Skip to main content

“Where did the anchor go?”

What’s up, guys?! Today we went sampling for our in-the-field measurements and I must say, it was an eventful morning. The initial plan was to take half of our team and a teacher to go to our sampling site near the camping, and perform at least 4 measurements. Just when we were about to leave, we heard one of our precious team members was feeling sick and wasn’t able to join us in the field. Since we needed an extra pair of hands, the ‘Rockers’ team was so sweet to lend us one of their team members for half a day.


We left the marine station shortly after nine and quickly approached the first sampling site. The aim was to drop the anchor, perform a few measurements (surface current direction and speed, temperature, pH etc.) and then lift the anchor to get to the next location and repeat. It was only at our third location we had a little issue with our anchor. As I tried to lift it (as I did the two times before), I felt it getting heavier. It felt like something was pulling the anchor down as I tried to get in in the boat. Gauthier also tried to get the anchor up, but soon we concluded the anchor was stuck and at a depth of at least ten meters, it was impossible to jump in the water to get it loose. New plan: we cut the rope of the anchor and attach a buoy to it. We left the anchor there and as we still needed to measure at least one more time, we went back to the marine station to get a new anchor.


As I walk into the boat house, I soon realize that they don’t really have spare anchors laying around. Luckily, a guy from the workshop walked by and quickly fixed us a new anchor. We resumed the measurements and finished just in time to get to lunch. Happy with our data we called it a day in the field. Just one thing…. Who is willing to retrieve an anchor for us?


Sampling quote of the day: “It feels like fishing, only now we are sure to always get something in the end!” – G.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The wet lab odyssey begins

The Hunger Games wouldn’t be as majestic and thrilling if it weren’t for the games being held in Panem, a futuristic city where the wealthiest and wisest of all beings control the rest of the districts and shape the lives of the masses. So how do a bunch of marine biologists relate to all of this? Well, since we are superior beings, we have the control over our Panem, the wet lab. Just like the movie, districts are our holding tanks and high speed trains are water flows cascading towards the hottest district, where all our competitors await for their chance to be the next Katniss. Arduino, a kind of motherboard to which it’s possible to attach a series of different sensors and switches was used to regulate seawater temperature in our world of two districts: the hot and the cold districts. Our main goal was controlling the temperature in the tanks where our shrimp were kept overnight. This was sort of complex as we needed to have warm baths of running seawater at constant temperatur...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sampling Tjärnö Bay

Professor Karim and Lucy after our last deployment, hurray!! Our experiments are finally finished! We were able to deploy BRUV (see our Finding Fish in Tjärnö Bay post for a description :) ) at all of our sampling locations, plus a few bonus ones. We sampled three different habitat types: sandy, muddy/algae, and harbour areas. Map of Tjärnö Bay with our sampling locations At all of our habitats we sampled at a depth of approximately 1.5 meters to assess what animals are typically found in the littoral zone of Tjärnö Bay - the littoral zone is the region of the sea closest to the shoreline. On our final day of sampling we decided to do a few extra deployments at 10 meters to search for species we didn’t find at shallower depths. We’re working on analyzing all our video footage now - stay tuned for an upcoming creature feature post! Justin and Catie setting up the cameras for deployment Since BRUV uses bait to attract fish, we also conducted snorkeling transects at all of ou...
Post a Comment
Read more

Moving day and other incidents

Dear snailings! Since our last post, a few days have passed (weekends are not a thing for us) and we can´t wait to tell you what has happened. The Arduino Incident… Lukas feeling proud after the successful Arduino installation As you remember from our first blogpost, Robyn and I (Lukas) built our own data logging device with Arduino technology to document water temperature, sea surface level and light exposure in the field. So, after two days of wiring, testing, more wiring and more testing, we were finally able to deploy the logging station in a (almost) waterproofed box in an intertidal pool on the rocky shore of nearby Saltö island. Lukas and Robyn securing the Arduino device using an incredibly wide range of physics knowledge – ropes and heavy rocks The trip to deploy the device became an adventure as the sea was very choppy. Returning to the device the next day gave an unforeseen surprise. Due to the adverse weather conditions, seawater entered the box and caused a...
Post a Comment
Read more