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Quick Hands, Light Work

August 29, 2012

WHOI biologist Amy Maas uses a quick, steady hand to pick out zooplankton called pteropods from a sloshing tray aboard a moving ship, not an easy task as they are only a few millimeters in diameter.  Maas, who is currently working offshore Oregon on the research vessel New Horizon, studies how the pteropods’ react to heightened exposure to carbon dioxide, the result of an increasingly acidic, warmer global ocean and atmosphere. Maas and colleagues catch pteropods, a major food source for fish, by dragging a net through surface waters.(Photo by Robert Levine, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)