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Krill, Get Ready for Your Close-Up

May 16, 2011

During a cruise on the R/V Endeavor in fall, 2010, Bosun Patrick Quigley deploys the Video Plankton Recorder (VPR), assisted by Joint Program students Nick Woods (left) and Wu-Jung Lee. The VPR is an underwater microscope that collects images of plankton. During this cruise to the Gulf of Maine, biologists Gareth Lawson and Peter Wiebe and physicist Andone Lavery studied large aggregations of krill that form there each fall, and the interactions of krill with predators such as herring, seabirds, and marine mammals. They used images from the VPR to verify information on the kinds and numbers of plankton present that they obtained with an echosounder.(Photo by Peter Wiebe, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)