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.

To the Abyss (again!)

It's nice to be back at sea!
 

Last Friday, I left Glasgow with one of my fish-ecologist colleagues to join the RRS Discovery for another cruise to the Porcupine Abyssal Plain (PAP) long-term survey site. This is my fourth trip out to the PAP in as many years now, and I must admit it's really nice to be back on a ship! 

Me and Jo, ready to sail!

Leaving a wet and rainy Liverpool

The main purpose of this particular cruise is to service the PAP monitoring buoy and download the data that it's been collecting for the past year. This includes oceanographic data (e.g. current speed, water temperature, salinity), as well as collections of the sinking particles of dead organisms, biological waste and other organic and inorganic materials that make up the "marine snow" which fuels the vast majority of deep-sea ecosystems.

The Porcupine Abyssal Plain (PAP) study site is about 300 miles south-west of Ireland

Recoving the PAP buoy in 2013

Taking a ship 300 miles offshore is not a simple (or cheap!) task however, and there's no point coming all the way out here just to service a buoy and go home again so we've got a full contingent of scientists ready to make the most of the opportunity to collect their own data from the PAP site. On this particular cruise, we've got teams who are interested in understanding how mid-water bacterial processes and communities are influenced by "marine snow" particles, as well as researchers who will be studying the plankton communities and oceanography of the site. We even have a couple of holographic cameras which can automatically assess the sizes of all the particles in a tiny patch of seawater and rebuild an image of them all! 

Some photos from the last time I was out here to fish in the abyss. Hopefully this time we'll catch even more!

 

As exciting as the midwater research is though, I am here with Jo Clarke from Glasgow University to go fishing! We're working with the "benthic" (seafloor) ecologists from NOC to help collect deep-water animals from the seabed using mud cores, grabs and a trawl. We're really here for the fish, so we're mainly interested in the fish samples, and are here to make sure that they get identified, processed and recorded correctly for any future work that might be done on them. We'll also be helping out with all the other benthic sampling that needs to be done which will largely involve dealing with a lot of mud!

Sieving mud samples isn't so bad really!

The megacorer is one of the standard sampling gears for getting good quality sediment and animal samples back from the seabed. We'll be seeing a lot of it over the next few days!

So far we've had a pretty quiet start to the cruise. We met the ship in Liverpool and then spent a couple of days steaming south to Falmouth so some repairs could be done to one of the ship's thrusters while we were still near the coast. Happily that all went well, and we reached Falmouth just after midnight on Sunday for a mini crew-swap before starting our voyage to the PAP site. We should arrive there tomorrow, ready to start working!

Stormy Weather!

Guess where our study site is? I'll give you a clue - it's under where the red bit's going

Well, it’s been five days at sea now, and so far we’ve spent most of that time steaming towards our survey site at the Porcupine Abyssal Plain (PAP) and then bravely running away again! In fairness, the forecast has had Force 11s right over where we want to be working and since those are neither comfortable nor safe conditions to be attempting to launch and recover hundreds of kilos of equipment in, we opted to pick up a monitoring buoy from a nearby site instead and then try and sneak back to our survey site around the back of the weather. The headwinds mean we can only do around 4 knots at the moment (about walking pace) so it’s looking like it’ll be Friday before we can start work at the PAP properly – keep your fingers crossed that we manage to get the fishing gear in the water before we have to come home again!

It's always good value when the sea is actively trying to get in your cabin!

 

The sun came out today so I took a break from working on PhD stuff in my cabin to try and take a few photos of the gales we’re trying to push through. I’ve got a few videos which show the size of the swell a lot better, but with the restricted internet you’re not going to get to see those until we get back to land! Still, at least we’re not out here in a sailing ship...

A square-rigger we passed yesterday evening. Anyone know what it might be?

Other than occasionally popping outside to admire the weather, I’ve been working on some of the photos from last year’s cruise to the PAP site when we had the AUV with us, and there are some pretty cool images of the fish:

Abyssal fish from last year's cruise - hopefully we'll get to see a few for real when we start fishing

With a bit of luck we’ll get to see a few of these in the flesh if we manage to get the fishing nets in the water this week!

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!

Heading back to sea!

I still can't quite believe I'm getting to spend so much time on research cruises this year! It's all very exciting! After the success of the Changing Oceans 2012 expedition which I was involved with last month, I've managed to grab a brief two weeks on shore before heading off tomorrow to join the RRS Discovery (the 50 year-old one, not the new one!) in Southampton to take part in the AESA cruise at the Porcupine Abyssal Plain (NE Atlantic). To give it its full title, the cruise is called:

Autonomous Ecological Surveying of the Abyss:

Understanding Mesoscale Spatial Heterogeneity

at the Porcupine Abyssal Plain

Which sounds pretty damn cool, doesn't it?

Essentially the aims of this cruise build on work we conducted on the RRS James Cook last August which aimed to collect preliminary data about the distributions of megafaunal animals across the abyssal seabed using an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). Unlike an ROV (a remotely-operated vehicle), which is constantly linked to the research ship via a tether cable and controlled directly by operators on-board, AUVs are pre-programmed with a route and details of what instruments to use and when, and then dropped into the sea where they will automatically follow their programming and then return to the surface when they're done. The lack of a tether system means that not only is the base ship able to continue working with other gears while the AUV is in the water, but that AUVs can access areas that are inaccessible to ROVs (e.g. under ice).

Image taken from the NOC website: http://www.noc.soton.ac.uk/aui/autosub.htm

The plan for the AESA cruise is therefore to send the AUV (we're using AUTOSUB) down to the abyss and send it off to conduct photographic surveys of the seafloor to assess how different animals are distributed across the seabed and how they respond to changes in the seafloor habitats (e.g. surrounding and on top of abyssal mud mounds) over a relatively fine scale. As usual, I'll be studying the fish that we see on the forward-facing camera, while others will be studying the invertebrate fauna using a downward-facing camera. Continuous surveying of physical environmental parameters will also be done at the same time. And while the AUV is busily collecting all its data, we can continue to work on collecting, processing and storing... you guessed it! Mud! I can't wait!

Deep-sea mud. Glorious, glorious, mud!

Since the RRS Discovery is the older sister-ship to the RRS James Cook, I'm expecting that we should have some (albeit limited) internet access while we're away, so I will hopefully be able to keep you updated on our progress and any other cool things we see as we go through the cruise. Also, since my research typically involves video & photographic analysis rather than lab work, I've made up a little side project of my own to run alongside the serious science! ... But you'll have to wait and see to find out what it is!

The sun is back!

We left Rockall Bank a couple of days ago and steamed back inshore (past foggy Rockall!) to a new site at the Hebridean Terrace Seamount which is about 50 miles or so west of the Outer Hebrides where we've been conducting a short survey for JNCC. Underwater the site looks pretty cool, with some impressive cliffs sticking up from the seabed and it looks like a completely different set of fish as well. It's not going to be possible to tell whether the differences are caused by depth (the seamount is much deeper than our previous sites, at 1200-1800m compared to 800m) or by the different habitat, but it's very interesting to see.

Unfortunately, the surface is less exciting and we've had barely any sightings of anything since we got here. Even our entourage of fulmars and gulls has left us now, so I've spent much of the weekend wondering what the hell to talk about today. In true British style, it turns out I'm going to rely on that old classic: the weather!

Well not really, but just enough to say that the clouds finally lifted last night and we were treated to the first clear(ish) sunset in almost two weeks which brought out the scientists and their cameras!

Sunset over the north-east Atlantic 

Watching the sun go down

Some silhouettes work out better than others!

See you on Wednesday for the last blog I'll make from JC073!

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!()

Wind, waves and wildlife!

Well, the good weather finally left us and we’ve had a grey and windy day today which has come as a bit of a shock to the system after all the sunshine we’ve been treated to the last week! Still, it’s great news for photographing seabirds though, as they seem to prefer a bit of wind for flying in to help them glide over the waves, or sit in the up draughts alongside our six-storey  ship. I must admit, it’s been great to be outside on the back deck shooting seabirds in flight again! I think the last time I was really able to stop and shoot seabirds was probably back in 2010 when I was working on the fishing boats. I’ve had a few trips in the meantime obviously, but I’ve been mostly shooting coastal birds for a while now and it’s brilliant to be back out with the gannets again.

The mystery of why there are so many birds around has been solved as well and it turns out that they’re all here making the most of the food waste that gets dumped from the kitchens. All our other waste is either recycled or incinerated on board to minimise the environmental impact of the ship while it’s working, so it’s only biodegradable waste that is put over the side. Still, it’s good enough for the fulmars and gulls, though it’s a little strange watching them fight over bits of watermelon

A gull making off with a chip. That’s a good traditional Scottish diet!

A group of fulmars congregating around the food waste

The fulmars are here in one of the largest groups I’ve ever seen around a ship and there are probably at least 100 of them following us around. I love how at home seabirds are in the oceans regardless of what the sea state is like and it’s great watching them shrug off breaking waves and strong winds like it’s nothing at all.

A fulmar splashing through a wave

A group of fulmars looking absolutely unfazed regardless of how tilty they get

And this one was so comfortable it tucked up and went to sleep

For a little while we were also joined by a few gannets which circled the ship for about an hour or so, gliding around the ship and floating in the air by the bows.

A gannet flying below the bows of the ship

More entertainingly, for some reason every time the gannets landed on the sea they would target a fulmar and force them to rush out of the way. I’ve no idea why they were doing this since nothing was feeding at this point, but I don’t know an awful lot about birds so if anyone else has any suggestions I’d love to hear them!

The gannets liked to use the fulmars as landing pads for some reason

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!