R/V Armstrong Science Verification Cruise - June 17-23, 2016

Hi! This is Serdar, new postdoctoral fellow from Turkey. I will be contributing to the updates of this blog during the Armstrong cruise. I am in Woods Hole as of June 1st, 2016 and I will be working with Gareth Lawson (and  the greater acoustic team here). I have a scholarship from TUBITAK (the NSF equivalent in Turkey ) for one year. My interest is on understanding the acoustic scattering properties of the zooplankton. 

Different aspects of acoustics have been described earlier in this blog as a method for observing the zooplankton. I will be focusing on material properties of these organisms as a scattering parameter. Zooplankton generally found in dense layers of swarms or aggregations. Acoustic returns from these layers are integrated to estimate the density. However, to numerically quantify these densities, the scattering potential from single individual has to be known. Unfortunately, the small organisms like copepods cannot be resolved individually with the fisheries echosounders.  Instead, physical models can be used for estimation. For this, the body mass composition of an organism is an important scattering parameter and are accounted for in such models (e.g. DWBA). But this property can change from species to species as well as depending on the life stage of the species, the season or geographical locations.

A large Calanus copepod. The lipid content inside a copepod can vary greatly, hence, alter its scattering properties. 

During this cruise I am planning to do such measurements together with Dr. Dezhang Chu  who has great experience and personally developed techniques. This is a great chance and it will be a valuable experience for me.