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Seabirds & Field Repairs (9/1/09)

 
A weight of confused albatrosses follows along behind the New Horizon, wondering when we are going to pull up our nets.

I've mentioned albatrosses to my land-lubber friends a few times, and figured they merit a little time in the blog. I love these guys! They're cool because they are huge of course, but they also have very sweet faces. Unfortunately, they are also a little shy of people, so I have no good shots of them up close (I need a better camera!) Here's an enlargement of the previous photo...

...doesn't do them justice. These are black-footed albatrosses -- lovely flyers, but they do look a little goofy when paddling along madly trying to keep up with the ship. I saw albatrosses often when working on NOAA's groundfish survey. They would congregate behind the boat as the trawl nets were coming up, snatching the small fish and organic chunks that fell through the net's mesh. We don't see too many albatrosses at a time on this cruise, but we did today. They must have been hoping for a net to come up. The poor guys must have been very disappointed to watch us steam off, after all that frenetic paddling trying to keep up. Sorry guys. I'll sing a special song for you tonight.

The other exciting thing that happened today was the repair of this contraption...


The FlowCAM - Natalja's tool of choice for visualizing all the tiny teeming denizens of the deep (until someone turns the dang knob too far clockwise).

The FlowCAM is pretty cool, actually. It's like a digital camera-microscope mounted over a conveyor belt. You pump water through the box and it records an image of each little gewgaw that blows by. This is great if you would like to have a good idea of who all is present in the seawater, but would rather not spend 10 hours hunched over a microscope looking for them (biologists don't need that much job security). Natalja was mortified to discover that the focus knob had ceased to function -- locked up, in fact. What good is a microscope that can't focus, you ask? Well...exactly squat, as you might imagine. Normally, sniggling little mechanical issues like these are easy to fix, but this device is worth $85k. Luckily I didn't know this at the time, as I probably wouldn't have done this...


 Grant demonstrates the now famous "Leatherman-Maneuver" that saved Natalja's bacon. 

Luckily I was blissfully unaware of the risk, and carefully returned the focus knob to it's normal operational parameters. It's fun being a tech! I so wish I had my camera in hand when Natalja realized the FlowCAM was fixed -- she jumped clapped her hands and absolutely beamed! A photo of Natalja's response would have made the perfect counterpoint to the photo of her I posted yesterday.