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!

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!

Back where it all started: Marine Biology at the Millport Marine Station

All the way back in 2001 I started my undergraduate degree in Aquatic Bioscience (I know, it's fancy!) at Glasgow University. I had gone to uni specifically to study marine and freshwater ecology, but because the first two years of the (four-year) degree focussed on a broad range of general biology subjects, it was only in 3rd year that we got to start studying anything related to marine ecology. It was a long time coming, but it was awesome to get started and our field trip to the Millport Marine Biology station (on the Island of Cumbrae) was a big part of that. It involved a stupid amount of work, but we were learning real marine ecology in the field for the first time, and that was pretty awesome. So, when I was asked if I wanted to go back this year as one of the course tutors, it was a pretty easy decision to make!

Sandy shore surveys at Kames  Bay. Click for larger version.

So last Saturday, I headed down to Cumbrae with 5 other staff, ready to teach 73 undergraduates about coastal ecology. To say the schedule was packed is a bit of an understatement, with the course content covering rocky & sandy shore surveys, plankton surveys, trawl surveys, microbiology labs, mark-recapture experiments and foraging observations on oystercatchers over a mere 6 days! On top of all that, they also had to keep daily group blogs (which was admittedly tricky without a good internet connection) and produce a short video describing a scientific paper in a creative and entertaining way, while also making time for lectures, briefings, cake and alcohol. Despite all that, the level of enthusiasm and excitement the students brought to the work made the entire course so easy to teach it was awesome.

We did a LOT of science this week. Click for a larger image.

After 12 years in research studying the macrofauna living in deep-water corals, parasites in Icelandic cod, the langoustine trawl fisheries along the west coast of Scotland, and human impacts on deep-sea fish communities (and all the stress of a PhD when things are going badly), coming back to this course was a really cool reminder of why I started out on this career path in the first place. And that is to say nothing about the awesome folk I've studied with, worked with and been cruise buddies with! It's been a long and slightly random journey at times to reach this point, but I wouldn't change a thing.

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!

A tale of half a million photographs

Well, this week has been busy! After a couple of issues with one of the batteries, the AUV team managed to get Autosub working perfectly again and we've been conducting photographic missions to the seafloor over the last five days, covering a survey track approximately 150km long and taking over 500,000 photographs in the process! It's the biggest AUV survey of an abyssal  region conducted to date (to the best of my knowledge) which is very cool and I'm hoping it will allow me to examine the distribution patterns of fish on the seafloor.

Autosub6000 being launched!
(I love that they've had to write 'harmless scientific instrument' on it in case it's mistaken for a giant yellow torpedo!

Deep-sea fish (particularly abyssal ones) are pretty difficult to study, partly because as the depth increases there's less and less food available which means fewer and fewer fish are able to survive. So, by the time you reach the abyssal plains at 4000-6000m, there are relatively few individuals around to find. One way around this problem is to use baited camera systems to lure the fish into your photographs, and it is an extremely efficient way of assessing the abundance and diversity of scavenging species in an ecosystem. However, scavenging species only account for around 25% of the  total fish diversity in the deep waters of the north-east Atlantic, so we need to use other techniques to identify the other 75%. A potential solution is to use unbaited cameras (such as Bathysnap), set to take images every few hours over several months then record which species pass by the camera in that time. Alternatively, we could catch specimens using trawl surveys to cover a larger area (which has the additional benefit that we can get definitive identifications for the species we catch), but we can't tell exactly whereabouts each fish was captured along the trawl's path.


However, none of these methods are really suitable for examining what the distribution patterns of fish are on the seafloor (i.e. do they cluster together or are they spread evenly over the seabed?) or how they respond to variations in habitat (e.g. how they react to the presence of hills or hard substrate), which are fairly fundamental questions to consider in understanding the ecology of any species. This is where Autosub comes into the picture. 

The forward-looking camera & flash on Autosub which  I use to look for fish.

As an AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle), Autosub can be programmed to dive to the seafloor, follow a survey route while operating any on-board equipment (like cameras or sonar systems) and then return to the surface and the research ship without requiring any human intervention during its mission. Not only does this free the ship to conduct other work while the Autosub is getting on with its surveys, but it can also be programmed to conduct extremely long or complex surveys which may not be feasible using other methods. For our work, Autosub was set to conduct photographic transects roughly 35km - 90km in length, taking photographs every 0.86 seconds at a speed of around 1m per second. In case your mental arithmetic is a bit creaky, that's approximately 4200 photographs per hour! 



EDIT: Hooray! I've had the OK to post a few images, so here are a few of the better ones. They're cropped from a 5MP camera so they're not amazing quality, but they do the job!

Bathysaurus sp. (lizardfish) is an ambush predator with rather a lot  of teeth. They're not really orange, but the camera has a funny colour balance going on that I've not fixed yet.

A (not-colour-corrected) grenadier from yesterday's mission.

And another little grenadier from the first mission we did.

Anyway, after a rather full-on five days or so of AUV operations and between the two stills cameras mounted on Autosub, we've amassed well over 550,000 images and covered around 150km of abyssal seabed! A preliminary look through the photos is showing a decent number of fish as well which is brilliant news and means I'm going home with a really nice set of (pretty damn exciting) data! All of this is exceptionally cool, but sadly combines with the 100 hours of ROV footage from last month's cruise to sound the final death knell for my social life. Well, that and the prospect of several weeks on an Angolan oil rig at the end of the year, but that's still to be confirmed...

Examples of the rubbish we trawled up from the Porcupine Abyssal Plain during last year's cruise.

One thing that takes the shine off all this cool and exciting research though is that despite the fact that we're conducting surveys in 5000m of seawater in an area which isn't commercially targeted for anything (no fishing, mining, oil drilling etc.), we're still seeing litter everywhere, from planks of wood and scraps of metal to canvas bags to old books and old drinks cans and bottles. Last year when we were out here we trawled up boots, bottles and twice as much spent fuel (clinker) as animals by weight. It sucks. You'd think that maybe somewhere as remote as the ocean abysses might just be far enough away from us that they'd still be relatively pristine, but it's certainly not the case out here.


Finally, Jen Durden and I have written up a blog for the NOC's 'Picturing the Deep' blog which will hopefully go up online tomorrow (Tuesday at the latest I'd expect) so you can see some of it there at least in the meantime! 

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!

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!

A Day in the Life... On a Research Cruise

There’s nothing quite like the combination of fog, rain and a big swell at sea to really limit your options for photography! The weather yesterday and today has been too poor to put the ROV in the water and too foggy to get any decent photographs so we’ve had a quiet couple of days to catch up on some writing and data processing in the labs. But, all work and no play makes scientists at sea go crazy, so I thought today I’d write a little bit about a typical day on a research cruise and what we get up to out here to maintain some semblance of sanity!

Bet you can't spot me!

I’m writing this during my third offshore cruise, and during each one the scientists have been put on (usually 12-hour) shifts so we can keep working around the clock. The RRS James Cook costs about £50,000 per day to hire (including fuel, consumables and crew wages etc.) so it’s important to try and make the most of every hour we can get on board, especially since the chance to participate in a research cruise often represents a one-off opportunity to get your data. Unlike other fields, with deep-sea research it’s not like you can just pop 300 miles back offshore if you forget something or lose a sample! With that in mind, even working for 12 hours or more through a night shift doesn’t seem quite so bad.

So regardless of what time you actually wake up, a typical day will start, as it does anywhere, with breakfast and a coffee in the ship’s galley before checking in with the shift leader to see what the programme of work will be for the day. The shift leaders are responsible for keeping things running through their shift and will liase directly with the expedition’s Principle Scientist and to make sure that everyone gets the samples they need from the trip. They are also the ones who will be at the forefront when plans need to change to allow repairs to be done on a piece of kit or if bad weather comes in and forces us to rethink what we’re going to do for the day.

Nothing like a giant bucket of mud to keep everyone happy!

Since every research cruise is designed with a particular purpose in mind, the type of work being done will depend very much on what the aims are. The cruises I’ve participated in have mostly focused on ecological surveying using ROVs, towed cameras or trawling for example, but we’ve also done plenty of mud sampling, box coring, water collections and acoustic mapping as well. Regardless of what type of cruise it is though, one of the things I really enjoy about working on these ships is the real sense of camaraderie that develops from joining in with the deck work in particular, whether it’s carting buckets of water around for the on-board aquaria or being up to your elbows in abyssal mud at 2am on a pitching ship!

But like I said, you can’t work for 14 hours a day for 4 weeks straight without needing some downtime, and fortunately the cruise ships I’ve been on have been well-supplied in terms of entertainment. The James Cook for example has a video room for watching films in, a small library full of novels, a good-sized social area for watching TV and even a Wii with a few games! For me as well there’s also the photography to keep me busy, whether it’s shooting the wildlife or shooting photos of the work that we’re all doing.

Wii tournaments can get pretty intense

So that’s more or less it really for a typical day at sea! The weather has just kept on getting worse and the captain’s ordered the decks secured now while we head to our next station through a 3-4m swell (about 10-12 feet I think), but the birds seem to be thoroughly enjoying themselves so I’m off to try and get some shots of the stormy seas!

Thanks to Karl Attard and Millie Sharkey for providing today's photos :)