I’ve been putting off writing this cruise report because there is just too much I could talk about and I wanted to be REALLY thorough, which apparently is not working! So I’ve decided to give a brief recap of what we did/learned each day and I can come back and elaborate more later:

Tuesday June 23
- DNA extraction with Mike Rappe (which I’ve done lots of before but was cool to see how our methods differ)

Wednesday June 24
- Nutrients with Karin Bjorkman and Tara Clemente (filtered water for measurements of phosphate, silicate and low level nitrogen (here in the subtropical gyre biological nitrogen levels are so low we must use special methods to detect it))

Thursday June 25
- Flow cytometry with Ken Doggett (counting microbial cells electronically. You can also sort populations of cells based on their properties- such as size and the type of chlorophyll pigments they contain- for further downstream analyses which is VERY cool!)

Friday June 26
- Viral and bacterial cell counts on slides + FlowCam with Grieg Steward and Mike Sieracki (counting microbial cells by staining cells, making slides and doing visual counts on a microscope- flow cytometry is MUCH faster

Saturday June 27
- Bacterial and primary production with Matt Church and Donn Viviani (This was my favorite day because I’ve learned methods for measuring these in my oceanography classes but this was my first time actually DOING them myself- very cool!)

Sunday June 28
- Deck ops with Brett Updyke (manning, deploying and recovering the CTD. Running the winch while recovering a sediment trap at 3am was the coolest part

Monday June 29
- Process sediment traps (full of smelly formalin!), packing up the labs, fishing (>20 tuna and 2 mahimahi were caught! Schools of them were following the ship almost all the way back to Oahu!)

Tuesday June 30
- Arrive home, offload!

What a great cruise!! Now back to the lab to process our samples and perform molecular analyses…