Its not everyday that a cook onboard gets asked “Can I put phytoplankton in your freezer?”
That’s what Sarah got asked today. Today we collected phytoplankton near Peterman Island, for the Citizen Science project FjordPhyto, the phd Project of Allison Lee. At key places throughout the Antarctic Peninsula we are collecting phytoplankton with a tow net, then filtering them and preserving them to understand what types are here and when during the season they are here. After we filter the phytoplankton out of the water, we put the small paper disk (the filter) in a solution inside a small tube and the into the freezer to preserve it for genetic analysis later! Hence a small build up of phytoplankton tubes in the freezer. The steps for the science even say fold the filter like a taco – so really we have phytoplankton tacos in our freezer!
Quixote Expeditions participated last year in this project and continued this year. This year we got a brand new microscope so we can look at the mini creatures we are collecting. The most prevalent type we’ve nicknamed Spike or Spikey – photo below and hopefully you can see why!
We try to collect whenever we can – yay for science!
– Laura
