Fancy sounding class title, read: The Whale Class. We got to do some pretty cool field research in this block aboard NOAA'S RV Auk (below) within Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary located off the coast of MA. Map of Sanctuary and Stellwagen Info.
As always safety first. We all had to put on immersion suits day one but this time we actually got to jump in the water and test them out! Talk about positive buoyancy, you couldn't sink if you tried.
So marine megafauna = large marine things e.g. whales. Every day while onboard we stood marine mammal watch recording whale swimming and feeding behaviors, attempting to ID humpbacks by their flukes and also identifying sea birds. Here are some minke whales near the boat.
View from the stern of the Auk as we left port everyday.
Here's Pam trying to ID a seabird. Probably a herring gull.
Humpback playing around.
Humpback breach!!!! We were so spoiled, we saw this almost every day we went out.
We also spent some time on a local fishing vessel, part of the course was about the difficulties of balancing marine preservation and the livelihood of fisherman. Here we are with the sophisticated sampling gear 'bucket on a stick' and the largest wrench I've ever seen.
Here a fisherman shows us a sediment sampler similar Shipek grabs scientists use.
We caught a lobster!
My specific project didn't really fit into the course description but our professor was very into marine food webs and was excited about our topic. We were looking at the ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi (the jelly) and its parasite Edwardsiella lineata (the thin orange guy). We did stable isotope analysis on the two organisms to see how high on the food chain the parasite was eating in relation to the ctenophore.
Here we are collecting in Woods Hole on a saturday.
Other students had varying research projects- this is team Dogfish analyzing the gut contents of some they caught off of the Auk one day. The other two groups cataloged the whale and seabird behaviors and analyzed benthic substrate within Stellwagen.
All in all it was a pretty exciting class, a full day out on a boat is never a bad way to spend your time. It was always satisfying to know that while we were in the field everyone else was sitting in a lecture hall.
