Day 9 R/V Point Sur

Getting up early really does have its benefits when you get to see a beautiful sunrise.



This morning the camera was deployed to 3000 m. It will be recovered tomorrow morning. Next, the respirometer was recovered. Unfortunately there weren’t any fish in the chambers. It was deployed about an hour later to 3000 m again.

Here’s a video of John grappling the respirometer. I was even allowed to control the A-Frame. :)



As I said in yesterday’s blog, the otter trawl net was almost completely destroyed in last night’s trawl. Today, Richie started sewing the net back together.



Hopefully we will be able to use the otter trawl tomorrow or on Thursday. For right now, the beam trawl will be used. Instead of having doors like the otter trawl, the beam trawl has a beam.



This trawl took 6 hours to go down 3000 m and back up. We caught many, many interesting sea creatures.

Here are some pictures of beautiful sea stars, flat and round sea cucumbers, a sea urchin with Dr. Drazen pointing to its mouth, a tube-like worm, and some snail like creatures.















As always, everyone worked hard getting all the fish dissected and the tissue samples taken.



John was nice enough to put a sea spider in a jar for me to take back to school for all of you. Thanks John!! :)





Tomorrow morning the beam trawl begins at 5:00. I better get to bed so I can wake up nice and early.

:)



“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).”