Book Review – The Salt Path by Raynor Winn

On July 22, 2020 By ClaireIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

This is one of those books that I kept on picking up in bookshop, drawn by the beautiful cover art. I’d read the back, decide it was a walking book, not a coast / ocean book and put it back. Like most of us, the TBR pile is huge… It wasn’t until it was the Ocean Book Club choice for this month, that I finally started to read. I can’t think why I didn’t start it before – this is a really wonderful book.

The book tells the story of the author and her husband, Moth. After losing their home and business following a bad investment, and Moth’s diagnosis with a terminal illness, they decide to walk the South West Coast Path. This is England’s longest waymarked footpath, and runs from Minehead in Somerset, along the coasts of Devon and Cornwall, and finishes in Poole, Dorset; a distance of 630 miles. This book documents their progress as they walk, progress both geographically along the path and psychologically, as they come to terms with the changes in their lives.

This is a book that makes you think. Primarily, it makes you think about homelessness. About the people who become homeless, the circumstances leading to their homelessness, ways of coping with it, our reactions when we come face-to-face with homeless people, stereotypes, and above all, how we might cope when confronted with this ourselves.

It also makes you think about kindness. The kindness of strangers, in offering shelter and sharing resources. This might be the offer of a safe place to camp, sharing food when you have very little yourself or even offering to rent a flat to people you’ve only just met. Linking in with this, it makes you think about friendships. About the worry of becoming a burden, or the potential for people taking advantage when friendships are no longer between “equals”, but also about the more transitory, but still very real friendships which can arise from shared experiences.

In a world where we never seem to have enough time, it is about having almost nothing but. It is about grief, physical hardship, and loss. About being disconnected from society, and from family, and from the life you had before. Above all though, this is a book about the love of nature, of freedom, and of recovery and healing. It contains some wonderful, evocative descriptions of landscapes, the pleasure of watching a peregrine falcon soaring above you, of swimming in the sea, and of eating salted blackberries.

Fair warning – this is a book which can get you in the “feels”, so be prepared to have it pull on your heart strings in places. But it is also very uplifting, so let it reinforce your love of nature, restore your faith in human nature, and take you away to the wind-swept south coast.

The sequel – The Wild Silence – is out in hardback in September 2020.

Five out of five star(fish) from me…

Guest post – Emily Rowlands

On March 21, 2019March 21, 2019 By ClaireIn Discovery DY098, Guest post, Ocean plastics, Science1 Comment

The night the krill eggs hatched…

Setting sail from the Falklands and heading into the open water, I was slightly apprehensive, with little knowledge of what to expect of the upcoming 40 days at sea on my first research cruise. A barrage of thoughts hit me in sync as I boarded the ship. How rough would the sea be? Would it make me ill? What would the people on board be like? Questions I’d perhaps put to the back of my mind beforehand as I was so focused on preparing for the scientific tasks ahead. Amongst the chaos of preparing the ship for leaving port, I paused to reflect on the first Antarctic expeditions aboard the Discovery, with Captain Scott. The apprehensions of the living conditions and weather worries were immediately put into perspective… I was as ready as I’d ever be!

With so many helping hands, the ship was transformed much faster than I had anticipated. The laboratories, previously blank canvases with nothing but wooden desktops had entirely transformed and were fully functioning with microscopes, light sources, weighing scales and everything else one might imagine needing for conducting zooplankton surveys, all screwed or tied in place to prevent them moving or falling with the rolling and pitching of the ship in rough seas. Finally, with the ship prepped and ready to, I could focus on my purpose for being on board.

The deck lab prior to unpacking. Photographic credit: Sophie Fielding

So what is ‘nanoplastic’? It’s a term much less heard than ‘microplastic’, crowned word of the year in 2018. Microplastics are categorised as small plastic particles under 5mm. Nanoplastic, unseen by the human eye, is even smaller! It describes tiny pieces of plastic less than 0.001 mm in size, that’s at least 2000 times smaller than a grain of sand! Because of their extremely small size, nanoplastics interact differently with the water particles in the sea and within the bodies of animals that eat them, compared to how bigger plastics behave.

We don’t yet know how much nanoplastic there is in Antarctic waters and we know little of how they impact zooplankton such as Krill. Krill are tiny animals that are hugely important for the Antarctic marine food web as they are eaten by larger animals such as penguins, sea birds and even whales. These are the things I hoped to address with my research on board.

The first hurdle for my research was catching pregnant female krill, so that I could look at how nanoplastics would impact the eggs that they produce. This was no easy task. Every day, midwater fishing nets were deployed and hurled by four people back onto the ship.

Recovery of the RMT fishing net. Photographic credit: Alejandro Ariza

The nets, especially with a big catch, are pretty heavy – and when the contents come aboard they were emptied into buckets. Everybody crowded around the buckets with each scientist searching for their focus species whilst trying not to block the little artificial light we had, since fishing often took place throughout the night when the ship was surrounded by darkness.

Sorting the catch from an RMT net. Photographic credit: Alyasa Hulbert

When the day came in which pregnant females were found, we quickly moved them to holding tanks and the waiting game began. Now it was just a case of waiting for the females to release their eggs. The jars in which they were kept were checked day and night, looking for eggs sunken below the protective mesh which was added to prevent the mother eating them. I waited with bated breath and finally….there were eggs! After checking under the microscope we knew they were fertilised eggs that given the right care, would develop into adult krill. I was ready to set-up my experiment.

All set-up, my next job was to document how the eggs developed by taking photographs every 12 hours. In the early stages krill eggs develop very quickly, and it was exciting to see the cells dividing each time I checked from early stages of two cells or four cells to later stages of 32 cells or more. Soon the development of krill eggs slows and my observations at 2am, in a temperature controlled laboratory set at 2 degrees Celsius (we called it the cold lab) with tired eyes became more tedious. At this time the developmental rate is so little between observations it’s difficult to tell whether the eggs are still alive!

On day four of my experiment, at 2am in the morning, when everybody had gone to bed, I put on my salopettes and thermal coat and headed into the cold lab, expecting to do my usual assessment. With tired eyes, I attempted to focus the microscope and noticed a blurry blob moving amongst the eggs. Coming into focus, there it was, a tiny baby krill had hatched and investigating further, there were many more too! Never seeing this in real life before and with little expectation of the krill eggs developing to this stage beforehand (as the eggs from the last year’s cruise had failed to develop to this stage), I was incredibly excited.

Krill babies! (C) Emily Rowland

After finishing my observations (with lots of extra time spent taking video footage of the baby krill), I left the cold lab and went into the main lab, a busy environment during working hours in which everybody is typing away on their computers waiting for instructions to put on their thermal clothing and head on deck for the next round of fishing. Now it was eerily quiet. I took out my laptop and sent some emails to friends back home, to share what to me was an extremely exciting day, though amused by the fact that they may not find it quite so exciting.

The next morning, I showed the video footage of the baby krill to the other scientists on board who were just as excited as I had been the night before. We celebrated the hatching of the krill, and that’s when I realised that one of the greatest things about being on a biology research cruise in the Southern Ocean was being with others just as passionate about the Antarctic marine ecosystem as I am.

Emily Rowlands is a PhD student at Exeter University, studying the effects of nanoplastic on Antarctic Zooplankton. To find out more about her research – give her a follow on twitter: @EmilyRowlands89

MinION sequencing on the RRS Discovery

On February 20, 2019February 20, 2019 By ClaireIn Discovery DY098, Guest post, ScienceLeave a comment

Guest post by Emma Langan

I’m on the RRS Discovery in the Southern Ocean, doing DNA sequencing of Antarctic algae or phytoplankton. To do this I’m using a tiny portable DNA sequencing machine called a MinION (shown next to the other kind of minion in the top photo).

Phytoplankton are microscopic algae which live in the oceans and make their energy from the sun, just like plants on land. They are important for making oxygen and also carbon from the atmosphere – excellent news as too much carbon in the atmosphere is one of the causes of climate change. They are also the bottom of the food web, so without them, there wouldn’t be penguins and whales and seals. My research is focused on investigating which species of phytoplankton are present and what tricks they use to survive somewhere as cold as Antarctica. To investigate this, I use DNA sequencing.

DNA is the basis of all life on earth. Like the code in a computer program telling a computer how to work, DNA tells your body how to work. DNA is made up of 4 bases, called A, T, G, and C which appear in different combinations making genes. Genes tell the body which proteins to produce, and proteins make muscle, or hair, or eyes in the right places. Different genes are what makes plants different to animals, penguins different to elephants, and you different to me. Looking at an organism’s DNA gives us a lot of information; we can use it to see which species are present in a sample and also to see what special genes they have which allow them to live in ice and snow, and in the dark.

The CTD is used to collect water samples from different depths

To look at Antarctic phytoplankton DNA, first we take water samples from the ocean and filter it to catch the phytoplankton. Next, I remove the DNA from all of the proteins and other sticky stuff in the cells. This process is called DNA extraction (if you’re interested and have an adult to help you, you can quite easily extract DNA from fruit or vegetables using things you can buy from a supermarket https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/how-to-extract-dna-in-your-kitchen/.)

Once I have extracted the DNA, I put it into the MinION which runs for 2 days, and you can start to see which species are present almost straight away. The MinION makes a list of all the bases that are in the DNA and compares it to DNA from species that we’ve already sequenced. This way that we can tell which species are in a sample, and what genes they have.

It’s really exciting to be able to do DNA sequencing on a ship, because usually we have to send samples home which takes months, and we don’t know if anything has changed since we collected them. Most DNA sequencing machines are the size of an oven so you can’t take them with you. The MinION is so small that we can take it anywhere – someone even did DNA sequencing in space. I’m going to use the information I get from it to look at whether the phytoplankton species change as the oceans get warmer due to climate change, and to investigate what genes they have which let them live in the Antarctic in the first place.

Emma Langan is a PhD student at UEA and Earlham Institute. You can find out more about her work by following her on Twitter @EmmaGLangan

When you can’t just phone 999…

On February 9, 2019 By ClaireIn Discovery DY098, Guest postLeave a comment

Phil Keating gives us a run-down of what life is like as an Offshore Medic – when you’re the only doctor, dentist and all-round medical support for several thousand miles…

My job on board is to look after the scientists and crew if the have any medical needs. This can be anything from coughs and sneezes, to broken bones or dental problems.
It is my responsibility to ensure that everyone on board receives the same level of medical care that they would receive at home. To achieve this the crew and scientists come and visit me, in the same way they would a GP, Dentist, or Paramedic at home.

On-board the ship i have a full pharmacy with all of the drugs and medicines that i could possibly need. I have an ECG machine to check peoples hearts and drugs to treat the heart if it has a problem.

I also have a specialism in prolonged field care. Unlike at home where you call an ambulance,it arrives in 8 minutes and takes you to hospital within another 30 minutes, If we have an incident on board ship, we are potentially 5 days from the nearest hospital. My specialism in prolonged care means i can provide intensive care level of treatment for my patient, and care for them in my hospital on board the ship before we get to a mainland hospital.

As we are also potentially 5 days from a Dentist, i am trained to carry out minor dental procedures such as replace a filling or extract a tooth. This is all part of the training on my offshore medics course, where we are also taught to give injections and carry out minor procedures such as stitching wounds. I have a satellite phone to talk to a consultant Doctor on the phone in case I need a second opinion an an injury or unusual illness.

Fortunately on this trip we have been light on medical issues. Another of my day-to-day roles on-board is to ensure that all my medicines, drugs and equipment are in good condition and within their expiry date. On top of this i am also responsible for carrying out first aid training for the crew, which includes CPR and defib training.

Some of the scientists are using some dangerous chemicals in their experiments, so another of my responsibilities is to have all of the information on each of the chemicals so i know how to treat someone if they have a spill. I also make sure that any antidotes that are required for the specific chemicals are stored correctly and in date.

The kitchen party act as my stretcher carriers on board the ship, so once a week i will do a training session with them and run a scenario with a mock casualty. This ensures that they get lots of practice, so when they are needed they can perform the duties really well.

I began my medical training whilst in the military, and i am also a commercial diver medic. My usual place of work is on offshore oil rigs or offshore wind farms. These types of projects also need a medic due to their remote location and lack of availability of a land based hospital team or ambulance service to reach our remote location in time to help a patient.

The Discovery Investigations

On February 9, 2019February 9, 2019 By ClaireIn Cetacean, Discovery DY098, ScienceLeave a comment

Whale and krill surveys are something of a recurring theme on RRS Discovery… in fact, she’s something of a pioneer in this field – or at least her predecessors are.

Known as the “Discovery Investigations”, a series of scientific cruises and shore-based investigations into the biology of whales was initiated in 1923. The ship used for these research cruises in the Southern Ocean was a proven Antarctic stalwart – the first RRS Discovery, more famously used by Captain Scott in his 1901 expedition to Antarctica.

The original RRS Discovery, at her permanent home in Dundee, Scotland.

The research cruises collected data on oceanography, krill and whales; much as we have been doing on our trip. Once they reached South Georgia in February 1926, the team on board worked alongside the then-thriving whaling industry of Grytviken. Working with the whalers, they were able to collect biological data from the remains, as well as at-sea data on the distribution and numbers of whales.

Reprint of a photo of the crew of the original RRS Discovery at anchor in Cumberland Bay, South Georgia. Photographed on the wall of the current RRS Discovery

The history of whaling is still very much in evidence at Grytviken today. The skeletons of both whales and whaling ships lie on the beaches, and the remnants of the processing machinery rust slowly against the hillside, long out of use.

Whale vertebrae lie along the shore, alongside rusting whaling ships

Whale jaw-bones lie outside the South Georgia museum, in what was once the whaling-station managers house

I am very pleased to report that (for the UK at least) current whale biology is carried out in a non-lethal and much less invasive manner; the sheer scale of the infrastructure here and the debris left behind goes some way to providing an idea of what this destructive industry must have been like at it’s peak.

But anyway, back to the Investigations…

RRS Discovery II became involved in the project in 1929, and her Maiden Voyage was a hydrographic survey of the South Sandwich Islands. She remained involved to the end, her last survey was in 1951.

Reprint of a photo of the crew of the Discovery II, photographed on the wall of the current RRS Discovery

The Discovery Investigations continued for many years, with the final survey in 1951 and the final report only being published in 1980. There are more than 37 volumes of reports documenting everything from the biology of elephant seals and fin whales to that of nematode worms; geology and hydrology; mapping and bathymetry.

There can be little doubt that the work of the Discovery Investigations made an enormous contribution to our knowledge and understanding of the whales, seals, penguins, pelagic seabirds and krill that make up this fascinating ecosystem, as well as the geology and oceanography of this previously unstudied area. It’s fascinating to be part of a cruise continuing this line of investigation on the fourth RRS Discovery, and to see the little nods to her heritage – like the photos on the wall and the whale logo on the gate on the way up to the Navigation bridge which takes the form of the old Discovery Investigations logo.

That having been said, I’m very pleased the days of lethal whale research are largely behind us. See other blog posts for further information on what we are up to on this survey, but rest assured, our current whale work is completely non-invasive – merely counting animals and taking photographs.

The current RRS Discovery at anchor in Cumberland Bay, South Georgia

Further info:

I must confess this is something I knew nothing about prior to this cruise – so the bulk of the information has come courtesy of wikipedia. If you’d like to find out some more – I recommend having a look at the following:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RRS_Discovery

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Investigations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RRS_Discovery_II

The South Georgia Museum: http://sgmuseum.gs/index.php?title=South_Georgia_Museum

For those of you who aren’t currently on a ship with limited internet access, I expect there are lots of other sources too!