Keeping Current
What is Planktoscope?
While this image may have been taken by NASA, it's not an alien!
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The Planktoscope is a high-resolution towed underwater
microscope camera. Plankton are tiny organisms in our ocean. They're called "marine drifters" because they are small and
don't have enough strength to move very far in water like fish.
We plan to use data from the Planktoscope and the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's 2021 West Coast Ocean Acidification (WCOA) cruise and to create information about plankton.
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We want to learn more about where different types of Plankton occur. Where these plankton occur can vary with the presence of different environmental conditions. We want to discover the details of where these organisms occur due to these specific conditions. We hope to use this information to define different thresholds and create theorifor certain types of plankton. These thresholds can serve as inputs for our Habitat Suitability Index. This information can help us understand and help conserve zooplankton.
Map of theÂ
California Current System
Our Area of Interest
The oddly-shaped blue section in this image
is where the California Current System Lies.
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How are we doing it?
The Nitty Gritty of Our Scientific Process
We want to learn more about where plankton live, and why. We need to look at the many factors that make different areas of the ocean habitable (or not). Just like humans, they can only live under certain conditions (volcanoes aren't exactly a real estate hot spot for a reason).
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How do we get this information? And what factors affect where plankton can to live? Luckily, there's a lot of scientists who have worked hard to find the answers to those questions. In comes the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
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Every year, NOAA takes out a research boat with many special instruments attatched to it (including the planktoscope) to measure different aspects of ocean chemistry in the water they're travelling in. These aspects (we call abiotic factors) include things like Salinity, Nitrates, Dissolved Inorganic Carbon (DIC), and much more. This cruise goes all along the California Current System, and since it is so big, they split the different areas called "Transects."
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This is where the work of our team begins. We have thousands of images of plankton, in each and every one of these transects. We also have data on the different abiotic factors that NOAA collected on the cruise. It is our job to try to put the two together to see how these abiotic factors affect the composition of planktonic communities.
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