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Casting and Cleaning Nets

Researchers aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy gather samples collected from bongo nets during a May 2009 expedition to the Bering Sea. The nets—also known as twin plankton nets or ring nets—are used to collect the miniscule animals that the group uses to study how climate change is affecting the region’s ecosystem. Each net has a ring at the mouth of a cylindrical net that, when towed through the water, funnel zooplankton into a collecting bucket at the back.(Photo by Chris Linder, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)