Although Krill are small, they are very good swimmers and are known to be good net avoiders. The MOCNESS system we are using has two LED strobe lights which are thought to disorient the krill from avoiding the nets. Last night we wanted to test if the strobe light actually allows us to catch more krill or if it’s just a coincidence. In order to do this we towed the MOCNESS in the same area of a krill patch and randomly turned off the strobe light on half of the nets. Our hypothesis was that the nets that had the strobe light on would contain more krill than the nets without the strobe light. Below is a picture of our catches from each of the 8 nets. Which nets do you think had the strobe light on? Feel free to post your answer in the comments.
Our results seem to be significant! This could mean that previous krill surveys without strobe lights could have been underestimating the amount of Krill in the Gulf of Maine!
So let us see the data which should include the info of whether the strobe was on or off.
ReplyDelete