Our first stop!

This area is a deep water coral reef on the upper continental slope dominated by Lophilia species (a deep sea coral).  We explored this area briefly last year to investigate interactions between the deep scattering layer and the benthic community.  This year, we are visiting this site twice to continue exploration with our first MOC deployment and retrieval happening last night.

This is our most shallow site with a bottom depth of 450 m and we towed the MOC10 downslope heading deeper to a depth of 402 m as to not disturb any benthic communities.  This was a night trawl so we expected many deeper-living animals coming to the epipelagic zone (0-200 m) as there is a nightly vertical migration of animals towards the surface to feed under the cover of darkness.

Yeehaw!  Almost time to shove off on our next DEEPEND/RESTORE cruise which will set sail tonight just after midnight on the R/V Point Sur.  The team is busy stowing gear, repairing holes in nets, and making sure we have everything we need for the next 12 days.  We will be deploying the MOCNESS net system as we have on past cruises and will be getting to out our first station tomorrow afternoon.  We will be posting blogs throughout our journey so stay tuned!

Cheers- Heather J

R/V Point Sur, docked in Gulfport, MS (photo: L. Rose-Mann)

Hi Everyone!

We are heading back to the dock today and can't believe the trip is almost over!  All we have left is to enter data, clean the nets, clean and pack everything in the lab and disassemble the acoustics equipment- all by 8 am tomorrow morning!  This post is all about the animals as we wanted to share just a few images of the amazing creatures we have collected during this trip.  

Hi Folks,

My name is Jon Moore and I am a professor of biology at Florida Atlantic University’s Wilkes Honors College. While I serve as a fish biologist for the DEEPEND project during this cruise, I have always had an interest in other wildlife and I was recently asked to keep records of sightings of various oceanic birds during this cruise. This data may help bird biologists and conservationists understand more about what birds are doing far offshore, where there are fewer observers to keep track of things.