We sailed out of New Bedford, Massachusetts for Leg 1, heading toward Maryland and Virginia to survey the southernmost section of our Atlantic surfclam population. Given the extremely hot weather on land, it was surprisingly cool on the water. Although, that could have been because I was sleeping during the hottest time of the day, having worked the night shift from midnight to noon.
There are a lot of shipping lanes where we were working, and it’s not uncommon to see large cargo ships. There was one ship from Cosco Shipping Lines just hanging out. We were thinking about the different kinds and quantities of items that could be sitting right in front of us, but your guess is as good as ours!
The species we sample are Atlantic surfclam, ocean quahog, and Atlantic sea scallop. As for the work on board, sampling clams is very straightforward. Two people stand on a scaffold to sort the catch on the conveyor belt, while another pair work below, where baskets collect the sorted catch. The pair working on the conveyor belt guide the most numerous species onto a metal slide that sends the catch into a basket at the end of the slide. Anything else is handpicked into a separate basket. The pair working at the bottom of the slide switch out the baskets and prepare them to be subsampled, if needed.
There were several special sampling requests for surfclam and ocean quahog this season. We collected surfclam gill tissue for a DNA project and stomach samples for a phytoplankton community analysis. We saved ocean quahog shells to be aged later. Quahogs can live more than 200 years, so understanding their age will give us more insight into the life history of this commercially important shellfish. Collecting all these requests took a little extra time, but that was no problem because the catches are very light in the southern area.
During one tow, we brought up a lot of clay. It was stuck in all parts of the dredge and took the deckhands several hours to soak and hose it off. In response, they built a 1-foot-tall clay man with a big mustache.
At the end of Leg 1, we docked in Atlantic City, New Jersey to switch out the science crew. The legs for this survey are only 5 days, and I like to stay out a bit longer. That means I’m also on Leg 2 and ready to keep going!
Original source can be found here.
