been getting a lot of invitations to speak.”
Everyone looked uncomfortable now, or maybe they were just eager to get on with the work. Ray stretched his face into what he hoped looked like a smile and said, “It’s his loss, missing out on all our fun.” He would leave it at that, leave his fresh anger in the cold place behind his heart. How embarrassing was it that students knew more than he did about whatever his so-called colleague was doing? And how annoying that acidification was the media’s new darling and everyone wanted a piece of Mr. Acidification himself. No one would miss Ray Berringer and his zooplankton expertise for a week, but apparently the world couldn’t live without constant contact with His Hotness Jackson Oakley. Apparently, the public could not get enough explanation of instrument calibration.
Only Marybeth, the undergrad helping with zooplankton studies, hadn’t worked with the CTD before, so he quickly went over the basics: conductivity, temperature, depth; the collection bottles that would trip closed at different depths; additional instruments; and the communications cable that connected to the computer.
Ray checked that all the knobs were tight and the troublesome wires free, though he knew that Colin would already have done this. He looked at the milk crates filled with sampling bottles. “Is Alex set up in the lab?” Alex was another incredibly diligent student. Not for the first time, Ray wondered why so many of the best students, like Alex, had Korean and Chinese family names. He had his theories, involving stereotypes that were best left unspoken.
“Almost. He says he has to do the rest himself.”
“Computer?”
“Ready to fire.”
The CTD drop at the first station went well. When the bottles were back onboard, the three women took their places on overturned buckets, like milkmaids around a cow, to siphon off samples—carbonate, nutrient, chlorophyll. In the wet lab, Alex had finished assembling his towers and was setting filters in place. Ray passed through to the dry lab, where Nastiya and Marybeth were back to work with samples from the first plankton tow. On their high stools, they peered into microscopes while their hands fluttered with eyedroppers and tally counters.
Ray had now entered his realm, the world of living zooplankton. Though he was dedicated to the study of marine organisms overall, there was nothing that excited him more than the tiny, footed, flagellated, ciliated, bristled, tentacled, transparent creatures, in all their life-cycle stages, all the way up to pulsing jellyfish as large as the reflected moon. It had become a primary goal in his life to encourage as many people as possible to look at his microfauna, to know that they existed. If ordinary people could admire their great beauty, maybe they would want to learn more about them, and maybe they would begin to understand why it was important for such creatures to have a home in the ocean. With his photographs, shot through the lens of a microscope, he was able to capture and enlarge the tiny larval forms of fish, the amphipods, the copepods, the microzooplankton radiolarians with their incredibly intricate mineral skeletons, and the shelled pteropods known as sea butterflies.
Ray liked to tell students, “My goal is to make people want to hug plankton.”
“How’s it going?” he asked now. He picked up a clipboard, to have something to do with his hands.
“Is very good,” Nastiya said.
It wasn’t just her Russian accent; it was the off-the-beat syntax that got him every time, and something about the harshness of her consonants. Good. My God, how could “good” be such an attractive, even sexy, word? When he talked with Nastiya he always wanted to adopt her own speech. The couple of times he had inadvertently done this, she had looked at him, wounded, and thought he was making fun of her.
Nastiya’s great attribute was her ability to sort zooplankton. She had a tremendous eye for the subtleties between species, and she could sit at a microscope for hours.
His inner voice repeated “Is very good,” but his outer one said, “I want to set up the carboys on the foredeck after lunch, and we’ll try some incubation.”
“Okey-dokey,” Nastiya said, finally looking up from the scope and straightening her back.
Okey-dokey?
“So,” said Marybeth, “the lack of wind equals lack of mixing equals lower productivity? Not so many nutrients up in the water column where the phytoplankton can reach them? And then the zooplankton have less phytoplankton to eat?”
“Precisely.” Ray moved around the table to stand closer to her. The room was tight between the lab tables, the big freezer, and the boxes of supplies. “That’s the theory. That’s the value of all these data sets, the time series, year after year, to match ocean conditions to primary production and to be able to apply what we learn to understanding and managing the species people care about, like salmon. Other people, I mean. People like us care about zooplankton.” He was trying to be funny again. People like us, crazy people like us, wacky scientists. He wasn’t yet sure that Marybeth was one of them, but she seemed an eager student—and had sworn, when he’d interviewed her for the cruise, that she’d been sailing all her life and had never gotten seasick.
“Let me have a look,” he said to Marybeth, taking her warm spot on the metal stool. The sample teemed with several species of the bug-like copepods, with their long rowing antennae and plumose setae extending like the horizontal fins on airplane wings. How could anyone not be in constant awe that a critter only three or four millimeters long could be so finely, elaborately designed? He used the eyedropper to pick out a few, one at a time, and squirt them into the adjacent dish. He counted aloud and she clicked the tally counter.
“A few Calanus pacificus,” he said. This was significant, but not unexpected. He explained to Marybeth: “One of the southern species that’s becoming more common here. A warm water copepod, ‘warm’ in quotes, moving northward. Smaller than our resident species. If it becomes more dominant, the foraging efficiency of visual predators might be affected. And, to the degree that it displaces our larger, fatter, more nutritious northern species, those predators will have less to eat.
He refocused the lens. “What I’m not seeing is Limacina helicina. Nastiya?”
“What?” She said this more aggressively than seemed warranted.
“Are you finding any Limacina in your sample?”
“No, I have not.”
“And, Marybeth, why are we interested in Limacina?”
“Because it’s a pteropod, and pteropods are a keystone species. Lots of other things eat them.”
“That’s right. And pteropods have shells, so they’re vulnerable to ocean acidification. That makes them an indicator species as well. There’s two species we should be finding in these waters—the more common Limacina helicina and the less common Clione limacina.”
“The naked one,” Nastiya added.
“Right. The naked pteropod, because it only has a shell in its embryonic form and loses it a few days after hatching. It becomes a predator itself, and eats the shelled pteropods.”
Nastiya again: “Clione suck those suckers right out of their shells.” She laughed wickedly.
“Yes, it’s specialized that way. It uses its buccal cones to grab and turn the little snails and its hooked proboscis to extract the bodies. OK, I’ll leave
