Yesterday was my first day of sampling on the cruise and it was a success. While we waited for the CTD rosette to come to the surface with my first set of samples, we decided to do the first naupliar-net tow. 
When the net came back to the surface, it didn’t seem like we had captured much material. But then we took a look at the collection reservoir, the “cod end”, which was clogged with thick, gooey yellow-brown plankton. It was so thick that I ended up having a really hard time separating out my nauplii from the rest of the larger plankton in the tow! We got our first look at live plankton on the cruise, and were able to get photos of some of these tiny critters under the microscope. After the net tow, the CTD came up to the surface and I went to work concentrating and collecting nauplii from the Niskin bottle samples. This took a long time, because I concentrate 10 Liters of seawater onto a single filter for each sample, and then repeat this for 4 depth features, with duplicate 10 Liter volumes for each feature.
There was some doubt as to whether 10 Liters would be enough seawater to get the necessary number of nauplii for my analyses. So early this morning I took a few minutes to look at how many nauplii I collected in these samples. Actually this is quite difficult to do on a ship. It requires a strong stomach and intense focus because it can be nauseating to sit at the microscope trying to count the animals in a small petri dish as they swish back and forth under the microscope due to the motion of the ship. Luckily I am quite good at it. As I had hoped, I found that I will have enough critters to do the barcoding analyses I planned, with roughly 40-90 nauplii in each 10 Liter sample.
With Day 1 of nauplii sampling complete, I look forward to seeing how these samples change as we move South, approaching the subtropics.
Basin-scale exploration of Atlantic plankton 