A Day at Sea

A before and after view of the research boat. All the gray and black in the after that is not part of the boat is from the mud brought aboard during the sampling process.

Yesterday I finished one year worth of field research with a trip to St. Andrews Bay and a very long day's worth of research. Joined by my trusty and amazing research assistant Owen, we defied the forecast by having a great day of sunshine and scarce wave action. The only thing better would have been less sun because we both got a bit red. However, we did get to see 3 dolphins, a blacktip shark (though hard to say with certainty given that we only saw dorsal fin and caudal fin), lots of ctenophores, and an eel. 

Although some might look on the work that I do as boring, odd, or messy (well it certainly is messy--see this week's photo), I find it really interesting. The sediment can tell us a lot about the health of the ocean, since the sediment acts as a resting place for materials that wind up in the ocean, and sediments can be used as an active timeline. For instance, I was able to show Owen oxygen banding in sediments and burrows made by marine worms which help small animals and bacteria access oxygen below the sediment surface. I was also able to point out how color banding in sediments can show the presence of specific nutrients that have been buried. And while I would love to be working with large animals like sharks, corals, and aquatic mammals, there is so much important work to be done studying the smaller end of the animal size spectrum and lots of work in ocean pollution.

So what's next? I need to go back to St. Andrews Bay two more times to collect more data for my research, but I will spend most of the next year washing all the samples I have, separating samples, cleaning microplastics, and analyzing microplastics and nematodes; I have plenty to keep me busy. All of this work will be used to inform manipulative experiments to help me understand the effect of microplastics pollution on nutrient cycling in marine sediments. So stay tuned for more stories, pictures, and research updates.

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