The competitive teamplayer – interview with marine biologists Allanah Paul and Kevin Becker

Working in ocean science sometimes resembles tip-toeing through a mine field. On the one hand one is supposed to be a good teamplayer, work together with others and share data to achieve progress. On the other hand one is supposed to be competitive and achieve a high number of scientific publications. Publish or perish.The competitive […]

English: Project chaos – project chances

Since September 2020, I have been setting up the public relations for the three oceanic projects REEBUS, CUSCO and EVAR. Interested people can already find the projects on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. This blog is also meant to be a way for people to dive deeper into everyday science and look behind the scenes of […]

Tracing silicon to learn about diatoms

I first heard about the CUSCO project when Dr. Mar Fernández-Méndez approached my advisor, Dr. Jeffrey Krause, about sending a member of his lab to participate. The project itself is investigating how changes in a certain physical process, upwelling, will affect the world’s most productive marine fishery off the coast of Peru. Upwelling, for those […]

Watchman, watchman, do you copy?

It is 8 am in Peru, the sun is shining up in the sky and the boats are out on the water sampling. I relieve Toralf, who has been awake since 5am, from his position as watchman for the next 4 hours. Little by little the members of the KOSMOS-CUSCO team are trickling in and […]

Packing an extra of lessons learned

This morning, while packing my suitcase for the upcoming KOSMOS 2020 experiment in Perú, I read that there is currently a red tide in front of Miraflores (Lima, Perú), and this brought warm memories from our last year’s cruise to these waters. Last year, I was on the magnificent research vessel Maria S. Merian celebrating […]