Nurseries of the Sea? The Fjords & Islands of British Columbia

Common wisdom dictated that the cold waters of the BC coast may yield large populations of plankton but relatively low diversity of organisms - that “wisdom” could not have been more wrong. To quote Nobel Prize winner Sydney Brenner, “progress in science depends on new techniques, new discoveries and new ideas, probably in that order.” The fjords and islands of BC may be vast nurseries of planktonic organisms that feed back into the larger ocean’s ecosystem. These protected, deep and largely pristine sections of coast, shocked us with incredible diversity and many organisms in various physiological stages - larvae and mature specimens in the same haul oftetimes “offseason” in the late summer. Our 21 day survey in May of 2023 on the SRV SAM from Vancouver, in and out of the fjords of the Inside Passage to the Goose Group and finally Haida Gwaaii was one of our richest sampling voyages top date.