Studying the animals in the deep sea within their natural habitat is very difficult. It often requires sophisticated instruments or equipment and scientists have to be careful to make sure that they don’t disturb the animals they are studying. During the DEEPEND cruises, we use sound to study how animals move through the ocean and the daily movement patterns as they go up and down from the surface at night to the deep sea during the day.  Using sonars, we can create a picture of where the animals are by measuring how much sound they reflect. While this gives scientists a broad picture of where the animals are, it does not provide enough detail to look at the individuals within the layers.

During this cruise, we have been using a new tool to study fish and invertebrates down in the depths of the ocean. We have attached an autonomous sonar (WBAT- WideBand Autonomous Transceiver) on to the MOCNESS (see photo above) to look at the animals that are near the net. This new sonar provides much higher resolution data at small scales, kind of like an underwater magnifying glass.  With this new instrument we can look at the individuals that are being collected by the MOCNESS and then compare this back to what we see on the ship’s sonar. So far we have noticed that the animals do not seem to avoid the net as we expected they would.

This is my first research cruise in over ten years, and I am quite excited by the great opportunity.  I once went out to sea fairly routinely when I worked at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution (HBOI), but the goals were much different then. This time for DEEPEND, we focus on the pelagic mid water column organisms in the Gulf of Mexico, which remains a fairly new habitat for me to explore.
 
My role for DEEPEND on this DP05 cruise is to ensure proper collection of new bacterioplankton samples from Gulf of Mexico seawater at various depths.  I am basically following the same procedures as past cruises for consistency.
 
The main instrument for collecting water is the CTD (conductivity, temperature, and depth) which is loaded with a rosette (circular arrangement) of twelve Niskin bottles that can each hold 12 L. These traditional aquatic water collectors close at precise depths which I can control from the ship. R/V Point Sur crew member, Marshall Karmanec, helped get me accustomed to running and deploying the CTD on this cruise. With the controls, I can designate where and when bottles are opened at specific depths. Once the bottles are filled and back on deck, I am able to drain 4-5 L of seawater and bring them into the lab.  I share a filtering station corner of the ship’s lab with FWC/USF technician Tess Rivenbark.  While most of the other DEEPEND scientists are identifying charismatic deepwater megafauna, I filter marine microbiomes onto special sterile 0.45 micron filters. “Sterile” is the operative word here, since the lab is not the optimal place for traditional “microbiology” methods. Essentially I am preserving the communities on the filter by careful handling, freezing and recording, so they can all be brought back intact to my molecular lab at the NSU Oceanographic Center for DNA extractions and sequencing that will eventually illuminate the distribution and dynamics bacterioplankton in much greater detail.
 
The CTD also measures where the very important oxygen minimum and chlorophyll maximum zones occur vertically within the water column.  These zones represent important parameters for oceanographic work since they can delimit where food chains begin or end, where maximum photosynthesis (the production of oxygen from cyanobacteria) happens, and we also have found distinct microbial communities (also known as “microbiomes”) associated with each zone. With DEEPEND postdoctoral scientist Cole Easson, we have been characterizing these microbiomes from past cruises, and our current results point to significant depth stratification of microbiomes in DEEPEND Year 1 data, which among other interesting findings will be submitted in a forthcoming manuscript.  This year 3 sampling adds to the temporal dimension of the project and is also very exciting.

Hello everyone!

Well, our first day of sampling was a success! We managed to deploy the MOCNESS twice at Station B081 (check out our home page to follow the ship!). While retrieving the night trawl we saw a lot of bioluminescence in the water which turned out to be pyrosomes, Pyrosoma atlantica, seen in the picture below. Each pyrosome is a colony of animals called tunicates which related to sea squirts. They form a tube which can pump water to allow them to vertically migrate. The longest species of pyrosome can get up to 20 m in length! We also saw some flyingfish which were being chased and eaten by dolphins!

Today we continued on to B082 and completed two additional successful trawls. Below are some images from the team processing the catch.

Here several of us are emptying the codends and sorting the catch.

Once we've sorted the catch, our team of taxonomic experts identify each organism to species. From front to back we have Dr. Tracey Sutton, Nova Southeastern University who specializes in fish identification, Dr. Jon Moore, Florida Atlantic University who also specializes in fish identification, Dr. Tammy Frank, Nova Southeastern University who specialized in shrimp identification, and last but not least, Mike Vecchione, NOAA's National Systematics Lab specializes in squid identification.

Here, Laura Timm, PhD student at Florida International University takes the species identified by Dr. Frank and samples them to run genetic analyses back in her lab after the cruise.

Travis Richards (foreground) is a PhD student at Texas A&M Galveston whose research involves stable isotope analysis, however, on this cruise he is taking tissue samples for the fish genetics team with the help of NSU graduate student, Matthew Woodstock (middle). I'm at the end of the line in this picture measuring fish lengths.

Our DEEPEND mascot, Squirt, hangs out with us in the lab making sure we're doing our job! You'll see more of him this week on instagram - @deepend_gom

The acoustics team have detected some very large animals under the ship. They will be blogging all about their new gear and what they are "seeing" with sound later this week!

Thank you for following our blog and stay tuned for more!

April

Written by: Matt Woodstock – DEEPEND graduate student, Nova Southeastern University

Hello, my name is Matt Woodstock and I am a graduate student at Nova Southeastern University working with the DEEPEND Consortium. This is my first time on a research cruise and I wanted to share a bit of my experience so far. Our ship, the R/V Point Sur, is equipped with all the supplies we need to do our science.
 

 
Pictured here (Left to Right): Gray Lawson (Technician), Joe Lopez, Travis Richards, Laura Timm, Tracey Sutton, Jon Moore, and Rosanna Boyle

 My job aboard the ship is to help Travis Richards (PhD student at Texas A&M Galveston) pull tissue samples for genetic sequencing. An average day for us begins early in the morning, hauling nets in from the tow the night before. We sort through each sample, dividing the fishes, crustaceans, squids, and jellyfishes.

 
Pictured here (Left to Right): Tammy Frank, Tracey Sutton, Mike Vecchione

After being identified by our experts, the animals are measured, weighed, and organized so they can be sent to different labs that study each species. We are currently freezing animals for stable isotope analysis, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) analysis, and parasite analysis (my thesis study).

 A Red Velvet Whalefish, Barbourisia rufa, caught between 600-1000 m that was sampled for stable isotope and genetic sequencing

Three Helmet Jellyfish, Periphylla periphylla, caught in an oblique tow (0-1500 m) is a deep-sea bioluminescent jellyfish

Other animals are persevered and sent to several different labs for later studies. We do this twice a day (day and night) and observe differences in the distribution of animals on a diurnal cycle. Occasionally we will take a break from our sample processing to see anything cool happening on the deck. This morning, we saw the sunrise.