New Zealand and the 13th International Deep-Sea Biology Symposium

This has probably been one of the coolest and geekiest weeks of my entire professional life. Actually, possibly just of my entire life (star trek conventions don't count do they?). Anyway, before I forget too much of the last week in the whirlwind of jetlag, coffee, science, beer and giant squid that it's been, I thought I'd better do a wee recap of the last week in Wellington, New Zealand and of some of the highlights of the 13th International Deep-Sea Biology Symposium.

A long flight for science!

As any of you who've made the trip before will know, the direct flights from the UK to New Zealand are epic. Mine went from Glasgow - (1.5 hours) - Heathrow - (15 hours) - Singapore - (7 hours) - Melbourne - (2.5 hours) - Wellington with a couple of breaks, adding up to a glorious total of 30 hours in transit and which I'm pretty sure landed me well and truly in tomorrow. It was confusing. I'm not sure if it's the best way to start a meeting with a load of new-found colleagues and potential future employers either, but at least most people were in the same boat! Still, attempting to stay awake all day until a reasonable bedtime meant I got to see a fair chunk of the city the day before the conference started (if you're walking near traffic you're probably not going to be sleeping!).

A blurry 36 hours after landing, on what was apparently Monday morning, the symposium began with an address from the Wellington Mayor (who is cool) and a Maori (sing-along) blessing before launching straight into the science. And man was it awesome!

Some of my highlights (in no particular order):

James Cameron presenting his one-man submersible at the plenary session on Tuesday. 

• I gave my my very first presentation as a deep-sea fish ecologist on the work we've been doing on the DELOS project! Go me!
• James Cameron (yes, the guy who directed The Abyss and some other less-cool films) gave a plenary talk on Tuesday about his solo dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in Deepsea Challenger
• Hadal research (>6000m) is all set to move forward with a brand new three-year project (HADES) to compare trenches to surrounding abyssal and bathyal regions to see just how different they really are. 
• A new iPad app (iDeep) is in development through the INDEEP project to aid identification of deep-sea species.
• Drs. Bhavani Narayanaswamy and Craig McLean are proposing the establishment of a brand new Deep Sea Society! Please contact them directly if you're interested in becoming part of the steering committee.
• Thanks to my meeting Dr. Craig McLean I discovered that I'm only two degrees of freedom away from Joss Wheedon (via his Deep-Sea News connection)!
• Work by Dr. Melanie Bergmann at the HAUSGARDEN arctic observatory suggests that the deep-sea may be a sink for litter as the amount of human garbage and plastics continues to rapidly increase at the seabed.
• The value of predictive modelling in assessing species distribution patterns and figuring out how different populations may connect together over large distances was highlighted by several fascinating talks including by Dr. Kerry Howell and Dr. Ana Hilario.
• According to Dr. Chuck Fisher's plenary presentation, the impacts of the DeepWater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2009 has impacted coral communities at least 11km away from the well, and possibly up to 25km, which is further than they thought the oil would reach...
• Deep-water phosphate mining is a real and somewhat terrifying thing which involves dredging up the top c. 3m (1-6m) of seabed and taking it back to shore for processing.
• According to modelling work presented by Dr. Dan Jones (NOC), the NE Atlantic (all around the UK coasts) could face massive declines in biomass of most taxa by the end of the century if global warming continues at predicted rates.
• However, on the positive side, many countries and organisations are making real progress in establishing areas of ecological interest as a first step leading towards marine protected areas (MPAs) in the high seas.

And finally: An underwater volcano erupting around a survey ROV

There was loads more going on that I can't possibly hope to cover, but these were some of the things that I thought were particularly interesting. I'm sure I'll probably add to that list as all the information I've absorbed slowly filters into my brain! Anyway, I've got to repack all the stuff that has exploded out my suitcase before I check out and head to the South Island tomorrow for some wildlife spotting and a bit of relaxation before I have to face the flight home again for Christmas. Proper photographic updates will resume soon I promise!

Finally, thanks to everyone at the Deep-Sea Conference who made it such a good laugh, and I look forward to meeting all of you again in Portugal at DSBS 2015 if not before.

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 :)

Rain? Time to get the macro lens out!

Well, it’s a rainy grey day out here in the middle of the sea, which actually makes a really nice change from the sunshine (yes I’m Scottish, yes I miss rain!), but as much as I enjoy shooting in the rain, with everyone hiding inside on their laptops and the wildlife pretty subdued it seemed a good time to get out the macro lens and try some specimen shots.

 Even the fulmars looked fed up with the weather

In order to get decent quality images of the animals we’re collecting with the ROV and the boxcores, I brought along a little 10L aquarium tank, a big strip of black cotton to surround it with and a couple of sheets of 2mm plexiglass to act as a sort of clear shelf inside the tank to support the animals (thanks to Millie Sharkey at Bristol Uni for her advice on the setup!). We set it up tonight in one of the outdoor labs and immediately entered into a bitter battle against the constant condensation forming on the glass... Once the cold room empties out a bit I’ll need to try and grab a space in there, but I’ll need to wait for the science to get done first.

I’ve only got one flashgun with me, so unless I can find some other sort of torch or waterproof lamp, I’ll be going for the side-lit look!  Anyway, here’s a few first attempts:

  

 An antipatharian (black coral)

 

Close-up of the black coral polyps

The underside and mouth of a pencil urchin

 

Lophelia coral (polyps retracted)

So it’s an all right start I think! Some of these have had a bit of work done to them in Photoshop to remove reflections from the glass and particles from the water, but otherwise they’ve only had the usual contrast and sharpening. If anyone has any handy tips for improving the lighting on these though I'd be really grateful! Chances are we're only going to have the one light source, but we can probably build more or less anything we need.

Deep-Sea Science at the Outer Hebrides

So, after spending two years of my life working on the Isle of Lewis looking at fisheries bycatch I’m back in the Hebrides again doing deep-sea research. This time around we’re here for one week of a four week cruise investigating the effects of global climate change and ocean acidification on the cold-water coral Lophelia pertusa (yes, Scotland has its very own coral reefs!). Or at least, that’s what everyone else is studying – my interest in this cruise is to collect video transect data from the Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) and use that to look at how fish use the reefs and surrounding areas as habitat.

The James Cook docked in Glasgow

Looking out from the JC bridge deck down the Clyde

Sunset over the Hebrides

So far things have been going pretty well, and it's been crazy busy with collecting samples, hosting a BBC film crew and school group from Benecula and dealing with the constant stream of video files coming out of the ROV! We had a few teething problems with the ROV during the first couple of days of the cruise, but they seem to have been more or less sorted out and we’ve been able to conduct some good long dives for sample collection and filming plenty of video footage for me to go through when we’re all back on land! I can’t put up any of the underwater images as yet since they belong to the cruise, but we should be putting a few up on the official cruise blog some time soon. In the meantime, I can share some of the surface shots of the gear we’re using.

This is our ROV and the most important (and expensive) piece of gear we have. With this we're able to collect precise samples, film everything we see underwater and even conduct experiments on the seabed.

Recovering the box corer. This piece of kit goes down on a winch cable and activates when it hits the bottom forcing the scoops closed and (hopefully) bringing us back up a big box of mud!

We did some maintenance work today as well for one of the long-term monitoring stations out here. This is the team preparing to put everything back.

As far as the wildlife goes, it’s been fairly quiet around the ship so far with relatively few sightings (which is a bit surprising considering that the perfectly calm weather we’ve been having is ideal for whale and dolphin spotting). Still, we have seen a few common dolphins and were visited by a basking shark a couple of evenings ago which was very cool!

Basking shark off Mingulay

I’ve been experimenting with taking some video footage with the 7D too, and I’ve got a few nice clips which I’ll get up online when I get home. Sadly the internet connection out here is far too limited to allow any kind of video upload, but to be honest we’re pretty lucky to get anything at all so I’m not complaining. We’ve also got a new mascot on board which doesn’t seem to want to leave the ship and has been here for about 3 days...

Anyone recognise this pigeon? It's still on board...

Anyway, we’re heading offshore now so the next update will be from the middle of the Rockall Trough (that’s about 200 miles west of Scotland).

The last land we'll see for 3 weeks. Could definitely be worse!