Day 8 R/V Point Sur

It was another beautiful morning.





Last night, the otter trawl net got damaged during the 2000 m trawl. Jack worked on the net during the day to have it ready for the 3000m trawl for tonight.





The respirometer was recovered this morning. Do you remember how the respirometer is brought in closer to the ship? In this video, John explains how to grapple. Tomorrow I will put up a video of John actually grappling the respirometer.



The respirometer was released about an hour later. Unfortunately there weren’t any fish in any of the chambers. Before the respirometer could be deployed again, John had to work on the battery and solder the wires together. The respirometer was deployed to 3000 m. Hopefully we will have fish in the chambers tomorrow.





The camera was also recovered today. It was deployed to 2000 m yesterday. The pictures were awesome!! Here are some of them. Don't forget that you can always enlarge the photo by clicking on it.

In this photo you will see a king crab (it’s huge!!), rat tail (white), morid fish, and some brittle stars.



I love this one. It has an octopus coming in to check out the bait. Doesn’t it look so cool?? There are also a couple of rat tails and a couple of fighting crabs.



I really liked this one too because it shows the octopus moving away from the bait. I was so excited to see these pictures.



This photo is really cool, too. It has the fighting crabs again, but also a giant rat tail (white), a long sea cucumber, and a sea star that is climbing on the bait.



These next two photos are pretty amazing with the skate swimming through.





The otter trawl was to 3000 m. It took about 3 hours and 20 min. to reach the bottom. Then it was trawling on the bottom of the sea floor for about an hour. It took about a little more than 2 hours for the trawl to resurface. Unfortunately, more than half of the net broke off. There were some fish that were caught on the net that didn’t break off.

Here is the vampire squid that was caught. Can you see the beak? Look at that eye! You can also see its little fins.









This is a huge sea spider.



Tonight’s moon was absolutely amazing. I tried to get a good shot of it, but none of them came out. Just take my word for it, beautiful! Tomorrow we will be deploying the camera to 3000 m, recovering the respirometer & deploying it to another 3000 m, and doing a beam trawl to 3000 m.

:)



“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).”