R.V. Mary Anning: The Research Ship of Swansea University
The new research ship named Mary Anning moored readily at Marina Bay. She had been for five years designed and just came out three weeks ago to do the commission as marine research and teaching. The ship is belonged to the Bioscience Department, the college of Science, Swansea University. The specific construction is mainly served for research and teaching on board in any kind of subjects. There are two bedrooms contained approximately six people, kitchen and meeting room. The total of 25 people can be on a ship in the travel route. It cost around 1.6 million ponds to build this high operational ship with approximately 6,000 ponds annual maintenance checking. The onboard use area serves the wet and dry activities-sampling preparation and drying. Moreover, the mammal observation can be search as the deck floor area. The functional manual machines are varied depend on kinds of research-there are crane, lifting for diving, seawater and freshwater pump and also the high technology supply. The available incredible helpers are surround in the ship as WIFI via cellular sim phone, sonar system, GPS mapping and tracking, and LCD can be projected.
Today on 14 June 2019, Mary Anning took students and researchers to collect the seawater sampling and tracked fish checking. Seawater sample can be done directly from the pump under the ship throughout into the bottle. That made sampling easily and quickly which meant the error among replication would be less. These water sample would be gone through the DNA metagenomic analysis. As difficult separation of microorganisms, the microbiome is directly analysed what organisms in the seawater. For the tracking check, the student checked the sonar sound from the receiving the underwater as 12 stations. Once tagged fish swim pass around the receiving, the student would get the sound of whether fish pass around by the prob.
Obviously, the research has good supported equipment to marine research. The obstruction is less by those technology and equipment. In addition, the offshore research can be more explore and combine to the real time data receiving. New equipment can help us do teaching onboard and various marine research. Anyway, high investment and annual maintenance cost are normally the big issue of the outcome so it need a support from many organizations involving. As science study, we need to think in big view of project or what kind of the benefit output would come out as its value of money investment or how we can do the research worth for our life and earth
