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THE MAINE EVENT: FALL 2003 Predation by Gelatinous Zooplankton in the Gulf of Maine MISSION DISPATCH 8 • Friday, September 19, 2003 Location: Gloucester, Massachusetts (42° 37'N, 70° 39'W) Dispatch by Harry Breidahl - Marine Education Society of Australasia [MESA] )
Hurricane Isabel has forced a brief but frustrating curtailment of The Maine Event for the 2003 season.
The last three days in the port of Gloucester, Massachusetts have been used in different ways by those
on board the
R/V Seward Johnson
. Two of the students, namely
Brennan Phillips and
Brian Ortman, took the
long trip back to class and to consult with academic supervisors. Graduate student
Whitley Saumweber remained
on board to review his metabolic data on the resting stage of the
copepod Calanus finmarchicus
. Doctoral candidate
Aino Hosia suspended
measurements of oxygen consumption by
Nanomia cara
because the supply of living
colonies can only be obtained while we are at sea.
Marsh Youngbluth, Chuck Jacoby,
Per Flood and
Francesc Pages
stayed aboard and examined the records, photographs and specimens that have been obtained on this and previous
Maine Event research cruises. Marsh and Chuck also moved the plankton kreisel from the wet lab to one of the
temperature-controlled rooms (a lab chilled to 70 C - the ambient temperature for Nanomia cara).
All these activities highlight the fact that for research scientists fieldwork is only the tip of the iceberg. For every day spent at sea, in our case plunging thousands of feet below the waves in a submersible, many weeks and often months are spent in both preparation and follow-up work. 
HBOI video production specialist
Brian Cousin
and I explored Gloucester and, in Brian's case, documented this
historic port on video. Being a newcomer to this part of the world, I was curious about the history of the New
England coastline. In particular, the Fisherman's Monument on the foreshore indicated the strong bonds between
this town and the sea. According to the monument, Gloucester was first settled by Europeans in 1623 "to harvest
the bounty of the sea". The people that came to this New England coast did so to exploit the rich fish stocks that
occur between Gloucester and Newfoundland. But harvesting the production of the sea is by no means a risk-free
pursuit. Since those early days of 1623 and the establishment of Gloucester as America's greatest fishing port,
a total of 5,368 local fishermen have perished at sea - "overtaken by howling winds and mountainous seas". In 1862
a single storm claimed 15 schooners and took the lives of 120 men. In the year 2003 satellites and other modern
weather forecasting techniques provide warning of approaching storms well in advance. Such predictions were not
available to earlier generations of seafarers. It was a hurricane that brought us to the port of Gloucester, the
town made famous by the Perfect Storm and by the ocean's bounty.
Early tomorrow morning we will go to sea again to resume investigations of a different aspect of the ocean's production, the rich diversity of gelatinous life in the basins of the Gulf of Maine and in the deep water canyons that indent the southern edge of Georges Bank.   |  |
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