• Question: what dose a day in the life of a marine scientist entail

    Asked by robert98 to Clare, Dave, Glo, Ozge, Sean on 15 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by bethparsons, katie12, deboraheg, fish4life.
    • Photo: Gloeta Massie

      Gloeta Massie answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      If I’m really lucky, the ocean. The truth is though, that only about half of my time is spent near the ocean – the other half I’m working in a lab or an office. (I’m not complaining though – I enjoy the lab work, too!) It’s not a 9-5 job, (for me at least), as I’m working on my PhD. So – for example – I was out from 7pm – 3am the other night trying to catch squid. On Wednesday, I’ll be working in a lab all day. Thursday, I’ll be scanning squid beaks with an electron microscope. Lots of diversity in my life. 🙂 How much time you spend in the field vs. in the lab vs. at a desk, really depends on the type of science you do.

    • Photo: Dave Sproson

      Dave Sproson answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      Most of my days are spent in the office where I’m usually working on analysing data. At the moment this usually comes from the instruments on research ships, or on buoys which have been moored out in the ocean especially to collect data. This generally involves quite a lot of programming on a computer — though, believe it or not, this can actually be quite fun! I also spend a lot of time reading the research that other scientist in my field have done, or, when I have results, writing reports for other scientist to read.

      It’s when out in the field that the really fun and exciting stuff happens though! Last time I was at sea was for a month near Greenland, where we were doing some research looking at the ocean currents in the area. My typical day there would start at 3.30 am (!!) when I’d get up, get my cold weather gear on, grab some breakfast and coffee and then spend 8 hours on a CTD watch. The CTD is an instrument that is lowered to the bottom of the ocean which measures the water temperature, saltiness and dissolved oxygen. It’s quite big, so can be quite challenging to lower off the side of the boat, and needs constant monitoring when it’s in the water so that we don’t crash it into the bottom! After 8 hours on duty, it was only mid-day, so I’d usually try to do some data analysis or reading in the afternoon, or maybe just stand on deck watching the ice-bergs pass us by. Sometimes, though, the weather could be too rough to do any science, so we would just have to sit around and entertain ourselves while the storm passed – it’s easy to go a bit stir-crazy when this happens for too long!

    • Photo: Ozge Ozkaya

      Ozge Ozkaya answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      Hi Robert,

      There are loads of different types of marine scientists so it’s difficult to generalise but here are a few things I do:

      At the beggining of the project you need to go out in the field and collect your samples. If you are using model organisms you need to keep them in the lab. This can be fish which you keep in tanks then you might need to feed them/clean them etc if you have no technical help. Or flies in our case, you only need to pass them onto new food once a month, so relatively easy.

      You need to plan your experiments, this requires some reading. Then run your experiments. This could start by doing some dissections for example. You might need to use special equipment, machines to measure things or whatever, a lot of pipetting and test tubes are involved in my case.

      Then you need to analyse your results and make a story ouf it, again a lot of reading required there to see how your results compare to that of other scientists. You then write your own story and try to publish it in a scientific journal.

      Sometimes you get to go to conferences to present your results to other scientists, you can give a talk or make a poster. These are great fun as you travel to nice places generally with you lab mates and meet other scientists.

      I also do some teaching, sometimes undergraduates sometimes project students in the lab. And there is the outreach too, I sometimes go to schools to talk about a particular subject, sometimes school children come to our university and we do demonstrations.

      So as you can see it is a very varied job.

    • Photo: Clare Woulds

      Clare Woulds answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      I think the others have made it clear that there are many different things that we end up doing, from going to sea, to working in a lab, to working at a computer, to going to conferences to talk to toher scientists, to teaching students. One of the best things about the job is the variety, and that fact that no two days are ever the same (oh, OK, if you have a lot of lab work to do then you may have to do the same thing over and over for a while, but the beauty is that it’s all worth it, so you don’t mind). Writing this is making me think that I really must get back into the lab soon…

    • Photo: Sean Clement

      Sean Clement answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      It really does depend Robert, not just on what your own job is but what your job is asking you at that time. I’ve spent entire days sat at a computer trying to plug some data into a computer and then resisting the urge to throw said computer out of the window on my 35th error message that day, but I’ve also had really cool experiences like diving with turtles and then some really bizzare ones like fishing for sea cucumbers at 1:30AM!

      Like Caare says, the variety of stuff you can do is what makes it so cool!

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