A great day for research?
Today we sailed out to the Long Eddy and were greeted by unnaturally glassy and smooth seas, warm temperatures, and a clear blue sky. Sounds like a great day for research, doesn’t it? Hah! Let’s hear about what went on before we come to conclusions, yeah?
The Balaena, the appropriately-named tagging boat, spent a good chunk of their time around two distinct fin whales, one of which was the same individual tagged yesterday. The DTAG went on the pole and the team poised for a tagging attempt at multiple points throughout the day. However, the whales kept evading the boat and swam particularly fast to avoid being tagged–it was as if they knew we were coming! The whales certainly made our job hard as we could never predict where they would be next time we saw them surface. The boat got real close to the whale twice, but ultimately today was a no-go–the tag boat came back in just after high tide and called it a day. Some good news though: the tag boat saw their first Atlantic puffins today! They were quite cute and surprisingly awkward while in the water.
[photo size=’large’ title=’No tag today’ link=’http://superpod.ml.duke.edu/johnston/files/2011/09/finnotag.jpg’ icon=’zoom’ lightbox=’image’]http://superpod.ml.duke.edu/johnston/files/2011/09/finnotag.jpg[/photo]On the prey-mapping boat, the Phocoena, we took advantage of the calm seas and conducted two great line transects that had no electrical noise and showed a thick krill layer throughout. However, our luck quickly ran out as the adaptor to the computer charger failed to work, and the noise came back soon after. We pulled back to the harbour prematurely and did some more troubleshooting by doing every single combination possible with the wires, battery chargers, inverters, and more electronic stuff I don’t really know the name of. Couple of revelations today: the charger to the laptop cannot be anywhere close to any of the echosounder equipment and the batteries! What that means is that we have to run the echosounder with the laptop on battery power, because the noise is inherently linked with the charger. Well, as they say, the better the quality of data collected, the better the dissertation will be! So, we’ll try testing the limits of the computer’s battery life tomorrow and see what happens.
Overall, yet another learning experience, but I think we all benefited from it in some way or another! Nothing like a good reality check to get you back on track, right?
[photo size=’large’ title=’Prey Team!’ link=’http://superpod.ml.duke.edu/johnston/files/2011/09/preyteamyah.jpg’ icon=’zoom’ lightbox=’image’]http://superpod.ml.duke.edu/johnston/files/2011/09/preyteamyah.jpg[/photo]