Glouster is a pleasant, quiet island with the sound of gulls and the smell of fish and saltwater. We took the 10:20 train to Gloucester, about an hour from North Station, and walked several minutes past old houses worn out from the air by the sea. Sarah met us at the Maritime Heritage Center, which houses a lab, an education center, aquariums, a diving shop, and a museum. The lab is hidden behind a huge wooden sliding door with a circular ship window in the middle. Huge tanks, pipes, and boxes clutter the lab, and the sound of running water comes non-stop from the tanks' filtration systems.
Sarah took us out to a dock, where we measured the water's salinity, turbidity, and temperature. Salinity was 32%, as opposed to 1% in the Charles. The water was far clearer than that of the Charles as well. Sarah handed each of us a plankton net, consisting of a long piece of netting with the closed top of a water bottle attached to the bottom. We simply threw the plankton nets in the water, reeled them in, and dumped the collected water into two buckets - one for surface water and the other for deeper water.
Back in the education center, we placed the tiny plankton we caught on slides and observed them under microscopes attached to computers with video-capturing abilities. In my slide, I had a number of isopods and possibly a type of annelid. It was difficult to take high-resolution photos of the plankon under the microscope, because they skittered restlessly around. Here are two examples that I managed to take:
Isopods under 10x magnification
After lunch, Sarah talked to us about our research project topics and took us on a tour of her lab. In the past she has done research on aquacultures, but now the lab is shifting its focus to educational programs on algae biofuels. She hopes to bring algae biofuel into school curriculums. We visited a small aquarium behind the lab and saw blue lobsters, skates, eels, various fishes, crabs, and more. In the touch tanks, we experienced the thrill of holding starfish and hermit crabs in our own hands.
Shortly before leaving Gloucester, we visited a dive shop museum with an assortment of antique gear, some pieces well over 100 lbs. It seemed like no human could possibly stay afloat in any of those impossibly heavy outfits and metal headpieces, but remarkably, the museum curator said that he has dived every single piece in the museum...except for the heaviest one that sits like boulder in the middle of one table. One headpiece hangs from the ceiling so that visitors can try to stick their heads in and stand up to feel the weight. I could barely lift the headpiece with my hands, let alone my head!
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