 Day 3 – Transects and collections
August 28, 2010
Location: MidWater 1 site Today we stayed at the MW1 site because the winds further offshore were predicted to be too high for us to deploy the ROV. We took advantage of this day to get in lots of collections, check in on a rock outcrop we visit a few times per year, and conduct the monthly transects that are part of a long term time series. We conducted the transects at 100 meters depth intervals between 200 m and 1000 m. During transects, the ROV flies at a relatively constant speed and depth for 10 minutes at each depth interval. Because we have done these transects the same way for 17 years, we can use statistical analysis to compare the observations and see how the mesopelagic community changes over depth and time. We also collected more animals for Kim Reisenbichler’s respirometry work. The MRS, deployed on the first day (see log from day 1) is still incubating, hanging on the mooring offshore. Kim also needs to collect some of the same animals so that he can run them in respirometer chambers in the lab. This will help him make comparisons to lab versus in-situ experiments. 
Bolinopsis is a lobate ctenophore collected for Kim’s respirometry experiments.
After completing the transects and collecting some midwater animals, we descended all the way to the bottom to try to find a rock outcrop that we’ve visited before. We found the outcrop and quickly found the animal we were looking for, a deep water octopod. This animal broods eggs by attaching them to rock and covering them with her body and arms, sort of like the way chickens sit on their eggs. However, we know little about how long deep-sea octopods will brood their young, or whether they will feed while brooding or die after the eggs hatch like shallow water octopods. We checked in on her, got some great video and frame grabs and will be back to see how long we can track her on our next expedition! 
Graneledone boreopacifica brooding eggs on an outcrop in Monterey Canyon.
—Susan von Thun
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Daily Expedition Logs
 Heading homeSeptember 1, 2010  A growing collectionAugust 31, 2010  Studying deep-sea squidAugust 30, 2010  Squids and ancient relativesAugust 29, 2010  Transects and collectionsAugust 28, 2010  A blustery dayAugust 27, 2010  Transit and JelliesAugust 26, 2010 Equipment
 R/V Western FlyerThe R/V Western Flyer is a small water-plane area twin hull (SWATH) oceanographic research vessel measuring 35.6 meters long and 16.2 meters wide. It was designed and constructed for MBARI to serve as the support vessel for ROV operations. Her missions include the Monterey Bay as well as extended cruises to Hawaii, Gulf of California, and the Pacific Northwest.
ROV Doc Ricketts is MBARI's next generation ROV. The system breaks new ground in providing an integrated unmanned submersible research platform, with many powerful features providing efficient, reliable and precise sampling and data collection in a wide range of missions.
The MRS conducts oxygen consumption rate measurements in situ, gauging the metabolism of animals without subjecting them to the stresses of transport to the surface. MRS has been modified to operate in deeper water with an expanded capacity, enabling respiration studies on animals that live deeper than 1250 meters.
Detritus samplers are large Plexiglas containers with lids that can be manipulated by the pilot of the ROV and gently closed once an organism is trapped inside.
The CTDO is mounted on the ROV and takes in situ measurements of environmental parameters such as conductivity, temperature, depth, and oxygen concentration.
This sampler acts like a vacuum cleaner sucking up samples and depositing them into one of the 12 buckets. Research Team
Bruce Robison's research is focused on the biology and ecology of deep-sea animals, particularly those that inhabit the oceanic water column. He pioneered the use of undersea vehicles for these studies and he led the first team of scientists trained as research submersible pilots. At MBARI, his research group has focused on the development of remotely operated vehicles as platforms for deep-sea science. His midwater research program is presently measuring the oxygen consumption rates of deep-living animals, and the ecological impacts of the declining oxygen content of the ocean's midwaters. Instead of bringing animals to the surface for these measurements and subjecting them to decompression, the measurements are made at depth using new instrumentation developed by MBARI's engineers. Related investigations include studies on the ecology, physiology, and behavior of fishes, squid, and a variety of gelatinous animals.
Kim's general area of interest is the study of midwater and deep sea animals. He has developed many tools and techniques to observe, manipulate, and collect these organisms, and to maintain the animals in the lab.
Rob studies the properties and organisms of the ocean's largest habitat, the midwater. His research group is learning more about the ecology of midwater organisms; their abundance and seasonal patterns, depth ranges and who eats whom. Rob enjoys watching mesopelagic animals with the HD (high definition) camera; animals that once would have come up as glop in a net can be seen to have delicate structure and complex behavior (e.g., squid inking or changing color, fish eyes that rotate to keep prey in sight, an amphipod carving up a pyrosome to make a home).
Kris works with the Midwater Ecology group, analyzing ROV video transects between 50 and 1,000 meters in depth to identify biological organisms from all taxonomic levels, most of which spend their entire lives in the oceanic water column. Kris started working at MBARI in 1996 after finishing her Master's at UC Santa Cruz. She's looking forward to returning to sea this month to collect video transects and search for deep-sea lobster larvae from the family Polychelidae.
Susan works in the MBARI video lab, where her primary responsibility is to watch video taken with MBARI's remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and make observations about the organisms, behaviors, equipment, and geological features that she sees. While annotating video, she's become adept at identifying numerous deep-sea organisms, specializing in midwater organisms. She works closely with the midwater ecology group and the bioluminescence lab to expand her knowledge of the fish, jellies, cephalopods, and other groups in the midwater.
Henk-Jan received his Ph.D in Ocean Ecosystems from the University of Groningen. Henk-Jan has developed an experimental program of both laboratory and in situ research that will chemically mark increments in the deposition of squid statoliths. Using the marks as temporal reference points, the pattern of deposition should allow him to determine the age of any squid.
Karen's research interests include evolution of pelagic life, phylogenetics of marine invertebrates, and mechanisms of speciation in the open ocean and the deep sea. Karen is a former MBARI graduate research assistant and is currently a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow at Scripps.
Meghan is a doctoral candidate at UC Santa Cruz in Dr. Steve Haddock's lab. Her research is focused on understanding the molecular biology and evolution of bioluminescence in a variety of deep-sea zooplankton including cephalopods, chaetognaths, and jellyfish.
Samuel is a graduate student at the University of Washington. His research uses DEIMOS, a deep-water acoustics package at the MARS observatory on the continental slope in Monterey Bay, California to describe the distribution and density of animals such as krill through the entire water column through time. His aim is to describe changing patterns in this density distribution using a variety of metrics and indicators derived from the raw data, with the aim of gaining a clearer picture of how this system behaves. |
