In the Arctic, and the rest of the world’s oceans,
zooplankton are important links between
the primary producers and upper trophic levels
like fish or birds, whales.
In the Arctic, there are a couple of large-bodied copepods
that are really key to the ecosystem, Calanus species,
and they are consumed by Arctic cod, bowhead whales,
so they’re really important links in the Arctic food web.
We have a lot of different types of plankton nets.
But the basic idea is that you have
some sort of frame, and then a net, and a cod-end.
And it’s either pulled vertically through the water
or towed through the water to collect plankton
and the plankton is collected down in the cod-end,
which is essentially like a little bucket
or a basket at the end.
The type of net that you use and the type of mesh
that you use depends on what kind of plankton you want to catch.
So, if you have a smaller mesh net
you are going to catch much smaller zooplankton
and a larger mesh net you’re going to catch the larger zooplankton.
For our multinet, which is what we were using on this expedition,
we deployed the net over the side,
and the net is lowered to near the seafloor,
and then recovered at 30 meters per minute,
and we can open and close different nets at specified depths.
We can get a really good idea of what
plankton lives where in the water column.
When it comes onboard, then we’ll
wash down the nets to make sure that all
the zooplankton that we’ve captured
actually make it to that cod-end
and then put the cod-end into another bucket,
bring it into the lab, and then we have
both quantitative and genetic samples.
So, we’ll take the samples that are then
being used for genetic work and preserve that in ethanol.
And then the other samples for taxonomic work
and quantitative work will be then preserved in formalin.
So, what’s really exciting about it is that
we’ve put a lot of effort into trying to find
new species and find more biodiversity in the Arctic.
A lot of the Arctic really hasn’t been studied intently,
especially with the Borderlands,
so these are new areas of discovery
that are really exciting to see what’s
going to come about from all of the
samples that we’ve collected on this cruise.
We found Callanus hyperboreus and
Catanus species that had these parasites
on them and those were the absolute coolest to see.
So some of them actually had external parasites
growing all over their body
and that was really interesting to me.
Since I spend a lot of time in the lab
working with the samples after everything’s dead,
to me just seeing everything alive,
seeing natural colors, that was really,
really exciting for me and also seeing
some of the deep-sea taxa that were
new to me that I had not seen before.
They come in all shapes and sizes,
they have their own special unique adaptations
to the colder environments versus
warmer environments, and it’s just really
amazing to see what stories they can tell us.