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Plankton Pump

October 29, 2014

Amy Maas, a postdoc in the labs of WHOI biologists Gareth Lawson and Ann Tarrant, joined fellow postdoc Mike Lowe in testing a plankton pump aboard the R/V Tioga in August 2013. Capable of pumping 80 gallons per minute, the system collects plankton as much as 100 meters below the surface—samples that help inform biologists about the health and distribution of a vital part of the marine food web. A previous version of the system was used to sample microzooplankton in the Georges Bank GLOBEC Project from 1995 to 1999, as well as the colonial cyanobacterium Trichodesmium in the North Atlantic, and to look for evidence of harmful algal blooms in the Gulf of Maine.(Photo by Peter Wiebe, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)