Introduction

Diary

Participants

 

R/V Pelagia Cruise HERMIONE /CoralFISH
	Diary overview
Wednesday, 21 October	An incubation chamber with a living black coral…
Today is Rachel's birthday and we were welcomed this morning at breakfast by balloons and lines of flags. Apparently the crew had needed some very feminine decorations in the past and these came to good use today. After breakfast, the "Aberdeen lander" was finally recovered, now that the waves had shrunk to an acceptable level. After examination, it turned out that everything had worked as it should have and only the battery of the sensors had died due to the long bottom-time. After a quick glance through the pictures, Thom said that there were loads of fishes on them "it is really busy down there". The morning coffee break was enlivened by some very nice gifts for Rachel and two beautiful pies for all after a more that decently sung birthday song. Today was mostly about boxcores.
These stamp a core out of the sea floor which is then sealed and hauled up to the ship, or at least, this is the plan. The first two boxcores came up without having triggered and a third came up closed, but it turned out to contain only water. Things were not looking good for the activities planned later today as the boxcoring was taking up more and more time. The next two boxcores came up with a flipped sample and these were sieved to collect all animals. At this point it was decided to move up to the big boxcore to see whether this would have a better result. At six o'clock in the afternoon, the big boxcore came back up and we went for dinner. When we came back, it was opened and it turned out to be a great sample, loads of live material to replace the samples lost when their tank turned over, and a good sample for respiration measurements of the top layer of the soil.  These respiration measurements are also performed with good samples of live corals and segments of the rubble below the coral with all the little animals included. In these incubations, the oxygen depletion of the water is measured to get an estimate of the animals' metabolism over time.   We were visited today by some common dolphins which came to play with the boat's waves, but they left in a hurry when we arrived on station. The ALBEX lander was also picked up today and the two cameras showed some really nice footage. Fishes, big crabs, sharks and even something looking a whole lot like an octopus (which turned out to be a monkfish, but it still looked good) were massing around the lander and were trying to get some of the mackerel attached to it. The HD camera, attached to the lander, turned out to have some focus problems and the lander was deployed again after dinner to try and get the camera to work properly before the year-long deployment soon, the "Aberdeen lander was also deployed again to get more footage from the deep. Nanne van Hoytema