Today is the last day of this research cruise. Our station is in the bay and we awoke to feeding whales surrounding the ship this morning. We will recover the MRS, put all our samples away, clean the lab, and head back to the beach. It has been a productive and interesting expedition for all the researchers, but we are looking …

Yesterday was an early start with a goal of retrieving the MRS from the 2,000 meter mooring. During the dive, we spotted a rare deep-sea jelly, Vampyrocrossota childressi and a very full black swallower, Chiasmodon niger.

Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History Postdoctoral Fellow Chan Lin My goal here is to collect amphipods, specifically from the genera Paraphronima, Cystisoma, Streetsia, Lanceola, and Scypholanceola. Each of those hyperiids has a distinct eye type. I am interested in studying how their vision works and how their visual world is represented in the brain. This is my first ever …

Our mission today was to fill and deploy the MRS at our deep mooring site (2,800 meters). Locating target animals is a challenge at this food-limited depth, but as the ROV flew closer to the seafloor we were able to successfully fill the chambers with a mysid shrimp, an eelpout, and several snailfishes. Respiration rates will be measured in the field over the next 48 hours, …