Surprises of Science!

Sampling is always a gamble, we put gear on the ocean floor, and hope it works the way that we expect. The sled is a bit of a black box, because we don’t have any imagery capability on it, so we really don’t know what is doing on any deployment, or what kind of sample we can expect. Sometimes it has a great sample, where the nets are clean and we only have sediment in the codends (sample containers at the end of the nets), sometimes the nets are full of mud, and other times the nets can be full of sponge bits and pieces. We also don’t know by looking whether the sample will be great or not. For example, a few sleds ago, we got a bunch of sponge bits and the sample was terrible for all the small animals we are looking for, and there were very few animals at all. Which was disappointing, but sometimes happens. On our most recent deployment of the sled, we had some sponge bits in the nets, very little else, and we expected the sample to be terrible like the previous sponge-y sample. But we were surprised! We found quite a diversity of species we haven’t seen before, and there were lots of animals. Science, and especially fieldwork, is always surprising, which keeps it interesting!

Dr. Sarah Gerken
University of Alaska Anchorage