Educational Activities

Journal Entry
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Saturday
September 6, 2003

Today was a very busy and fun day. I enjoyed reading my emails from family and friends, and enjoying the sunrise very early with nobody else on deck. The water is so calming and peaceful. I got some writing done and worked long hours in the laboratory.

I spent several hours taking digital images of some very small invertebrates that we pulled up in the 1 meter net. They are such interesting creatures and so tiny in such a big ocean. One creature that we captured in known as a porpita. It looks like a small very blue round disk with miniature tentacles. It is related to the portugese man of war jelly fish, but don’t seem to be poisonous. We have found some as small as 1 mm and some as large as 1.5 cm. In the same net tow we captured some nudibranchs, which are sea slugs, and a snail that feed on the porpita. The snails are called janthina and the ones we’ve seen range in size from 3 mm to 6 mm. Such a pretty name. They have a blue-purplish hue and make a crusty surface that looks bubbly to protect their foot. The nudibranch, that is about 3-7mm, is known as a glaucus. They are very interesting to watch under the microscope. They have a slit opening for a mouth and stick out an almost completely translucent tongue like projection. We also saw a crab larvae called a zoea. Now, this guy was created for horror films. It has a huge spike (in comparison to it’s tiny body) that runs through the length of it’s body. Their bodies are very small, most of them being less than 2 mm, but the spikes can make them look like 5 mm. We also saw pyrocystis and ethmodiscus. Pyrocystis are very small circular organisms about 1 mm in diameter and they are what makes the bioluminescent water shows at night out here in the open ocean. Several of the research crew members leaned over the port side the other night with long sticks in hand and swirled the waters to watch these guys glow. It was better than making sparks with your blanket in the winter! Pyrocytis, like lightening bugs or fireflies, contain two chemicals called luciferin and luciferase that when mixed emit light. The ethmodiscus diatoms, about 1 mm in size, are counted by Dr. McKay and the data is used in his research. He collects them and will use them back in his lab at Bowling Green, Ohio to determine how they migrate in the water column. Ethmodiscus are very pretty under the microscope. They are a single celled boxy shaped diatom whose shell emits rainbows of color from the light in the microscope. We also collected some small fish larvae, and a portugese man of war larvae. For more information and pictures on these creatures please view the audio clip found on this web site, called “Tiny things in a Huge Sea”

Shout out to all my colleagues back at the lab….you guys are the best.

Dr. Nikki Hanegan

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