After spending the last couple days monitoring the incubation experiment, it was time to take it down and sample for final parameters. After breakfast we took all the bottles out of the incubator and brought them into lab, again very careful not to disrupt any stratification or flocs (loosely packed particle masses) within them.
The final parameters took much longer than the initial parameters – when starting the experiment we only had 3 different types of water, the 3 different size fractions of phytoplankton. But now that they had undergone incubation and treatment we had to sample final parameters from all 27 bottles.
It was a busy day, but with all three of us on the job we got it done and even had some water left in the bottles at the end that allowed us to tack on one additional parameter. The photo below features Diksha standing over the now depleted experiment bottles, satisfied with the work we had done.
We were also done using the towfish at this point, so after subsampling the experiment bottles for trace metals we took down the bubble.
With the bulk of our scientific work completed (a small amount of analysis remained), we looked ahead to a full day of cleaning and packing.