Somehow, I’m now coming to the end of my second season in the Falkland Islands (having been here since mid-October). The last few months have been insanely busy, and now that I’m into my last week, there seem to be so much left to do! This has included going rock pooling for small fish, helping out with World Ocean Day, and making sure that I have got all the data that I need from my samples. Things seem to be falling into place though, which is always nice. Now I just need to make sure everything gets to Aberdeen so I can continue the work!

Stall at the World Oceans Day Event

Squid larvae

Big-eyed lantern fish larvae

The last few collections all involved games of “tweezer ninja” (where we try to collect as many fish larvae from the sample so I could look at them separately), but on this occasion, there were only three small larvae to pick out. Based on the work I did on last year’s samples, it looks like these ones could be more of the deep-sea lantern fish larvae. It was very exciting to find them in last year’s collections but getting them again at the same time of year is even more interesting.

In the first week of June, I hit a major milestone of my PhD – I finished sorting through my 214 zooplankton samples! I have no idea how many hours I’ve spent in the lab counting everything under the microscopes, though I’ve spent the better part of a year going through them all. I sometimes now wake up with a vague feeling of having been counting things in my dreams. I really enjoy looking at the overall numbers for these samples because they sound ridiculous. According to my huge spreadsheet of results, I have counted around 120,000 animals which collectively have weighed… about 500g. Zooplankton is really tiny. To continue the scale of reference from my blog post from the last Southern Currents – my zooplankton weighs the equivalent of 3.3 chocolate oranges. The analysis I’m actually doing for my PhD is slightly more technical, but less fun to think about than that!

On return to the UK, I need to collect my zooplankton samples, as they got to take the more interesting route back to the UK on the RSS Sir David Attenborough (thank you BAS). I did get to have a tour of the ship before they left the Falklands, which was incredibly exciting! Once I get my samples back to Aberdeen, I will continue spending my time in the lab trying to identify zooplankton, but this time I will be identifying the animals using DNA barcoding and phylogenetic analysis. To do this, I will essentially be making a family tree of my unknown species and comparing these with the DNA of animals already identified. This way I can see what species my sample is closely related and determine what it is. It sometimes feels like combining science with detective work.

214 Sample sorted! 

Visit to the RRS Sir David Attenborough