Jenny (pictured above) is a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz studying plankton. She takes weekly phytoplankton samples at the Santa Cruz Wharf. A jar is attached to the bottom of the plankton net, which will lowered into the ocean to collect a water sample.

The net can be pulled along the surface layers of the ocean or you can let it sink to a desired depth before pulling it back to the surface. Plankton are unevenly distributed throughout the water, so a plankton net will help to gather a variety of species within a particular slice of the water column.

View of the sample looking down into the plankton net.

Pouring the net tow sample into a bottle to take back to the lab.

The sample is poured into a petri dish and looked at through a stereoscope.

The different possibilities of plankton in once sample are endless. There are alot of factors that affect what kinds of plankton you will see in a sample, such as the time of year the sample is taken, at what time of day, different water temperatures. Above is an example of a variety of different kinds of phytoplankton viewed through a microscope.