Introduction

Diary

Participants

 

R/V Pelagia Cruise HERMIONE /CoralFISH
	Diary overview
Tuesday, 3 November	Nanne with a halosaurid fish from 3000m depth...
We are still at the 3000m station south of Galicia Bank. To collect extra material for our foodweb studies we need tissue from larger bottom animals. So Gerard, our expedition leader, has put a trawl on the program for this day. So we are going to fish with our little 3m beamtrawl. The chances of getting a good catch are quite small as the winch we use proves to have only 3900m of steel cable. I instruct Bert to steam as slow as possible, as too much speed will drag the trawl from the bottom like a kite. After fishing for more than an hour the net is hauled in. The catch is pulled in by man power, and at first it seems that there is not much. But to our surprise we caught a real deepsea fish, 10 snails, 120 bivalve shells, 12 large tusk shells, sea-anemones, shrimps, and a few goose barnacles.
More than we dreamed of. We pick the animals out of the small heap of dropstones and man made litter. A close look at the stones shows that almost all have one or more brown pimpels of half a centimeter. These are strange Brachiopods with a chitineous shell. They belong to a group of animals that did very well in the far far past, but now this group is represented by only a few hundred of species. In the afternoon we pick up both landers. Both worked very well. The pictures of Thom show again and now even more undisputable, that rattail fish at 3000m depth attack and swallow the spinach bait eagerly. We will add the new evidence to the manuscript of which Rachel is the lead author and which we hope will be published soon. The algae experiment is also a success and probably will be our next subject for a publication. In the evening the scientific program has come to an end and the ship heads for Lisbon.   Marc Lavaleye