Research Cruise

Menu

Breakfast

• Cheddar and links scramble
• Fruit and yogurt
• Oatmeal

Lunch

• Beef Tacos
• Refried beans
• Rice
• Mexican spoon bread
• Chicken soup
• Salad bar

Dinner

• Beef tenderloin
• Yellowtail steaks
• Garlic mashed potatoes
• Rice
• Steamed broccoli
• Salad bar

Weather

Clear and sunny, clouds in the distance

Position

Dredge: Southern ridge of A1′s summit

We tried dredging today – back to the founding technology of oceanography!  The dredge is an oceanographer’s workhorse, and one of the original “Remotely Operated Vehicles”: it’s basically a large rectangular mouth that feeds into a net – this mouth is dragged across the seafloor, and collects anything that it comes across.  Although not the most ecologically friendly device, if used properly, it can have minimal impact and give a really good sense of the diversity present in a given area, because it gathers up everything it comes across.

Conversely, Jason is a very selective sampler; although we have videos of everything in front of her, Jason can only collect what she can grab and hold in her limited payload.  We used the dredge to help get some coral samples from depths that we haven’t harvested from- pinpointing exact depths weren’t really necessary (the depth error with a dredge can be quite large – up to 50 meters or so), and we were looking for a large bulk of samples.  Unfortunately, our workhorse wasn’t really working too hard…the first dredge came up with nothing save a lone sea star.  The second and third dredges came up with slightly more material, but our net was nowhere near filled.  So we did get some nice solitary corals, but overall, the dredge’s success was limited.

We’re hoping to go into full 24-hour operations with Jason starting bright and early at 6 AM tomorrow morning – this means we have 4 hour shifts and three groups, so 4 hours on and 8 hours off.  This is a much more typical way of running operations, or so I’m told…

The target is a seamount to the West of the Sisters, where the Southern Surveyor did a dredge last year.  This seamount has also been heavily fished, so we’ll approach it from the opposite face that the fishing trawlers typically approach it from, to hopefully find non-impacted sites.  We also want to run across the dredge mark, to see what it sampled, and the depth of the dredge.  That’s it for today; more on the dive tomorrow!

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 21st, 2008 at 12:06 am by Adam Subhas and is filed under General, marquee. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.