Gone fishing for copepods

The zooplankton team aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy put their vertical net over the back of the boat during an April 2009 cruise in the Bering Sea to study how the changing sea ice affects the plankton food web. They were looking mainly for copepods — little crustaceans that are even smaller than krill, but still visible to the naked eye. “Look at all those big juicy copepods,” says Phil Alatalo, a marine biologist at WHOI.
(Photo by Chris Linder, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)