Egg Island, Bahamas

Ms. Austin

Today was another busy day on the R/V Seward Johnson. I woke up and had breakfast around 7:30am and spent the early part of the morning working on my deep-sea research project. I am studying how the color of crustaceans change with depth. So, this morning I took pictures of the crustaceans that we had collected at each depth during our MOCNESS plankton sampling a few days ago. After about 3 hours of taking pictures for my project, I took a quick break and sat out in the sunlight on the deck of the ship. I then had lunch in the galley and afterward helped bring in the animals that were collected from the morning submarine dive. There were some slaps, other interesting tunicates and a sea star, which they had collected. Today’s submarine dives went as deep as 2,100 feet!

In the afternoon I went snorkeling in Golden Cay where I saw lionfish, barracuda, rays and some beautiful sea urchins. I made it back in time to eat dinner and watch the evening sub return to the ship at 7:30pm. That night starting around 9:00pm, we all helped launch a CTD (which measures temperature, salinity and chlorophyll at different depths) to around 3,500 feet! After the CTD came back up we collected all the water from the bottles and took them to the lab to be analyzed. This whole process took us into the wee hours of the morning. I went to bed exhausted!