Friday October 14, 2011

I was very exhausted on Friday and slept in quite late. However, I was still able to get in some work and fun too. After spending most of the morning setting up our lab, we went out fishing again. Darren, my friend from Happy Campers was doing his sea ice training while we were fishing and he came into our fish hut for a bit to do some fishing as well. His research is on tagging Weddell seals so he will be living on a camp away from the station for most the rest of the field season. It is a little sad that I have become good friends with so many amazing people so quickly and now they will all be going out to their respective field sites for 2 months. I hope that I will get to see them when they return to McMurdo in December. Here is Darren Fishing.

Next to our fish hut is what is known around here as the Observation Tube (Ob Tube for short). It is a long cylinder with a ladder built into it with a small glass room at the bottom. The tube and room are just big enough for one person to climb down the tube beneath the sea ice and observe the amazing and spectacular life below. Here I am climbing down the Ob Tube.

Once I got down, I the views were spectacular. My pictures don’t show how amazing it is down there, but several of my friends are part of a dive team down here. They are also leaving for the season tomorrow, but hopefully I can get some of their underwater pictures and post them as well. All of the little white specs in the shots are of little baby fish called Pagothenia borchgrevinki. We call them “Borks” for short. There were thousands of them just under the sea ice. It was a really incredible experience.

Brad came to make sure all was well.

Here are Sandwich and Marissa fishing. We have a pretty amazing life down here!

Sandwich climbing out of the Ob Tube. When she was down there, she said that she could hear seals!

In the first shot, Brad is the one wearing the "Big Red." Behind him, you can see the small green opening to the Ob Tube. The next picture is of our Pisten Bully and our fish hut.

Marissa drove us back to town.

This is the "road" and the view we had as we drove back to town.

Once we got back to town, we headed straight to the aquarium and Sandwich and I weighed and measured each fish. This is something we do after every fishing outing. In addition, we also record where we caught each fish. These data will be important later before we run our experiments.

Brad teaching us about the different species that we have caught and how to differentiate between the species. It will take me a little while to differentiate some of them because many of them look so similar.