ICEFISH

Biology Professor Bill Detrich and a team of 30 scientists from around the world are on board the Nathaniel B. Palmer research vessel for the ICEFISH 2004 Cruise. The mission of the 61-day cruise, which left from Punta Arenas, Chile, on May 17th, and will dock at Cape Town, South Africa, on July 17th, is to collect specimens of lower latitude fishes in order to relate the evolution, physiology, biochemistry, and population dynamics of high latitude Antarctic fishes of the suborder Nototheniodei to the transitional fish fauna of the subAntarctic.

Professor Detrich worked with a project team from the EdTech Center to build the web site for ICEFISH, an acronym for International Collaborative Expedition to Collect and Study Fish Indigenous to Sub-Antarctic Habitats. Funded by the National Science Foundation and designed and built by Deanna Brown Aho and Katelynn O'Brien, the web site is designed to meet the visual and content needs and expectations of both the scientific research community and K-12 students. The site attempts to bridge this gap by offering information in layers and carefully naming topics to appeal to different target audiences.

Because ICEFISH is the first of several follow-on cruises, the site will be in use after the initial cruise is over. To ensure that researchers can continue to add materials to the site, EdTech included a web-based content maintenance application that allows one to change content by completing web forms.

Students from the United States, South Africa, France, New Zealand and the Falkland Islands are following the cruise and sending questions to the scientists who respond within 24 hours.

Project Collaborator(s): William Detrich