Plankton

Person in a Canada shirt standing in front of a red and white coast guard ship with LIMNOS on the side.

Zig-Zagging Through Lake Erie: A CSMI Expedition on the Limnos

Last week, members of our team in the DFO Great Lakes Food Webs lab returned from a week-long voyage aboard the Canadian Coast Guard Ship (CCGS) Limnos for the first cruise of the Lake Erie CSMI field-year. We were joined by other interdisciplinary scientists and technicians from our federal research partners at Environment and Climate […]

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Male Mysis shrimp

Great Lakes Food Webs Science: Mysid Shrimp

“Night, when words fade and things come alive” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

One of the species the Lower Trophic Food Webs lab is responsible for monitoring in the Great Lakes is Mysis diluviana (previously called M. relicta which is native to Northern Europe), the Opossum Shrimp (order Peracarida, family Mysidae). For a member of the zooplankton, this species is quite large (up to 25 mm in length), and their common name comes from the females having a prominent brood pouch (a marsupium) between their thoracic legs. The body is very shrimp-like, with long antennae, stalked compound eyes, a large thoracic carapace in front of a long abdomen and a clefted telson tail.

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Two scientists deploy a water quality instrument on a warm winter day. Water is ice free.

Great Lakes Food Webs Science: WinterGrab II 2024

Great Lakes Food Webs Science: WinterGrab II 2024
“What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.” – John Steinbeck
This past week our lab once again sampled sites around Burlington Ontario in February for the WinterGrab II. In the Fall of 2021, a grass-roots group of US and Canadian Great Lakes scientists met to plan a set of standardized sampling for mid-winter across all of the Great Lakes.

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Biologist washing a plankton net with Toronto skyline in the background.

Great Lakes Food Webs Science Advice Clients : #2 ECCC

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there” Lewis Carroll
The next science advice client that our lab at Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) provides science advice to is related to our mandate under the International Joint Commission. While Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) has many regulatory and conservation responsibilities, they are both our regular science collaborator in the Great Lakes, and also the Canadian agency lead under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, so they are ultimately responsible for reporting out and moving forward restoration activities.

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Biologist rope sampling from ship rail in ice floe covered waters.

So, What do Aquatic Scientists Work On in the Dark of Winter?

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a scientist in possession of good data, must be in want of a paper (with respects to Jane Austin)
Though it is often hoped by students in aquatic sciences that a scientist’s duties involve mostly sampling in the field, the sad fact is that the vast majority of a scientist’s time is spent working on things which aren’t even data and writing, much less working on a boat.

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