Excerpt from Bochdansky et al. (submitted):

"The Medea-2 expedition on the RV Pelagia (Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research) took place from mid June to mid July 2012. Twenty-four stations were sampled from the Porcupine Plains west towards the Charlie-Gibbs Fracture Zone, and then north to the Norwegian Sea. Water from six depths (ranging from 100 - 4483 m), four below 1000 m, one at the oxygen minimum zone (OMZ), and one at 100 m, was collected from 25 L Niskin bottles into 250 mL polycarbonate bottles. Various volumes of water were filtered onto 0.2 µm pore size, 25 mm diameter polycarbonate filters depending on depth: 50 mL from 100 m, 150 mL from the OMZ, and 250 mL from the deep sea and fixed the same way as stated above. The filters were stored in 2 mL cryovials at -80 °C immediately after filtering and shipped to Old Dominion University on dry ice. The filters were cut into 8ths. For prokaryote abundance, two opposite slices were stained and mounted with Vectashield DAPIon glass slides. For eukaryotic microbe abundance, two opposite filter slices were dual-stained with FITC and Vectashield DAPI, and enumerated (Morgan-Smith et al. 2011). All prokaryote and eukaryotic microbe counts were performed on an epifluorescence microscope (Olympus BX51). For prokaryotes a minimum of 50 randomly selected fields of view, 25 on each filter slice, were counted. For eukaryotic microbes, a minimum of 100 randomly selected fields of view was counted per station, 50 from each filter slice."

Cell counts of eukaryotic microbes can be found in the Protist counts for the cruise Archimedes-IV dataset. Context data for this cruise are stored on the Centralized Oceanographic Data Information System (CODIS) of the Data Management Group at the Netherlands Institute of Sea Research (www.nioz.nl/portals-en). Cruise number: 64PE356. (not yet available, 2015-09-01)

References:

Morgan-Smith D., Clouse M. A., Herndl G. J., Bochdansky A. B. (2013) Diversity and distribution of microbial eukaryotes in the deep tropical and subtropical North Atlantic Ocean. Deep-Sea Res. I: 78: 58-69. doi:10.1016/j.dsr.2013.04.010

Morgan-Smith D., Herndl G. J., van Aken H. M., Bochdansky A. B. (2011) Feature article. Abundance of eukaryotic microbes in the deep subtropical North Atlantic. Aquat. Microb. Ecol. 65:103-115. doi: 10.3354/ame01536

Related datasets: See Dataset Collections under the project page for "Basin-scale distribution and activity of deep-sea protists in the North Atlantic Ocean"

protists_prokaryotes_MEDEAII.csv