One of my more work-intensive third year option courses this year is Limnology. The course is just wrapping up just now and ends with a field trip to the SCENE facility at Loch Lomond, so yesterday we all got to make a nice little trip. We got extremely lucky with the weather, turning what could have been a horrible experience into a delightful day out in the countryside.

The day was divided into two halves, with half of our time spent out on the lake taking samples and measurements and the other half in the field centre labs analysing samples. My group spent the morning in the lab, studying the phytoplankton and zooplankton present in a south basin water sample, as well as performing some rudimentary water chemistry measurements.

The trip costs also included lunch, which was provided by the field centre, and it was bloody brilliant. Tomato and Pepper soup, alongside rolls with a whole range of fillings. Needless to say I stuffed myself silly.

In the afternoon we went out onto the lake on the speedboat to gather samples. My mini-group were using a Van Dorn (henceforth: Van Damme) sampler to take water samples from various depths in the lake at two different sample sites. We then filtered and extracted these samples in the lab on Friday to measure chlorophyll concentrations. Other members of our groups took Temperature, DOC and Turbidity readings as well as taking some sediment samples.

The trip workload wasn’t particularly heavy (a shocking change from the rest of the course so far) so we basically had a fun day out on a beautiful lake in what was probably the last really nice sunny day of the year.

My camera battery died early in the day, but below are some photos I snapped on the trip (as usual, there are higher res images on my flickr page):

Boat

Pier

Woods

Highland Boundary Fault

Slightly visible in the picture above is the line of the Highland Boundary Fault (Hint: Follow the Islands) and, if you look closely, the town of Balmaha – the location of our next field trip in 2 years time. I’m not too optimistic about the weather however.

On the Lake

Islands in the Sun

Lake

Reflections on the Water

Andy Wading

We ended the day with a group photo taken sitting on the Pier. Which of course meant that Andy had to get his feet a little bit wet…