It's nice to be home!

The first thing I did on return to Glasgow after reminding the dog I still exist. Good times!

Nothing sums up coming home to Scotland quite like a bottle of Irn Bru and a Greggs!

Anyway, as some of you may have noticed I've been using some time over the last few days to update the layout of the blog a little bit and have added in a drop-down menu system. Since I'm not a programmer and this was a task requiring a spot of CSS coding, I turned to the ever-helpful Google to sort it out and would like to acknowledge this guide as the reason I got anything to work at all.

With that done, I've been able to align the blog a bit better to the layout used over at my Wild Ocean Photography site, and intend to use it to set up quick links through to some of the location & equipment guides I have planned. For now though, I've set up a 'Kit Bag' section so now you can find out what gear I use when I'm out photographing, SCUBA diving or boating if you're feeling nosy! 

I've also uploaded the first set of images from the Changing Oceans 2012 research cruise (JC073) to the Marine Science and Conservation gallery over at Wild Ocean Photography so you can go and check those out now too!

Zan is not a ninja photographer

And after what feels like no time at all, the cruise has come to an end and we are back in Glasgow. It's just as grey and wet as when we left all those weeks ago back in the middle of June, but it's definitely good to be home again for a break before the next one! I will post up some of the cruise highlights over the next few days once I've caught up on some sleep, but for now I wanted to share a small collection of photos that I've taken over the course of the cruise. I'm typically much more used to shooting wildlife, but by being one of the cruise photographers for the last month I've spent a lot more time than usual photographing people, which has been an excellent learning experience. I'm a huge fan of reportage-style photography and it's an area I'd like to develop into a bit more. Still, it doesn't always work out quite as planned and being spotted sneaking around with a long lens is not quite the look I was going for!

Here is the set of photos I like to call 'Zan is not a ninja':

Anyway, I'll be back soon with some more photos and some of my favourite images from the trip.

Rockall in the Fog

Well, we steamed past Rockall itself last night and I thought you might like to see it:

Can you spot it?

No?

Let me photoshop that for you.

So, seeing Rockall in the fog was probably not the most spectacular way to see it, but it was definitely there, with breaking waves and everything! It's pretty amazing to think that anyone actually managed to stay on that rock for any amount of time, but it has been done!

In some other news, some more photos have gone up over at the official cruise blog, and you can check out those galleries for some photos from the ROV and a few of mine which are up in the Week 3 Gallery.

Thanks also to Dom and Rick who identified those mystery birds as a Pomarine Skua, Arctic Skua and Blue Fulmar (which is an alternative colour morph, not a different species).

Have a good weekend, and see you on Monday!

Plankton blooms, Strange birds and More Macro Photography

Well, we left Rockall trough yesterday and moved to a shallower site further north on Rockall bank to try and escape the storms which are swirling around the south of the UK at the moment, which seems to have been a good move as we’ve managed to get some good, long ROV dives out here so far!

Interestingly, we seem to have arrived right in the middle of a coccolithophore bloom which has turned the water a tropical milky green colour! Coccolithophores are a type of phytoplankton with a calcium carbonate skeleton, and are one of the most obvious blooms to see using satellite imagery because they are such a bright green.

A coccolithophore bloom has turned the water bright green

We’ve also had a few interesting bird visitors lately. I’m not actually sure the bird from the last blog really was an arctic skua, and we were visited by a yet another skua two days ago which I’ve not seen before. I've no idea if they're the same species with different plumage or are completely different, so if anyone can help me out it would be greatly appreciated! We don't have a particularly good ID book out here so getting these right at the moment is more or less guess work.

Another mystery skua passing by the ship

I also spotted this little fulmar amongst the crowd, showing very different colours from normal, but I don’t know if it’s just a young bird or on in winter plumage? I’ve not seen fulmars in different plumage before so any help would be much appreciated!

I've never seen a fulmar with this plumage before. Is this common or something weird?

With the return to ROV dives we’ve also had some more guests for the photography aquarium. To get around the issue of the unbalanced lighting I made a homemade reflector out of tin foil and a random piece of plastic and it seems to be working pretty well so far. See what you think of these:

A little squat lobster on a hydroid. 

The hydroid itself was full of little amphipods (crustaceans similar to sandhoppers)

Eunice norvegicus is a polychaete worm which builds its tubes inside Lophelia reef framework.

A gorgonian (a type of soft coral) commonly seen growing in Lophelia framework

A tiny crinoid or feather star, found clinging on to a little piece of coral.

We're heading off to the Hebridean Seamount tonight which means we're heading back towards the Outer Hebrides and land and starting to meander homewards. We'll be passing Rockall itself this evening at about 9pm, so we'll hopefully get there for sunset (if the clouds lift a little!).

Squishing cups at 800m!

Well, we got one day out of the ROV at least before the weather turned lumpy again and we had to put the work on hold again. It’s unclear what we’re going to do for the last week of the cruise, since the weather forecast and the sea state are both changing so rapidly it’s difficult to know what the best decision will be to get the most out of our last few remaining days.

Between writing my cruise report and working on my thesis, I’ve got plenty to be getting on with, so having a bit of time to really focus on writing and analysis is great for catching up on some things. Of course, being disconnected from constant Facebook access means that we have to come up with slightly more creative ways to get distracted from working, and with deep-sea work going on, that generally means decorating polystyrene cups and sending them down to the seabed to be squished by the pressure. Interestingly, the ones we're sending to 800m are about the same size as the ones we sent to 4800m last year, which makes me wonder what the minimum depth is for maximum squashed-ness... My science-sense is tingling and I can sense an experiment coming on! Anyway, here’s a few I made earlier:

Teeny weeny squished cups

In wildlife news, there hasn’t been much change really. The gannets, fulmars, kittiwakes, gulls and skuas are still following us around, but the gannets still haven’t been diving for us and it’s been too rough for successful whale spotting.

Fulmars run over the surface of  the sea before they take off, leaving little footprints in the water!

I did see my first ever Arctic skua yesterday though as it swooped by the ship! At least, I think it’s an arctic skua.... It’s a pretty terrible photo, but I’m going to share it anyway.

The first Arctic skua I've ever seen (I think!()

200 hungry seabirds & the Jubilee

Well, the weather brightened up yesterday and the swell has decreased pretty nicely so it’s looking like we’ll be back on track with the ROV work from today which is good news! Still it’s been pretty cool out here with the heavy weather and although there hasn’t much going on in terms of wildlife that we could really see (except the pod of 20 pilot whales which I missed! Bah!).

Making celebratory Jubilee hats

The bad weather did give us a chance for some hat-making sessions for the Queen’s Jubilee weekend though!

What are you looking at?

Considering that there are 54 people on board the ship, we throw away relatively little food. Meals are one of the daily highlights so people tend to eat everything they’re given anyway, and the kitchen will recycle any other leftovers into new meals for a few days as well so very little is actually wasted. So it’s pretty incredible that we’re currently being followed by an entourage of about 200-300 gulls, fulmars, gannets and skuas, which are apparently getting enough food to make it worth their while to tag along with us. I’ve no idea how much these birds need to eat, but I would have thought a fishing boat would have made a better target for discards and a free meal than us. Still, it means that feeding time for us is quickly followed by feeding time for the birds which inevitably means a few scuffles between the birds and some good photo opportunities for me!

We're being followed by a LOT of birds

This must be worthy of a caption competition!

Fulmars racing for some scraps

Two gulls scuffling over some leftovers

A (far away) skua intercepting a gannet mid-dive.

 I saw my first shearwater of the trip today too, which is nice since it means they’re definitely out there somewhere! I’m still trying to get a good photograph of one, but they’ve been making themselves scarce this trip which is a bit unusual considering they’re usually a fairly common sight. Still, I’ll keep an eye out for them and hopefully they’ll come back over the next few days before we leave.

Wildlife over the Rockall Trough

So it’s another beautiful day at Rockall, where we are currently floating on our research ship about 200 miles to the west of the Outer Hebrides. Surprisingly, this area appears to be a far better site for wildlife watching than Mingulay was, and we are seeing large numbers of gannets, fulmars and kittiwakes around the ship. I’m never sure if they follow ships out here, or if we just happen to come across patches of them, but since these are all scavengers I wouldn’t be surprised if they were attracted in to see us.

A young gannet flying by

A fulmar swimming up for a closer look at the ship

 We’ve also had some surprising visitors to the ship as well, and picked up a large group of about 20-30 barn swallows last night which were as tame as anything and spent the entire evening posing for everyone with a camera! We were a bit concerned that they were only here because they’d been knocked off course, but it seems that some swallows will migrate from Africa to Greenland, so it’s possible we’re on their route. Certainly most of them seem to have disappeared this morning so hopefully they’ll be back on their way north for the summer.

 

Migrating barn swallows en route to the north. They all looked exhausted and were no doubt pleased for the short break.

More surprising than the swallows though was the appearance of a second pigeon (how do you get a pigeon 300 miles offshore?). Both birds are ringed racing pigeons and are (I believe) being fed and watered by the crew since it’s unlikely they’ll be leaving the ship now before we go home. If anyone knows what to do with them, I’ve managed to get partial numbers off their rings which seem to be:

 

Pigeon 1: (Green) SU10 3660L

Pigeon 2: (Blue) N273 

Anyway, if anyone knows how to contact the birds’ owners they might be interested to know their pigeons are currently enjoying a brief holiday.

Minke whale surfacing beside our ship

Finally, not to be outshone by a group of birds, we had our first whale sighting of the trip when a Minke whale surfaced right alongside the boat yesterday afternoon! I’ve seen a few Minke whales over the years, but I’ve never managed to get a single shot of one, so you can imagine I’m a bit pleased with how these came out!

Anyway, better get back to work watching the ROV dives. Catch you soon!