Jecca Mehlota (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jecca_mehlota) wrote2009-06-12 01:00 pm
jecca_mehlota) wrote2009-06-12 01:00 pm
Bucket Fisher
Today did not go as planned! You can tell because I'm writing an entry now instead of being outside throwing things into the lake. Weather's been iffy the last couple days, so I knew we might not go out today, but I still had to get up and get ready, and when they called to tell me, yeah, no, not today, I was already awake. I could have slept in another hour. Alas! But I will take this opportunity to write a little about what I've been doing, instead, so I guess it all works out somewhere.
Very, very short version: we draw water samples. whoooo.
I get up early (FOR ME) in the morning (circa 7:30 or so, which my body persists in telling me is an unholy hour. It doesn't matter when I went to bed, that is too early. But too bad!) and walk / bus up to the designated meeting place at the designated meeting time. It's usually around 9:30, though a few times it's been earlier. (How early I have to be awake is a factor in when I get up. If I had to be there at, say, 11, I could roll out of bed around 10:15 and be ready to go in under fifteen minutes. At 10, I'd need to get up around 8:45, because I'd need a little more time to wake up. The earlier I have to be somewhere, the longer I need to actually wake up. It's annoying.)
Then we drive to wherever we're putting in, which is probably not totally random but which kind of feels like it is. I've been out five times. We park and throw all the supplies in the boat, then two of us sit in the boat while the other person backs us into the water. I will designate random names for them. The guy, who drives the boat and does something with water and stratification and I-don't-know that's not what I'm doing, will be called Craig. The woman, who is the one I am working with, will be called Kim. Kim backs us into the water and then Craig brings the boat around and we pick her up. THEN WE DRIVE. OVER THE WATER. I sit in the front of the boat, so I am just assuming they use GPS or something to tell us when we're at the station, because they aren't marked at all. The boat stops and there we are!
First, we locate the shady side of the boat (something this requires waiting for the boat to rotate so that there is a shady side) and drop a secchi disk down. It's a ... disk to measure water transparency. It has a black and white pattern on it, and we lower into the water until we can't see it anymore, then we note the depth. It's on a rope with the meters marked on it. I think the shallowest it's been so far was only a little over a meter, and the deepest has been about seven. Once we've determined the depth, we double it! That tells us how far to draw from.
There are two - well, three, but we use the same thing for two of them - draws. One uses a rubber hose with a weight and a bit of rope tied to one end. We drop that down to whatever double the secchi depth is, then pull it back out. The first three times we do this, it's just a down-and-up process to wash the hose out. The fourth time we lower it, after it's down, we kink the hose over to prevent the water from coming out and then, using only the rope, we pull the end of the hose back out of the water. We empty the water into a bucket! (If it's a really shallow pull, we draw twice, because there's just not enough water otherwise.) Then we are done with the hose.
In the bucket, there's a little ... mixer-thing. So we still the water a bit, then put a little into a plastic cup. We rinse the cup out with the water three times (we rinse everything at the site three times), then mix the water again and fill the cup up and set it down. Plastic syringe-thing comes out and we... draw a bit of water, rinse the entire thing out, and repeat twice more. Then we fill the syringe to full and squirt out the air bubbles and excess until we have 50 ml. We take that and squirt it through a little plastic... thingy, I have no idea what it is, which we have to put a little paper to catch whatever is living in the water! We do that twice, for a total of 100 ml. Then we pull the soggy paper out, fold it up (carefully - we don't touch it, we have to use little metal tweezer-looking things), and store it with the date, station number, and how much water sample went through. That is to measure chlorophyll!
Th other step uses a net! It looks pretty much like this. The top of the net is waterproof, apparently. We dunk it up to that part three times (so we don't fully submerge it), then we put a clamp on the little rubber spout at the bottom and lower it down to the determined depth. And pull it up. (I really haven't been joking about this mostly consisting of throwing things off the boat and then pulling them back on the boat.) We pull the net up and rinse off the outside to knock anything clinging to the net down into the little container at the bottom. The top part, the net proper, can be removed, so we screw that off then carefully shake out most of the excess water. The sides are designed so that water and... ridiculously tiny things (I can't remember the size. VERY VERY SMALL) can leak out, but not the algae and plankton and stuff that we're after. We put a tube at the end of the spout and remove the clamp and collect the sample! Then we add some preservative (which turns your fingers kinda yellowy but which doesn't hurt) and, yay! Done! Then we do a three meter pull (same thing, but only dropping the net three meters down instead of whatever) for blue-green algae (doooooom).
We also sometimes do pulls for zebra mussels, and that involves the use of alcohol, which can be risky later in the summer once the algae starts really blooming, so then you have to wear gloves. OR ELSE YOU DIE. Or at least get a little ill. Which is less dramatic.
And sometimes that's all we do at a station!
Sometimes, though, we pull water up from different depths to get oxygenation levels. And thaaaat can be hard work. For example! On Wednesday, we went out to a station where the lake is 100 meters deep (... that is a lot of water) and had to pull a lot of water samples. 90 meter pull! 80 meter pull! 70 meter pull! 60, 50, 40, 30, 20, 15, 10, (maybe 5?), and 2.
The thing we use is a giant metallic tube with a spring in it. We lock it open and throw it over the boat, and hold the little ... other metal thing, I... it has a name until the container's down as far as it needs to go. Then we let go of the other metal thing, which sits on the rope, and which, if you're holding the rope, you can hear as it goes zipping down, down, down into the lake. When it connects (which quite a THUNK) with the cylinder, it snaps it shut, and then you haul the thing back into the boat. Yeah, you pull the big metal thing up 90 meters. This is about as fun as it sounds, and why I am probably developing blisters. I CAN FEEEEEEEEL THEEEEEM.
Once that thing is back on the boat, you have to heft it up and open the spout on the bottom to fill the little bottle with the designated depth written on it. Then we add two different thing to it (and I'm failing at remember both of them right now). One is pinkish and the other is brownish, and the brownish one will burn holes in your clothing so don't get it on your shirt or anything.
And then we're done! So we pack everything up and drive to the next station, where we do it all again. We usually do two stations a day, but then on Wednesday we did three.
And at some point we eat lunch. The whole thing takes about five hours.
Aside from doing all this really cool stuff, I've seen some neat things, too! Bald eagles (and their nest), ravens, ospreys (and their massive nest! It's build on a marker in the water, and when we got close, one gave us the evil eye and swooped over, then doubled back once we'd moved on), great blue herons (and their nests...), ten trillion seagulls and cormorants (and their LITERAL ISLANDS FULL of nests), geese, carp, and a couple dead fish which are less interesting but still noteworthy. And undoubtedly other things I am forgetting to mention.
IT IS HARD WORK! BUT IT IS AWESOME. I am having a lot of fun even if I have been passing out freakishly early these nights.
Anyway (I use this word too much. Sometimes I start conversations with it, which makes no sense), the FFXI IS DYIIIIING threads are, indeed, back with a vengeance, and I find myself mostly avoiding the forums. That said, I kind of liked reading this.
... years ago, my brother was listening to this song and my mother misheard the lyrics as, "I beat you with a tire iron." I've never been able to unhear it.
Very, very short version: we draw water samples. whoooo.
I get up early (FOR ME) in the morning (circa 7:30 or so, which my body persists in telling me is an unholy hour. It doesn't matter when I went to bed, that is too early. But too bad!) and walk / bus up to the designated meeting place at the designated meeting time. It's usually around 9:30, though a few times it's been earlier. (How early I have to be awake is a factor in when I get up. If I had to be there at, say, 11, I could roll out of bed around 10:15 and be ready to go in under fifteen minutes. At 10, I'd need to get up around 8:45, because I'd need a little more time to wake up. The earlier I have to be somewhere, the longer I need to actually wake up. It's annoying.)
Then we drive to wherever we're putting in, which is probably not totally random but which kind of feels like it is. I've been out five times. We park and throw all the supplies in the boat, then two of us sit in the boat while the other person backs us into the water. I will designate random names for them. The guy, who drives the boat and does something with water and stratification and I-don't-know that's not what I'm doing, will be called Craig. The woman, who is the one I am working with, will be called Kim. Kim backs us into the water and then Craig brings the boat around and we pick her up. THEN WE DRIVE. OVER THE WATER. I sit in the front of the boat, so I am just assuming they use GPS or something to tell us when we're at the station, because they aren't marked at all. The boat stops and there we are!
First, we locate the shady side of the boat (something this requires waiting for the boat to rotate so that there is a shady side) and drop a secchi disk down. It's a ... disk to measure water transparency. It has a black and white pattern on it, and we lower into the water until we can't see it anymore, then we note the depth. It's on a rope with the meters marked on it. I think the shallowest it's been so far was only a little over a meter, and the deepest has been about seven. Once we've determined the depth, we double it! That tells us how far to draw from.
There are two - well, three, but we use the same thing for two of them - draws. One uses a rubber hose with a weight and a bit of rope tied to one end. We drop that down to whatever double the secchi depth is, then pull it back out. The first three times we do this, it's just a down-and-up process to wash the hose out. The fourth time we lower it, after it's down, we kink the hose over to prevent the water from coming out and then, using only the rope, we pull the end of the hose back out of the water. We empty the water into a bucket! (If it's a really shallow pull, we draw twice, because there's just not enough water otherwise.) Then we are done with the hose.
In the bucket, there's a little ... mixer-thing. So we still the water a bit, then put a little into a plastic cup. We rinse the cup out with the water three times (we rinse everything at the site three times), then mix the water again and fill the cup up and set it down. Plastic syringe-thing comes out and we... draw a bit of water, rinse the entire thing out, and repeat twice more. Then we fill the syringe to full and squirt out the air bubbles and excess until we have 50 ml. We take that and squirt it through a little plastic... thingy, I have no idea what it is, which we have to put a little paper to catch whatever is living in the water! We do that twice, for a total of 100 ml. Then we pull the soggy paper out, fold it up (carefully - we don't touch it, we have to use little metal tweezer-looking things), and store it with the date, station number, and how much water sample went through. That is to measure chlorophyll!
Th other step uses a net! It looks pretty much like this. The top of the net is waterproof, apparently. We dunk it up to that part three times (so we don't fully submerge it), then we put a clamp on the little rubber spout at the bottom and lower it down to the determined depth. And pull it up. (I really haven't been joking about this mostly consisting of throwing things off the boat and then pulling them back on the boat.) We pull the net up and rinse off the outside to knock anything clinging to the net down into the little container at the bottom. The top part, the net proper, can be removed, so we screw that off then carefully shake out most of the excess water. The sides are designed so that water and... ridiculously tiny things (I can't remember the size. VERY VERY SMALL) can leak out, but not the algae and plankton and stuff that we're after. We put a tube at the end of the spout and remove the clamp and collect the sample! Then we add some preservative (which turns your fingers kinda yellowy but which doesn't hurt) and, yay! Done! Then we do a three meter pull (same thing, but only dropping the net three meters down instead of whatever) for blue-green algae (doooooom).
We also sometimes do pulls for zebra mussels, and that involves the use of alcohol, which can be risky later in the summer once the algae starts really blooming, so then you have to wear gloves. OR ELSE YOU DIE. Or at least get a little ill. Which is less dramatic.
And sometimes that's all we do at a station!
Sometimes, though, we pull water up from different depths to get oxygenation levels. And thaaaat can be hard work. For example! On Wednesday, we went out to a station where the lake is 100 meters deep (... that is a lot of water) and had to pull a lot of water samples. 90 meter pull! 80 meter pull! 70 meter pull! 60, 50, 40, 30, 20, 15, 10, (maybe 5?), and 2.
The thing we use is a giant metallic tube with a spring in it. We lock it open and throw it over the boat, and hold the little ... other metal thing, I... it has a name until the container's down as far as it needs to go. Then we let go of the other metal thing, which sits on the rope, and which, if you're holding the rope, you can hear as it goes zipping down, down, down into the lake. When it connects (which quite a THUNK) with the cylinder, it snaps it shut, and then you haul the thing back into the boat. Yeah, you pull the big metal thing up 90 meters. This is about as fun as it sounds, and why I am probably developing blisters. I CAN FEEEEEEEEL THEEEEEM.
Once that thing is back on the boat, you have to heft it up and open the spout on the bottom to fill the little bottle with the designated depth written on it. Then we add two different thing to it (and I'm failing at remember both of them right now). One is pinkish and the other is brownish, and the brownish one will burn holes in your clothing so don't get it on your shirt or anything.
And then we're done! So we pack everything up and drive to the next station, where we do it all again. We usually do two stations a day, but then on Wednesday we did three.
And at some point we eat lunch. The whole thing takes about five hours.
Aside from doing all this really cool stuff, I've seen some neat things, too! Bald eagles (and their nest), ravens, ospreys (and their massive nest! It's build on a marker in the water, and when we got close, one gave us the evil eye and swooped over, then doubled back once we'd moved on), great blue herons (and their nests...), ten trillion seagulls and cormorants (and their LITERAL ISLANDS FULL of nests), geese, carp, and a couple dead fish which are less interesting but still noteworthy. And undoubtedly other things I am forgetting to mention.
IT IS HARD WORK! BUT IT IS AWESOME. I am having a lot of fun even if I have been passing out freakishly early these nights.
Anyway (I use this word too much. Sometimes I start conversations with it, which makes no sense), the FFXI IS DYIIIIING threads are, indeed, back with a vengeance, and I find myself mostly avoiding the forums. That said, I kind of liked reading this.
... years ago, my brother was listening to this song and my mother misheard the lyrics as, "I beat you with a tire iron." I've never been able to unhear it.