Gone fishing...

On the offchance(!) that you aren't currently following the official Porcupine Abyssal Plain (PAP) Observatory blog, I thought I'd leave you a wee link to the post I wrote for them at the weekend about our trawling work. Enjoy!

https://papobservatory.wordpress.com/2015/07/06/gone-fishing/

Bringing the nets on board

The armoured grenadier, Coryphaenoides armatus, caught from 4850 m down!

Some of the other animals from the trawl catches. Left: Brittle stars (Ophiuroidea); Middle top: A sea cucumber (Holothuroidea); Middle: an Abyssal Grenadier (Coryphaenoides profundicolus); Middle bottom: an isopod; Right: A sea spider (Pycnogonidae)

"Days at Sea"

We've been busily working away out here over the past few days, getting well stuck into our nights of mud-sampling while bobbing around in the tail end of a tropical storm. The rough weather has made it too difficult to do much willdife-watching, but it has given me a bit of extra time to work on a photo project I've been adding to for a few years now but never quite got round to finishing that I'm provisionally calling "Days at Sea".

25 days on the Atlantic Ocean. Click to view a larger version.

When I went on my first deep-sea research cruise, I took a photo out of my cabin window every day. At the time, it was largely just a nice way to track the number of days we'd been out on the water (and how many we had left!), and it very quickly turned into a bit of a habit which has turned into a rather large archive of images. Out here, there is virtually nothing out here to see except and endless expanse of sea and sky, but for such a simple view it's amazing how variable it can be from hour to hour and day to day. This project is intended to be a reflection of the dynamic and relentless beauty of our oceans.

Whales!

Last night we were joined by a family group of pilot whales just as we were finishing dinner and preparing ourselves for our first night of seafloor sampling. Incidentally, running up and down two flights of stairs to get your camera after eating a large amount of lasagne and banana bread (separately, not at once!) is not an entirely pleasant experience!

A large pod of pilot whales popped by the ship yesterday.

Pilot whales in the waves

Pilot whales are funny beasts. They have a very lazy way of rolling through the water, which makes them a bit difficult to take interesting photographs of because they don't do much other than breathe and pootle about. The calves tend to be a lot more active and tend to leap around a bit more which is VERY cute to see if you can find a family group! 

Photobombing whale

Family of pilot whales

This pod had a couple of calves with them that still had visible foetal bands, meaning they must have been pretty new! We got really lucky with this group, and they stayed near the ship for about two hours. Most of the photos I took were of small black fins in the distance (as is typical of photographing whales and dolphins), but they did briefly come right up close to us and I got a few photos that were a bit more reasonable!

This pilot whale calf was so young the foetal bands were still visible on its flanks.

We've also been seeing a few shearwaters over the past couple of days. I'm not completely sure what species of they are, but I suspect they're Cory's shearwaters, though that's based mostly on the fact that I've seen them out here before and these ones look a bit similar. If anyone with a better internet connection than me can check and let me know it'd be much appreciated!

I think this is a Cory's Shearwater... Is that right?

Anyway, we've been put on night duty for our mud-coring work so I'm going to try and grab a couple of hours of sleep before dinner. See you next time!

Work, work, work (and sea monsters)

It's been a hectic two weeks.

Busy busy busy.

After the weather finally decided to stop chasing us around, we got ourselves over to our study site at the Porcupine Abyssal Plain to start what has probably been the most diverse range of deep-sea work I've encountered on a cruise! We've deployed and recovered environmental moorings, autonomous gliders, and a time-lapse camera ("Bathysnap") that's been photographing the seabed for the last 12 months; we've sliced mud, trapped amphipods and sampled a LOT of water!

Trawling in the Abyss

But the work that I came out here for was the trawling, and despite a couple of minor issues with the net along the way, we managed to catch ourselves a decent selection of fish which will help massively with confirming the species identifications of the fish I'm seeing in my photographs from the region. It's also a bit more data to add to our long-term dataset from the PAP which has been being added to gradually over the last 20 years and is one of only two such datasets to exist in the world, so all of this is pretty valuable.

The benthic fishes include the grenadiers (top four images) and eels (bottom image).

My primary interest is in the benthic fish (the ones that live on or close to the seafloor), like the ones in the image above. However, from a purely photographic point of view it's the pelagic or mid-water species that have been holding my attention over the past few days, because they are brilliantly monstrous little things! Here's a selection (most backgrounds have been photoshopped out and replaced with black):

Female Anglerfish

Female angler fish (head detail).

Gulper Eel (head detail)

Hatchetfish

As usual though, we unfortunately also collected a lot of litter in our catches. It's not surprising - this far offshore there are few regulations regarding the disposal of waste at sea (it's legal to dump most things once you reach international waters), but it's still a shame to think that even out here in an environment that is so distant from us, we're still disturbing and impacting it.

The litter brought up in our first trawl.

A coke can in the net.

 

 

I'm on a boat...

After a rather hectic weekend of data processing and frantic presentation-writing in time for a meeting yesterday, it's now time to pack up my rigger boots again and head to Southampton for another two weeks at sea for what is likely to be my very last cruise as part of my PhD.

Mud and muddy animals! Yeah! 

This time, we're heading back out to the Porcupine Abyssal Plain to learn how to trawl for sample in deep-water! I've done a similar trip before, but the guys who knew all the details of how to work the gear and get it properly set up are starting to leave or retire now, so there's a bunch of us heading offshore to gather as much knowledge as we can (and hopefully catch some interesting things while we're out there too!).

An abyssal grenadier almost 5000m down

As well as a lot of mud-sampling (it just wouldn't be a trip to the abyss without it!), we'll be conducting at least two seabed trawls and hoping to collect another batch of samples to add to the long-term dataset which has been being collected at the PAP site since the early 1980s to track temporal changes in abyssal animals over the course of several decades to improve our understanding of the fragility of those systems. As always, I'll be on the lookout for fish specimens to bring back with me, and will of course keep you posted on our progress as we go. Keep your fingers crossed for us getting good weather!

The internet's back on! Time for a blog...

And so, after 4 days of travelling, we finally made it to our sampling stations in the Porcupine Abyssal Plain first thing on Sunday morning ready and excited to start working! ...At least the morning shift were up and ready to go - my afternoon (1500-0300) shift was a little slower to get out of bed, most of us just managing to get ourselves up in time to eat lunch! Still, I can't complain; doing the backshift is DEFINITELY the better option compared to having to get out of bed at 3am every day (I don't do mornings). 

It is quite interesting seeing how different people deal with the shifts though. Most people on board I think would prefer to work the 1500-0300 shift if they had the choice, but some definitely deal it better than others. For me, if I had to get up for 3am I would still wake up feeling like crap no matter when I went to bed, whereas working the backshift until 0300 is absolutely no problem and only took a day or two to get used to. It's also helping the productivity (well, that and the extremely intermittent internet connection means I can't get too distracted too easily!), which always helps ease the PhD Fear back a little bit!

Mud + Science = Fun times for all.

Anyway, aside from settling into our shifts and getting to know everyone else on the ship, we've been getting stuck into a lot of megacoring work, which basically involves sending a corer to the seabed armed with 8-10 plastic tubes, which will be forced into the seabed then mechanically sealed up and hauled all the way back up ready to be measured, cut into slices, preserved and stored. All in all, the whole cycle takes around 7 hours (5 hours to send the gear down and back up and about 2 hours to process) so there's plenty of time to escape off to do some work or watch a film in between cores (or bizarrely, learn how to play cribbage), which is nice because it's not the most exciting work! It's one of those team-effort type jobs though so it's a pretty good laugh at least.

Autosub on the back deck. 

Autosub (our AUV or 'Autonomous Underwater Vehicle') is still being prepared for it's first launch later this afternoon (Wednesday) so keep your fingers crossed that it all goes well! The plan for the next few days is to send it down to take a few test photographs on the seabed so we can make sure it's all working the way it's meant to, and then it will rise up to about 100m off the sea floor and conduct the first part of an acoustic mapping survey which will take about 6 days to complete. So there won't be any fishy photos to look at for a while yet I'm afraid!

A little mystery tern floating by on its own private polystyrene island. Click to enlarge.

In wildlife news, there hasn't been much in the way of bird life out here except for this little mystery tern which floated past the ship yesterday on a little polystyrene island. As usual, I've got very little idea what this is, but it doesn't look like any of the British species I've seen before. Anyone out there got any ideas?

Maybe a fin whale? A group of about 5-6 whales passed our ship yesterday but no-one could tell what species they were.

We also saw a lot of whales yesterday too, which was very exciting! They were pretty far away, but they were pretty big (one was probably >15m, though I'm horrible at estimates. Definitely bigger than a minke though) and we think they might have been fin whales. One day I'll buy an ID guide and be able to say for sure what all these things are that we find out here!

To the Abyss!

The tug boat maneuvering us out of port and away from NOC

Leaving Southampton behind us (click to enlarge)

And we're off! After a relatively calm day yesterday to arrive and get acquainted with our new living arrangements aboard ship, we finally left Southampton harbour at lunchtime today, heading out on our way to the abyss! So far we've not really had much to do aside from going through the normal start-of-cruise safety and science briefings, and getting to know the other scientists and the ship so it's been quite a relaxed couple of days (which is a nice break after the chaos of preparing for the cruise!).

We have old skool life jackets!

Inside the life raft, listening to why abandoning ship would be all kinds of horrendous.

We've got a long way to go to get to our study site in the Porcupine Abyssal Plain (PAP), which means we'll not be arriving until first thing on Sunday, with a stop-off en route on Saturday to collect some 'shallow' mud and water samples (from only 1000m!) for one of the other PhD students. Saying that, there's plenty of preparatory work to be done to make sure all our equipment and computers are working properly and that we're ready to cope with the deluge of data we're expecting to get from the AUV on a daily basis. All being well, I'll have amassed an absolutely enormous collection of photographs by the time we come home (current estimates suggest we'll be getting 40,000 photos per day from each of the two cameras), and will have photographically and acoustically mapped an area of seabed of approximately 50km2, making this the largest and most detailed attempt to map a deep-sea area ever conducted! Hopefully with all those photographs I'll get to see plenty of fish!

Southampton harbour (click to enlarge).

In slightly different news, I've also been asked to keep the official NOC blog up to date as we go through the cruise, so if reading one blog by me isn't enough, you can pop over to http://picturingthedeep.blogspot.co.uk/ and read that one too! Though in fairness, the NOC one will be written by lots of different people, so you'll at least get plenty of variety!