MOCNESS

February 2, 2019 (Note: this is #26 in a series of posts describing my NSF-sponsored fieldwork in Antarctica aboard the Laurence M. Gould)  

A big old pile of nets in the aquarium room!

Last night and today we did our last night/day pair of depth-stratified net tows (see my earlier post about the MOCNESS). The image above shows a 5-gallon bucket filled with the contents of a deep net sample (750-1000 m). The red and pink shapes are jellyfish (Atolla and Periphylla), three of them intact and one broken to pieces during the sampling. The orange things toward the upper right that look like a pair of eyes are an unusually large form of ostracod crustaceans (Gigantocyprhis). From these tows, it looks like most of the copepods were pretty deep at this station…around 300 m…deeper than I sometimes sample. They can’t hide from me!

Since these were our last tows, the lab group took apart the nets after we were done, and piled them up in the aquarium room. We’re starting to clean things up, pack away bits of gear and plan out our last days in the field.