Hello and welcome to my first post as a Talking Science contributor! I’m excited to join this roster of fine bloggers. To help introduce myself, I would like to share my experience as a volunteer scientist on a research cruise with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This is to be the first of a multiple-post series about NOAA’s survey cruises, and the research that these surveys support. I’ve also included a few photos from the trip to help tell my story – enjoy!

Until April 2009, most of my hands-on experience with marine life had been limited to scrubbing algae from the walls of my freshwater aquarium. Then one day I found myself onboard a NOAA ship, dissecting Atlantic cod, winter skates, and yellowtail flounder, and up to my elbows in fish slime – and I could not have been happier.

The Fisheries and Ecosystems Monitoring and Analysis Division (FEMAD), of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, has conducted bottom trawl surveys as part of NOAA since the 1960s. These surveys collect valuable information each fall and spring on fish populations, as well as meteorological and oceanographic data. I participated in April 2009 as a volunteer scientist on a 10-day cruise, just one leg of the 10-week survey.

To survey the populations of marine species, research vessels tow large fishing nets in specific locations off the northeast coast; the catch is dumped into a large bin (a hopper), and everything is sorted into buckets and baskets by species. Eventually, anything pulled aboard is weighed and measured individually. This quickly becomes a vast and thorough data set, because hundreds of fish and other marine species may be brought aboard in a single tow. In a 12-hour shift, the ship’s Chief Scientist will aim to complete between 5 to 10 tows. After only a 10-day cruise, that’s a lot of fish.

Although called a cruise, these trips are anything but a vacation. Survey ships are active twenty-four hours a day, with two teams of scientists working in 12-hour shifts. I was on the day shift, which means I worked from noon to midnight. Coordinating as a team to be efficient, the scientists must immediately identify each fish species carried along on a small conveyor belt, grab the slimy creatures, and separate them into buckets. It is both physically and intellectually demanding labor. The challenge is to think and move fast, and especially to take care when picking up the spinier species, with the conveyor belt continuously carrying more fish down the line, all the while standing on a rocking boat – for a long shift. After the fish were sorted, we weighed and measured each one at computer workstations in the wet lab. Depending on the research being conducted on each species, we also gathered additional information, including the individual’s sex, maturity, stomach contents, and the weight of some internal organs.

The information collected on these voyages contributes to an enormous data set on fish populations off the Northeast coast. NOAA scientists use this data to study a wide range of topics in regards to the sustainable management of marine resources, which I will discuss in a future post. Thanks for reading!