Midwater survey

Thursday 4th of February : first midwater survey for the AUV PICASSO. A few technical issues still : the camera doesn’t focus worth beans and there was a crimp in the fiber-optics cable so the communication with the vehicle came and went. Another biggish problem was that there was absolutely NOTHING in the midwater zone. Not even siphonophores, which had been relatively abundant in the other dives. During an hour and a half of dive we saw 1 siphonophore that we were unable to focus on and lots of puffs of squid ink from a squid that was off camera, during a period where we had lost contact and so couldn’t move. We did get to see a lot of marine snow though....

In the afternoon we did 2 plankton nets, one at 300 and one at 400, but they contained the same things as the surface ones. We did find a juvenile jellyfish which we think might be a stage 1 of Liriope tetraphylla, develloping into a stage 2. As it’s really not like any of the other jellyfish in the books we’ve decided to keep it and see if we can get it to devellop into an adult. I fed it a bit of detritus half it’s size (it’s only about 1mm across) and it gobbled it right up. It had nearly finished digesting it an hour later. That is more than can be said of the porcupine fish, who seems positively terrified of the clam bit we gave him and spt out the fish bit we offered him. He must not be starving yet.

Last day for us tomorrow. There will be a PICASSO dive in the morning, aroung 500m and down to the seafloor if there’s nothing in midwater. We will also have to pack the lab up and move out of the container so the MR-X1 robot team can move in and start diving on Saturday. We will be leaving all the equipment on board as the ship will be arriving at JAMSTEC on the 9th. We will need to take the fish and the jellyfish though. I will leave the boots and water clothes on board so have extra space in my luggage.

I will add the dive photos later, as I took them on Dhugal's camera.