl back to the northeast.

A large portion of life aboard is collecting and filtering water. Lauren Vice, a summer research intern, has become proficient in performing RNA filtering of water samples. Today's video blog has Lauren demonstrating the filtering process.

Today we began a new field campaign for the CMOP program. At the beginning of the strong ebb tide we released an Argos surface drifter at the mouth of the estuary on the south side of the shipping channel. We immediately cast the CTD and collected a surface water sample. Then we followed the drifter as it moved off shore, casting the CTD each hour and collecting a surface water sample every three hours.

Today we attempted to follow an intermediate bottom salinity as it moved up estuary on the flood and down estuary on the ebb. We waited until the strong ebb settled down at about 10:00 pdt and moved to station NC-7, which lies 7 miles up estuary from the mouth. We established a set of stations at half-mile increments from NC-7 to NC-11 near the bridge, including 3 stations spanning the channel at each point. We then worked our way up the estuary with the flood casting the CTD at several of these stations.

Research has pretty much stayed the same this week. Slow progress, but progress nonetheless (I hope anyway). One thing that I've found that is that when I'm performing experiment after experiment, its easy to just get lost in the repetition. I'm doing the same tests with different electrode configurations, different electrolytes, conditions, etc. Not only are there a billion confounding variables that stump me at times, but without sufficiently organizing my data, or taking some time to pause and evaluate what I'm doing, I can do a lot of work without coming up with anything useful.

Week Six- Monday I performed another set of four RNA isolations, Tuesday I prepared for the cruise, and Wednesday I boarded the Barnes. My duty on the ship was to fliter water samples through Sterivex filters with a pore size of .22 um. The system I used was something like this: a large bottle of water was collected at a particular depth and location and then the water was pumped out through tubes using a geo-pump. The water ran through the filters connected to the tubes and then was deposited in large plastic buckets.

Almost all primary production in the ocean is performed by algae, with a small fraction contributed by vascular plants and other groups. Peter Kahn, OHSU graduate student, demonstrates one technique to perform primary productivity measurements.

Thus week I created a homepage where the user can choose which feature of the application they would like to use. So far we only have four options but hopefully more will come. I also created a schedule of the tasks i need to complete and when I think they will be done. This should give us an idea of a stopping point with the application. I also went home for the weekend!!!

Wow, I have not written on here in a while. Sorry to all my faithful readers (Vanessa).

Things have been so busy here that I have barely had a chance to sit down! With my proteins all purified and ready to go, I have been doing about two in vitro proteolysis reactions a day! That is a lot of gel, a lot of digging around in the -80C freezer and a lot of data.

I don't have too many interesting details on the project for this week. I have been slowly but steadily adding more layers to my IBM. I have been working on the eating and movement behavior of the zooplankton. I would say that a majority of my time this week has been spent in trying to make the model run faster. MATLAB is very user friendly, but not very efficient if you ask me. I bet if I was more familiar with it, I'd know some more tricks to get it to run faster. But it still runs! So I guess that is the important part.