Well, the other researchers and most of the personnel on station left on the ship this morning. We're now down to 19 people here including me. Nathalie and I are the only research scientists on station and therefore in the Antarctic peninsula. Some people on station even claim that we may be the only ones on the continent as there isn't much science going on during the winter season at most stations.
It's been quiet today since everybody left. I'm used to people buzzing around in the labs downstairs and the galley. Right now there are a couple of people in the galley, but it's only because lunch will be served in 30 minutes. In the labs though, I'm the only one. It's eerily quiet. The other research team never made much noise, but at least there was equipment present and at least one body or the soft humming of somebody's iTunes. I don't think it helps much either that most of the people on station have the day off today. They put in so much overtime trying to help everybody pack cargo and move off of the island so ASC (Antarctic Support Contractor) told them to just take some time for themselves.
The goal for today between Nathalie and me was to dissect some fish and look at some of the fish females. She decided that we should take the morning off, so we'll see what we end up doing after lunch. Tomorrow she would like to go boating again to drop some traps. We lost the only MT (marine tech) we had on station, so now the lab manager here will be going out with us...or anybody else with boating two certifications. Our fishing expeditions is a nice excuse for them to leave the station for a few hours.
Soon we should be getting our fish to spawn. It's now or never. Right now and within a few weeks is C. aceratus' breeding period. Nathalie and I have unfortunately had to dissect a few females who were near full maturity. Had they been alive for just a few more days we would have been able to get some eggs. If we do manage to obtain some eggs, the next difficulty will be finding a male. Not many of our male fish are "milking males." In terms of our rock-cods though, we should be okay. We have so many of them so we're bound to get some ready males and females for our experiments.
As an aside, I'm not writing blog posts for Northeastern's research blog. Eventually I'll be contributing to a co-op blog if it is up and running in time. The research blog is fun, but I'm always so tempted to get too detailed with the science. I'm supposed to keep it conversational and fun. The next post that should be up at some point this week is about my fishing trip. It was a bit too scientific, and I think that I spent more time recounting events than describing things. While the trip was just a month ago, I've been so busy doing other things here that it's difficult for me to remember some of the finer details (i.e. date I left, fish count, etc.). A lot of edits were made, so hopefully now it'll be a lot more fun to read and not so filled with scientific terms and step-by-step recounts.
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