Diary
	3 July
	1/2 July
	30 June
	28/29 June
	25-27 June
	24 June
	23 June
	22 June
Participants

 

R/V Pelagia Cruise HERMES
Sunday-Tuesday, 25-27 June 2006
We are now about half way through our cruise to explore the Rockall Bank deep coral mounds.  I am an invited scientist from the USA who works with a team to investigate similar deep coral systems along the US east coast and Gulf of Mexico.
This is a unique opportunity for me to compare sampling methods as well as the types of deep-sea coral ecosystems. First, the air and surface water temperatures here are much cooler than where I work, but the bottom waters are about the same as in my area.  The sea conditions here remind me of our study area off Cape Hatteras, a bit rough all of the time.  However, on this cruise so far conditions have been great.  The Pelagia team has many objectives, requiring a variety of sampling methods in depths from 450 to 600 m, sometimes deeper.  The dredges and box cores produce coral samples (alive and dead) plus other invertebrates for metabolic experiments (in special refrigerated tanks), culturing live specimens, documenting the fauna, genetic studies, and several projects on bacteria and viruses.  A towed video camera system has given us some very good views of the bottom habitats and associated animals.  I was especially looking for the fishes which is my area of study.  In appearance these coral banks look very much like the reef systems off the US coast, and the dominant coral species (Lophelia pertusa) is the same.  But most of the other animals are different. One of the most exciting and new things to me is the use of the benthic landers.  They remind me of landers sent to the moon or Mars, as they perch on the deep-sea bottom for as much as a year to record data and conduct experiments and are then remotely called to surface. These are very powerful tools, and we should use them more off the US.  Many of our objectives on both sides of the Atlantic are similar, with the ultimate goal of understanding these amazing, but poorly studied, habitats so that we may better manage and protect them.  We are spending some time on this cruise discussing future work and ways to collaborate in trans-Atlantic projects.  This exchange of ideas is very important and will lead to greater scientific productivity.   Steve W. Ross University of North Carolina at Wilmington and US Geological Survey