 Day 3: Some amazing organisms
October 24, 2012
Before talking about today's double-dive day, we wanted to share some of the images from last night following the return of the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to the surface. Once the ROV gets back to the Western Flyer, there is an organized frenzy of activity as we remove all the samples from the ROV and get them into the wet lab for processing. 
The "organized frenzy" of post-dive sample processing.
We recovered the trawl around 9:30 p.m. and brought that back to the lab for processing as well. Henk-Jan Hoving launched the camera again and recovered it this morning at 5:45 a.m. 
Kris Walz and Rob Sherlock sort through the night's trawl.
At 6:30 a.m. we started our first dive today in relatively shallow waters and then headed over to the Midwater Respirometry System (MRS) mooring to pick the MRS up. We returned to the ship with the MRS, and Kim Reisenbichler removed the animals to continue working on them in the shipboard lab. We then returned the ROV to the ocean for our second dive of the day. We saw some amazing organisms today, and some surprises. Taonius is always entertaining to watch—we took some video and let this animal swim away. We found Octopoteuthis with a fascinating circle of spermatangia on her back. Once this female is ready, she will fertilize her eggs from the sperm contained in these spermatangia. And then we found a ctenophore—Lampocteis—a beautiful red lobate ctenophore that was being eaten by Aegina—a narcomedusa jelly. 
Taonius borealis.
Octopoteuthis deletron.
A red lobate ctenophore Lampocteis being eaten by the narcomedusa jelly Aegina.
—George Matsumoto
|
Logbook
Equipment
 R/V Western FlyerThe R/V Western Flyer is a small water-plane area twin hull (SWATH) oceanographic research vessel measuring 35.6 meters long and 16.2 meters wide. It was designed and constructed for MBARI to serve as the support vessel for ROV operations. Her missions include the Monterey Bay as well as extended cruises to Hawaii, the Gulf of California, and the Pacific Northwest.
ROV Doc Ricketts is MBARI's next generation ROV. The system breaks new ground in providing an integrated unmanned submersible research platform, with many powerful features providing efficient, reliable, and precise sampling and data collection in a wide range of missions.
The MRS conducts oxygen consumption rate measurements in situ gauging the metabolism of animals without subjecting them to the stresses of transport to the surface. The MRS has been modified to operate in deeper water with an expanded capacity, enabling respiration studies on animals that live deeper than 1,250 meters.
Detritus samplers are large plexiglass containers with lids that can be controlled by the pilot of the ROV and gently closed once an organism is trapped inside.
The CTDO is mounted on the ROV and takes in situ measurements of environmental parameters such as conductivity, temperature, depth, and oxygen concentration.
This sampler acts like a vacuum cleaner sucking up samples and depositing them into one of the 12 buckets. Research Team
Bruce Robison's research is focused on the biology and ecology of deep-sea animals, particularly those that inhabit the oceanic water column. He pioneered the use of undersea vehicles for these studies, leading the first team of scientists trained as research submersible pilots. At MBARI, his research group has focused on the development of remotely operated vehicles as platforms for deep-sea science.
Kim's general area of interest is the study of midwater and deep-sea animals. He has developed many tools and techniques to observe, manipulate, and collect these organisms, and to maintain the animals in the lab.
Rob is interested in the ecology of midwater invertebrates. He has worked in the Robison lab and been involved with the Midwater Time Series since he came to MBARI in 1996, identifying and quantifying mesopelagic animals and the changes in that community over time and depth and relative to other physical factors.
George works in the fields of research and education. As an education specialist, George is involved in several different projects including coordinating MBARI's summer internship program and seminar series and fostering links between MBARI and other partners. As a researcher, George is interested in the ecology of a wide variety of open-ocean and deep-sea gelatinous organisms, as well as the functional morphology, natural history, and behavior of pelagic and benthic organisms.
Kris works with the midwater ecology group, analyzing ROV video transects between 50 and 1,000 meters in depth to identify biological organisms from all taxonomic levels, most of which spend their entire lives in the oceanic water column. Kris started working at MBARI in 1996 after finishing her master's degree at University of California, Santa Cruz. She's looking forward to returning to sea this month to collect video transects and search for deep-sea lobster larvae from the family Polychelidae.
Henk-Jan is a postdoc in the midwater ecology group of Bruce Robison, investigating the life history strategies of pelagic cephalopods. Cephalopods have one reproductive cycle after which they die. Henk-Jan is interested in how long deep-sea cephalopods live, and how different species shape their reproductive strategies to optimize their single reproductive event.
Bret is an aquarist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium where his job is to highlight and display a wide variety of marine organisms by providing the best possible conditions for each individual in captivity. Bret specializes in tropical systems and cephalopods.
Alicia is an aquarist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where she specializes in the care and display of cephalopods and jellies. She is also a graduate student at Moss Landing Marine Labs, where she is focusing on ontogenetic changes in the ecology and morphology of midwater cephalopods.
Paul is a curator of Husbandry Operations at the Monterey Bay Aquarium where he manages husbandry staff and live exhibits. He is currently part of the team developing the aquarium's next temporary gallery that will focus solely on cephalopods. With support from MBARI cruises in 2012 and 2013, this team will attempt to keep midwater cephalopods alive and on public exhibit for the first time.
Chris has been an aquarist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium for two years now. His focus is mainly on the husbandry and rearing of syngnathids—the family of fish that includes seahorses, pipefishes, and leafy and weedy sea dragons—though he also works with jellyfish and cephalopods. |
