Ghost town

"Nobody's cut out for this town...nobody sane anyway."
- Rachel Caine in Ghost Town

First time in the lab in months! I might be a little excited...

I usually like being the only one in the building, but not today. The silence feels eerie, just another reminder of the unprecedented pandemic we're living through.

That's right - I'm at work today. I received an exemption to enter my lab and work on some time-sensitive samples that had just arrived from the Arctic. You may recall that I spent two weeks in Svalbard in January. Three colleagues and I sampled zooplankton, sediment, and water column parameters to understand the influence of Atlantic water upwelling in mid-winter on the Kongsfjorden ecosystem. Well, those samples got stuck in Norway for a good 3 months (thanks, covid!) and were finally delivered to my lab last week.

A larval snail, photographed using a dissecting microscope
at 40x magnification

Now that I have my samples, I'm carefully cataloging and photographing them to make sure I have accurate counts of everything I collected (I sorted them in the field, but there was no time for careful record-keeping). Thankfully, the specimens are beautifully preserved. There are snails and worms and clams, all larval forms of species that reproduce in the polar night. I'm able to identify some of them by eye, but for others, I'll need to use molecular tools to tell what they are. These young organisms are born in the coldest, darkest part of the year, and I am amazed by their resilience.

I'll be coming in for half-days until I make it through my samples. I'm looking forward to seeing what secrets they hold!