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Off the north coast of Wales,
Gabrielle Kennaway is searching
for the secrets of the single-celled plankton.
Under a light microscope you can see a certain number of things,
but then there are organisms that are so small, are molehills,
that are actually too small to see with the light microscope,
so you have to look at them with very powerful electron microscopes.
And it's just like, I suppose, those Russian dolls -
you keep on taking one doll off and there's something smaller.
I find that completely fascinating.
Gabrielle's mission is to find out more about the organisms
in their natural environment.
Now, this is the CTD.
It's got lots of Gucci bits of kit on it.
Now, we sample the water with this -
it's called the rosette sampler, and all these are bottles.
They're controlled by the computer, it gets a message down this wire,
and the top and the bottom snap together,
enclosing nearly a litre of water inside.
The CTD is also fitted with sensors.
They record depth, temperature,
and the telltale signs of photosynthesis.
If you shine blue light on chlorophyll,
it excites the chlorophyll molecule,
and this change in the energy level is given off as red light,
and the sensor in here picks that up,
and it comes up the cable, up there, into the computer,
and where there's a peak of phytoplankton,
we'll get a nice big peak on the graph.
That looks like a nice smooth launch of the CTD.
This trace is really interesting.
The chlorophyll peak, the phytoplankton peak,
is here at 30 metres.
Now, an hour ago, that wasn't there.
And it's an excellent example of a medium-term,
a medium scale turbulent event -
the tide bringing a parcel of phytoplankton along in the tide,
just past us as we were sampling.
It wasn't there an hour ago.