Yesterday was a beautiful morning, but the weather was rough the night before. We had to move closer to shore because of the bad weather. This delayed our camera and respirometer recoveries, but we were able to do an otter trawl at 350 meters.
Here is a type of a medusa jellyfish.
These look similar to skate egg cases, but they are actually a catshark egg case. If you look closely at the second picture, you will be able to see the yolk sac inside attached to the catshark embryo. Again, this is similar to the skate egg casings that you saw in the earlier blogs. The catshark embryo will get its nutrition through the yolk sac. As soon as the catshark gets all the nutrients from the yolk sac and empties it, the catshark will leave the egg case.
Here is a skate egg case. Do you see the difference in the size and shape between the skate egg case and the catshark egg case? The skate egg case has little horns that come out at the ends and the catshark egg case does not. The catshark egg case is sometimes called the mermaid's purse.
John dissected a hagfish. Can you see the small yellow eggs? The hagfish had over 15 eggs inside.
Here is another type of crab that was caught in this 350 meter trawl.
After the weather calmed down a little, we headed to the camera station to recover it. This camera was deployed to 2000 meters. It was recovered safely, and the camera took many amazing pictures of the deep-sea creatures at 2000 meters.
In this picture there are rat tails, a flat nose codling fish, and crabs.
In the bottom left corner, you will see a long white sea cucumber. The massive fish int he middle is another type of rat tail.
Look at all these crabs!!!! Doesn't it look like a rugby match?? =)
The respirometer was also safely recovered. It was a very successful deployment. All four chamber doors were closed upon recovery and there was rat tail in one of the chambers!!!! =) They have downloaded the data from the oxygen sensor and will analyze it.
Since we had lost a lot of time from the bad weather, our respirometer pit crew had to work fast to get it ready for another deployment that night. Everyone worked well together, and it was deployed to the new depth of 3000 meters. We have such a great team!! =)
After deploying the respirometer 2000 meters, it was time to deploy the camera to 3000 meters. The respirometer and camera will be retrieved tomorrow.
Again, because of the bad weather our trawl was pushed back. Instead of trawling in the early evening, we would now be trawling at 1:00 am. Since I'm such a night owl, I volunteered to stay up to watch the trawl until 6:00 am. Jason also stayed up to watch and monitor the computer. It's been a very long time since I've stayed up for 24 hours straight. Boy was I exhausted after the trawl came up in the morning!!
Many of us were tired yesterday.
=)
“This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0727135. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).”
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