Photo of the Week: Bongo Flow

Emmett Pinney (left) and marine tech Jeremiah Brower hold a bongo sampling net while NOAA fishery biologist Emily Gardner takes a reading from the net's flowmeter aboard Scripps Oceanography research vessel Sally Ride earlier this week. Photo courtesy of CalCOFI.

The bongo net was being used to collect plankton samples during a quarterly survey for California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI), which monitors the marine environment off the coast of California and the management of its living resources, as well as indicators of El Niño and climate change. The program has been in existence since 1949, making the California coast among the most extensively studied ocean regions in the world.

CalCOFI is a collaboration among the California Department of Fish & Wildlife, NOAA Fisheries Service and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. Follow CalCOFI on Twitter for more images and cruise updates.

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