We’ve been writing regular posts about our research work on this Indian Ocean survey trip, but we thought readers might be interested to see our voyage up until now. If you click on the map, you can enlarge the voyage route. The yellow dots mark our surveying stations. We have now entered into the Indian Ocean gyre, and we’ll be reporting to you more about our plastics research here.
Currently, we’ve hit some rough weather, so we’ve experienced difficulties in carrying out quality zooplankton samples using the multinet. Nevertheless, we have been successful in using a net phytoplankton, and a WP2 net for zooplankton, which has provided us with quality data. Here in the gyre, we observe less plankton and fewer fish.
As we approach the centre of the South Indian Ocean gyre, it will be interesting to see how production, plankton, fish change as we move westwards. Today we are steaming west, along the 20th degree S. We are sampling every 150 nautical miles, and trawling for mesopelagic fish in between the ecological stations.
08/07/2015