Marine bacteria in a night Plankton tow

Sep 03, 2018 • 5:54 AM UTC

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Microorganisms

Manu Prakash

I am a faculty at Stanford and run the Prakash Lab at Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. Foldscope community is at the heart of our Frugal Science movement - and I can not tell you how proud I am of this community and grassroots movement. Find our work here: http://prakashlab.stanford.edu

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Ocean is vast and mysterious in so many ways. Sometimes I find it hard to just imagine such a large interconnected ecosystem with all its living abundance. Combine that with its inaccessibility simple by being completely under water. You can take a casual stroll in a rainforest day in and day out – to be on and really “in” the water needs a lot of planning, preparation and all of us can’t even get to majority of places. This water world is the subject of my current series of posts.
Recently, I have been doing a series of night Plankton tows to see differences of communities during the day and night. I will continue to update this series – but just want to share; what it’s like being on the water in the middle of the night on a very small boat and what we see.

We are in Monterey bay; 1 mike from the coast line. These sea lions really can sleep under the bell tower. Just imagine. We did several horizontal and vertical tows; and the communities we pulled out were dramatically different from our day tows. More on that soon..
Here is just a sample of marine bacteria. It’s a critical ingredient of this ecosystem – responsible for that “ocean smell” – and is incredibly abundant in the marine environment. You can see it seaming and munching on an embryo of some kind.

The conditions on the water – specially when it’s so dark out – we’re not great. Just a lesson for friends; don’t get a nice dinner and hop on a boat. Does not help 🙂
Keep exploring.
Cheers
Manu