Illuminating the Deep with Sound

Hi everyone!

My name is Ian Areford, and I’m a PhD student in Kevin Boswell’s Marine Ecology and Acoustics Lab at FIU. This is my first research cruise and after working with deep-sea organisms for the last 4 years it’s been amazing to not only see all the weird and wacky deep-sea creatures that come on board but also to experience being on a research vessel collecting all this data in real time. 

Caption: The command center

My primary role on the cruise has been assisting Kevin with all of the acoustics operations as well as helping with the deployments of the CTD and MOCNESS. The workhorse of the acoustics program is our pole-mounted “Pod,” which contains two transducers operating at 18 kHz and 38 kHz. This setup lets us view the behavioral patterns of these deep-pelagic organisms 24/7, which allows us to capture events such as diel vertical migration (DVM) in real time. Additionally, the live echograms from our transducers help inform where we position the MOCNESS during our “To-Yo” trawls, where we target specific acoustic scattering layers using the MOCNESS. 

Caption: The “Pod” with its 18 and 38 kHz transducers

Aside from our pole-mounted transducers, we have recently installed our WBAT, aka “The Wombat,” on the CTD cage with both sideways and downward-facing 120 kHz transducers. This allows us to get a more up-close and personal view of the organisms inhabiting the deep scatter layer (DSL) that our shipboard acoustics don’t provide. The hope is to be able to observe the behaviors of individual organisms and potentially classify them into different functional groups in order to investigate their distribution patterns. We’ve uploaded the first batch of data from our CTD drops today, and I can’t wait to see what we got. 

Caption: The CTD cage with the WBAT and its sideways and downward transducers

Anyways, the cruise has been an amazing experience, and I can’t wait to see what the rest of it brings.

- Ian