Ben Frederiks completed his stay as field assistant last Monday to join
Antigua’s guided tour along the West Spitsbergen coast starting at
Longyearbyen. We still didn’t get any news from Ben but we could check the last
itinerary of the schooner heading south on Maritime Traffic website. We hope he’s
having a blast at this moment sailing over the Greenland Sea on such a
beautiful boat!
Great views of Kongsfjorden from Blomstrand island © Ariadna Szczybelski
At the same moment Ben was leaving, Noël Diepens came to take Ben’s place. Noël quickly adapted herself to my surprise saving some time to play basketball with other scientists and testing the climbing wall on her first day at the station. She had obviously time to get the attention of other shy amateur climbers and these started to join her after dinner time (smart girl). We think this could derive into something more exciting over the next weeks ;)
Noël joined us on board during the third and last week of sampling when
a seemingly weird phenomenon (or just bad luck on the previous sampling days)
happened. For the general understanding, I will make a short recap of what the
sampling plan was before we even arrived at the station. From the beginning we
chose different benthic species with different feeding habits to focus on based
on sampling results during summer of 2013; namely Astarte borealis (filter feeder), Macoma calcarea (deposit feeder) and Nephtys ciliata (omnivorous) (check previous posts on this blog). I
should say I was also a bit skeptic of finding these same species in the same
numbers as in summer time and this was exactly what happened with Nephtys sp. and Macoma sp.
The latter ones would normally account for 10-40 individuals and 10-30
individuals per sampling day, respectively, which brings up a lot of
uncertainty on how to make the most of your experimental set up when you didn’t
get enough replicates even after your second week of sampling. Then, as if by
magic, Macoma and Nephtys started to emerge from the third
week when we were still lacking four days to finish our available time on
board. To give you an idea of our happiness, we started to collect Nephtys individuals
of up to 10-15 cm long (sometimes two or more of these came up in the same
grab!) whereas in the previous weeks we barely could find an individual
exceeding 4-5 cm.
We, however, started to strategically collect after the first week of
sampling another filter feeder (Ciliatocardium
ciliatum) and another deposit feeder (Nuculana
pernula) to cover our backs. But why these? Well, Macoma and Nephtys were
not randomly chosen neither. ARCIND PhD project intends to not only compare the
inter-specific differences among these Arctic species with different ecological
traits in terms of organic pollutants sensitivity, but also to compare their
response towards these substances with the likely induced response in Atlantic
counterpart species such as Macoma
balthica and Nereis virens (long-term
exposure experiments have been carried out at IMARES Yerseke facilities in
summer 2014). We then thought choosing Ciliatocardium
and Nuculana was a quick movement since
the response of both would be comparable to other similar species response as Cerastoderma edule’s (common cockle) and/or
Nuculana minuta’s (minute nutclam).
So all in all we got a very decent list of caught individuals if you
compare the available and the (needed) individuals for our current exposure
experiments: 689 (450) A. borealis, 261
(280) N. ciliata, 175 (150) M. calcarea, 150 (170) C.
ciliatum and 148 (150) N. pernula.
We, of course, had time to celebrate the end of the sampling season for
ARCIND project and the Teisten working season at Ny-Ålesund in excellent company
(see picture below), but also the scientific committee had organised the Arctic
version of the Oktoberfest which, I have to say, can be the envy of many other
countries’ version of this German party event.
From left to right: Ariadna Szczybelski, Noël Diepens and Axel Meldahl © Ariadna Szczybelski
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