Day 9 – Jason on the bottom again!
Menu:
Breakfast
- Breakfast burritos with ginger salsa
- Malto meal
- Bacon and sausage patties
- fresh fruit
Lunch
- Crab melt
- Pork adobo
- Pork egg rolls
- Lentil soup
- Rice
- Breaded eggplant
- Veggie lasagna
- Salad bar
Dinner
- Roast chicken
- Garlic potatoes
- Rice
- Lentil soup
- Asparagus
- Salad bar
- Chocolate cake
Weather
Calm!
Position
147 6.80′ by 44 15.02′
We’re back in the water with Jason! Today, we’re investigating some more of the higher-altitude seamounts to fill in the upper gaps of our coral selection. Specifically, we’re going to Mongrel seamount, named by the fishermen because of its notoriously difficult terrain, and its ability to mangle equipment. This seamount is also very heavily fished, so we’re going to try to do some more photomosaic work in this location, to serve as a baseline for future restorative work in this area. It is amazing how bleak some of these seascapes look when they’ve been dredged – it’s really a complete change from the coral-covered scarps of some of the more underfished seamounts. We landed on a plain of basically pure rock and sediment – a lot of fish, but not really much else, save a few isidids and gorgonians here and there. We were able to pick up a second sea pen of a completely new species – no one has ever been able to bring one back to the surface before this trip! A “slurp” was also added to Jason recently – basically a big underwater vacuum connected to holding tanks. We’ve been trying to slurp off associates from corals we find, and also slurp some sediment samples. We managed to get quite a catch – some squat lobsters, some of the purple gorgonian coral that we found the other day – lots of good stuff! We also were able to see a black shark, at least 2 1/2 feet long swimming around the bottom last night, which is much bigger than any of the dogfish sharks we’ve seen in the past, so that was pretty exciting. The summit was reached by following an incredibly steep and narrow ridge up to around 800 or 850 meters; on the way we encountered some lost fishing equipment – the Mongrel stays true to its name! Stay tuned for some more HD photos!
December 24th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Adam – It must be exciting when the team realizes it has something that has not been documented before. Finding such specimens in heavily fished areas may suggest that some fishing trawlers may, over time, have hauled up these specimens and thrown them away.
Give the team and the crew our wishes for a happy Christmas. A hug to you.
Let us know if you see Santa Claus – rare since he is a North Pole denizen!!