Plankton Every Day is a blog by Kate Zidar about citizen science and untethered living. These are my micro and macro observations about the daily practice of staying afloat!
On his epic journey across the Pacific aboard a traditional balsa raft, Thor Heyerdahl and his team dined on buckets of plankton (as well as military rations, coconuts and countless species of fish, crustacean, etc.). Their descriptions of drawing up the plankton tows and the experience of actually slurping the stuff down, are some of my favorite passages from the opus work The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas. Given the changes since these days, in terms of the encroachment of the plastisphere into the water column…I wonder if such dining will still be possible on my excursion?
The summer cools, the days shorten, and I go into planning mode. This weekend I joined my plankton friend Mike back at Newtown Creek. He ran a plankton tow and I ruminated on how Newtown Creek Alliance and North Brooklyn Boat Club, along with Mike’s institutions (Pace and AMNH) and LaGuardia CC can collaborate on a monitoring program for the long haul.
When dredging occurs on Newtown Creek (for the sludge loading pier as well as for Superfund), it will be increasingly important to understand baseline turbidity and suspended particles in the column…deep thoughts. Deep and anchoring.
Here at Plankton Every Day, we are big fans of citizen science. “Go do some science!”, I like to say. There is a new, fantastic smartphone app called Secchi App that crowdsources phytoplankton measurements from all stripes of seafarers around the world. It was created at Plymouth University in the UK, and the app is free. To participate, you need a smartphone and a Secchi disc.
What is a secchi disc, you ask? It is a simple device that was invented in 1865 by Angelo Secchi, a Jesuit scientist and leader in astronomy, oceanography, meteorology and physics. It is still a standard tool in use today for determining the turbidity, or clarity, of any waterbody. Measuring turbidity is essentially a proxy for measuring plankton, silt or other suspended solids in water. Clear water = low turbidity, and cloudy water = high turbidity.
According to Richard Kirby, a Marine Institute Research Fellow at Plymouth University, a Secchi disk is “arguably one of the simplest marine sampling devices ever created.”
Here is Richard:
I will attest to the simplicity of this device. Similar to my very favorite scientific instrument, the Bucket on a Rope, a Secchi disc is simply a disc on a rope. It is weighted so that the disc can be dipped straight down in the water column, and the rope is marked for distance (or the rope itself is a measuring tape), so that you can measure “wet rope” aka “depth”.
You send the disc down until you can no longer see it. You bring it up until you can just barely see it again. Then you carefully lower it until it is just disappeared. Measure wet rope, log depth measurement into the app, and ping for GPS location.
I love this marriage of old analog tools and modern gadgets. Go do some science!
