Today, Francisco Alemany from Spain!

Hello internet, greetings from the Caribbean! We had some interesting days sampling in the very very strong currents associated with the Yucatan Current! Today we are in much calmer waters heading south at the moment in a general western direction. 

In this leg, Dr. Francisco Alemany joined us from the Instituto Español de Oceanografía in the Balearic Islands in beautiful Palma de Mallorca.

Francisco deploying plankton gear on the Nancy Foster

Francisco is  Senior Researcher and he shared with the blog that he is the “vice-director of the Balearic Island Oceanographic Center and coordinator of the larval ecology group based in this lab.  Our research team is mainly focused on larval tuna ecology but also works on the whole ichtyoplankton communities and other meroplanktonic groups, as decapod crustaceans and paralarvae. These days I am leading the BLUEFIN project and other related research oceanographic surveys. On the other hand, I'm also involved in the implementation of the European Union’s new Directive on Marine Strategy, as the national responsible of the tasks related to Alien (or invasive) Species and also participating in a couple of international EU projects on this matter. Occasionally, I work as FAO consultant, giving courses on fish ageing through otoliths reading...My day to day work nowadays consist mainly in taking care of administrative matters of ongoing projects, developing research proposals, revising the works of PhD and masters students, correcting papers and so on... therefore, this opportunity to be out “in the field” is very welcome and makes me very happy because I get time to analyze a plankton sample by myself, as occurs here on board NF all day long!

Francisco shared with me that he joined our cruise because “he wanted to get first-hand knowledge of the lab’s working protocols at sea, to see for myself the larvae of the tuna species that I cannot find in the Mediterranean and, this is the most important, ideas to strength the friendly and close collaboration we are maintaining with the NOAA tuna larvae ecology team from 2002, when John Lamkin joined our survey for the first time....[and then, the rest is history!]

As Francisco continues to help us sort and identify larval tunas in the Caribbean, we steam to the next station and will update the blog soon (been busy!)