The ostrich sticks its head in the water rather than the sand to observe the little morsels to eat. The morsels that we care about are LARVAE. The main objective of this research cruise revolves around patches of fish larvae, their predators, and their prey.
I'm tagging along to look at the invertebrate larvae which may also be food for the baby fish.
We're doing a series of tows of an imaging system called ISIIS and also MOCNESS tows to groudtruth the images.
There was a lot of excitement upon leaving port - there was an eddy in the lower Florida Keys that could be generating patches, filaments and streaks of larvae. We steamed ahead...
As my husband said... "Ah the elusive Eddy. Its like the unicorn or the kracken." While I don't hope to see the kracken, it would be nice to find the eddy soon. It seems to be hiding from us... or at least running.
To follow the cruise, check out the cruise blog: http://hmsc.oregonstate.edu/ostrich
