Introduction

Diary

Participants

 

R/V Pelagia Cruise HERMIONE /CoralFISH
	Diary overview
Thursday, 22 October
16:05 - I am in the CTD lab. Looking out the porthole ahead of me there is little reference of our location or direction other than the angle of the rolling waves, and the haze of sun peeking through the clouds. On my laptop screen however, I have quite a different sense of orientation. Fledermaus is running with a colourful 3D picture of the seafloor, which stretches out 900m beneath us. A second laptop beside me is hooked up to a GPS and is mapping our position and the track of the ship as we cross over a prominent feature rising up from the seabed: Theresa mound. It is about 100m tall and below in the dry lab, Marc and Bob and a few other by-standers are checking her out! They are watching video images that are currently being collected by the hopper camera, 800m beneath the waves.     Over the past few days, a lot of hard work was put into trying to get the online video working with the usual deep-sea cable. After a few failed attempts due to suspected broken wires in the cable, today Bob managed to get the system working on the CTD cable. The images from the hopper can be used in a variety of ways. It can be used for habitat-mapping purposes to determine the primary facies of the survey track, we can see how much live coral and coral rubble is where, describe the macrofauna assemblage of the area, or, importantly for Coralfish, estimate fish abundance.   The video diary also started today. We will try and take a few nice clips to edit into a little film about this research cruise. I visited Rachel in the container earlier, and filmed the Lophelia in the incubation chambers which were collected from last night's boxcore from Galway mound. They were doing well; the polyps were out, although some oxygen-deprived black corals from the same boxcore apparently didn't make it through the night. The hopper is up now, and on deck preparations are being made to take a boxcore before dinner. The Albex and Aberdeen landers that were collected today will be deployed again after dinner if all goes according to plan.   19:00 - The boxcore from the plane to the East of Galway mound yielded a mammoth overflowing pile of mud with a sprinkling of coral rubble on top. The top layer was sieved but the emptying of the sticky clay-filled barrel led to an impromptu artistic pottery session. Nanne, Inge, Tom, James and Henko lined up the skulls, faces and trophies they had created along the ship's starboard barrier, with a backdrop of the dark sea. Thalia Watmough