Beagle plankton sampling

There is a good precedent for plankton sampling on the replica HMS Beagle: Darwin did it on the original in 1832, as this sketch from his diary shows. On January 10th and 11th he records:

it is a bag four feet deep, made of bunting, & attached to semicircular bow this by lines is kept upright, & dragged behind the vessel. — this evening it brought up a mass of small animals, & tomorrow I look forward to a greater harvest. —

11th

I am quite tired having worked all day at the produce of my net. — The number of animals that the net collects is very great & fully explains the manner so many animals of a large size live so far from land. — Many of these creatures so low in the scale of nature are most exquisite in their forms & rich colours. — It creates a feeling of wonder that so much beauty should be apparently created for such little purpose. — The weather is beautiful & the blueness of the sky when contrasted with white clouds is certainly striking.

From the beginning of this project we've been clear that the replica will be no museum ship, but will update Darwin's science. When we sample plankton we'll know where we are thanks to GPS and a friend in orbit, and we'll also know whether we're in normal oceanic water, on the margins of or in the midst of a plankton bloom. Darwin had a microscope with which to look at his haul, we'll have specimens preserved for DNA barcoding.

Stories of sailing and the supernatural are legion. Joshua Slocum, the first man to circumnavigate the world single handed in his yacht Spray, told the story that in a crisis (he was sick and in foul weather) he was joined by the ghost of the navigator from the Pinta, one of Columbus' ships. The British sailing magazine Yachting Monthly has a monthly column by all round sailing guru Tom Cunliffe. He has a reputation as a man who neither talks not writes male bovine manure. In last month's issue he related three occasions when, sailing his old pilot cutter Hirta, he was joined by the ghost of the Welsh pilot. On one occasion the sailorly spirit helped Tom douse a large, ill-behaved mainsail with a heavy gaff swinging destructively in the high wind. So it wouldn't surprise me if, somewhere in North Atlantic (it would have to be on night watch) we are doing our thing with continuous plankton recorders and metagenomics when the ghostly figure of a 22 year old Darwin elbows his way into the lab space and asks for a go. 'DNA. What's that?' Explaining that to Darwin's ghost and watching the lightbulbs go on really would be a webcast worth watching.