Photo: Ulf Riebesell, GEOMAR

Last 15th March it was “t6: the cleaning day” in the KOSMOS 2013 Gullmar Fjord. And what does it mean…? It means that we had to pull the 1mm mesh size net through the mesocosms to get out everything of large size, to avoid a massive predation in the bags. Therefore, we went for the greedy-guys in our kosmos world: fish larvae and jellyfish.

We left on the Wassermann boat, Madde, Jan, Micha, and me -the mesozooplankton girl-, with a reaaally cool net, especially built by the guys for this cleaning task. The changeable weather in this last week luckily allowed us to carry out the fishing of the big zooplankters, while we were listening to music, and dealing with the net. But to do that, we needed  more people to give us a hand (Tim E., Lenni, Andrea, Thomas, Ulf, …) in turns from a second boat to pull the net in the kosmos, as well as a visit of Tim B., turned up out of the blue with warm food to keep our stomachs in a happy mood. Great team … so 6 hours work for my first sampling day were a piece of cake (or something like this :P). Thanks, guys!

But… what did we find? These “big” inhabitants: ephyrae, small jellyfish, ctenophore larvae, some decapoda and exuvias, fish larvae, fish eggs, and big copepods.

Now, our kosmos are “clean” of the big guys, but tiny larvae are still in the water, ready to jump in the kosmos adventure. Let´s see how they behave.
Looking forward to sunny days in the fjord, as the algae for the bloom… Happy beginning of the spring to all of you!

Photos: Maria Alguero, AWI and Michael Sswat, GEOMAR