We’ve put the science of this cruise in the books. Well, nearly. A couple of experiments will be finished up tomorrow morning, back at the lab, but most of it is done. And we’ve got jars of stuff, CDs full of data, slides with tiny stuff on them, and notebooks full of observations. It wasn’t the smoothest cruise ever, but we achieved all of our objectives in one way or another, learned a lot, and everyone comes home with their fingers and toes in tact. I’ll write more in the coming days about what we’ve done, but I’ll leave you with a picture of our science crew and our target organism, the inimitable copepod Acartia tonsa. I’ll get some higher resolution pictures of the cruise up when we get home, it’s a bit slow uploading images from the ship.
The science party from DeZoZoo 1001, on day 6 of the cruise.
Now, I’ve got to pack up before we get to the dock…
An Acartia tonsa female, and a smaller copepodite stage.
abplankton
afishe21
bcrump
jellyfisher
planktoneer
Life in the Dead Zone 
This was really interesting – I didn’t follow along, but just read it as a whole. I hope you will post the results of some of the tests you run back in the lab. I am surprised that there are low oxygen zones this early in the season. I thought that happened later as the water heated up. I am a ways up the Tred Avon and the water is quite murky here on Fox Hole Creek – lots of green gobs of kelp-y like stuf and small particles of a brown slimy algae. It was worse on Sunday and better yesterday – more breeze I guess. On the other hand, we seem to have a pretty good stand of grass coming this year. My oyster-babies are coming along well and the baskets are full of other critters as well!