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| Plankton and junk food |
I am in Plymouth at present, working at SAHFOS http://www.sahfos.ac.uk/ to finish analysing some samples I took on the UK-Chile cruise I sailed on in 2010. Wow, finally after almost 2 years I'll be able to figure out what was going on in the ocean when I looked at it. Well... at least answer the little tiny question I asked myself back then. You will probably wonder...what question was it? In a few months I will reveal it all! I just need to finish my thesis first. Let's just say I wanted to find out a little more about how copepod health is affected by what they eat. It's important you know?! Have you seen that "Supersize me" programme? Well...copepods may have an issue with junk food too...
Anyway. What is good about being here is that SAHFOS have the best Plankton taxonomists in the world and the lots of books that can help me with the identification of the copepods I have seen. Also, they have access to fresh plankton every week (for experiments).
Here what they do and why: http://www.westernchannelobservatory.org.uk
As you can see there are plenty of people interested in plankton and all of us look into different things and ask different questions. SAHFOS for example, has been scanning the ocean for a very long time (more than 60 years!) and their ultimate goal is to have a time series of data available to anyone interested showing species distribution over space and time. This is because plankton responds to environmental changes much quicker than other animals.
Monitoring plankton is beneficial for us all as in the plankton you get larvae of fish and crabs etc..things that we eat and love! I mean, we eat a LOT of fish worldwide. Therefore looking at things such babies abundance and health can help us identifying problems in the fisheries.
For more info on the system they use visit their website! It's a really clever device.
raffles79
