Summary

Description

The survey consists of 120 random stratified stations in the Middle Atlantic Bight, Southern New England, Georges Bank and the Gulf of Maine. Depending on the duration of the cruise and weather, fewer stations might be samples. These will be sampled with an array of bongo nets: a 61 cm bongo frame equipped with two 333 micron mesh nets, and a smaller 20 cm bongo frame equipped with two nets of that same mesh A subset of 15 stations from the cruise will be sampled with a similar array except that the 20 cm bongo frames will be equipped with 165 micron mesh nets. There will be five fixed position stations in the Gulf of Maine that will be sampled for plankton using a bongo net, and for water using a Niskin bottle rosette equipped with 12 10-liter bottles provided by the Northeast Fisheries Science Center. There will also be an additional thirty fixed position stations that will be sampled using only the Niskin bottle rosette sampler. The rosette sampler will be equipped with a Laser In-Situ Scattering and Transmissometry (LISST) instrument mounted horizontally on the rosette frame below the Niskin bottles to provide particulate counts and measurements. The Video Plankton Recorder will be deployed at selected stations underneath the bongo sample. It will record data in archive-mode and be downloaded on the deck. The Imaging FlowCytobot will be plumbed into the scientific flow-through system and used throughout the cruise. This cruise will represent the first operational deployment of these new technologies in the northeast U.S. shelf ecosystems.