Creatures from the deep

January 16 2019 (Note: this is #15 in a series of posts describing my NSF-sponsored fieldwork in Antarctica aboard the Laurence M. Gould).

Yesterday was relatively uneventful for me. We had some technical difficulties, so there wasn’t much sampling and sorting going on. Instead, I had time for my shipboard “hobbies”: tending to my experiment, catching up on data entry, reading graduate school applications for my department back home, and a brief trip to the gym.

Today was more exciting. Everything was working perfectly, so we were able to do vertically stratified sampling using a MOCNESS. Basically it’s a fancy set of nets that lets us sample different depths in the water column, like a stack of layers on a cake. We sorted through nets that sampled as deep as 1000 m (over half a mile down!). This was my first time sorting through deep samples, and it was really fun to explore the differences between each sample. I’ve pasted in a couple of my favorites…we got 4 small squid from the 200-300 m sample One of them even released some yellowish ink. The squid in the picture at the top was about the size of a dime. I also liked this little larval fish (Probably from family Paraleptidae). It was probably about a centimeter long (similar to the diameter of a dime), but very narrow and clear. The mouthparts look pretty fierce to me. Tomorrow we’ll go back to sampling our regular stations, which should mean more copepods for me!