We are in the home stretch for this DEEPEND cruise with only one trawl left to process on our last day out here at sea.  This cruise has been just as productive as every other trip we have conducted with lots of hard work, long hours, and rewarding finds!  Here are some fun facts from our six cruises out here in the Gulf of Mexico:

We have found great diversity of species for the major taxa:  61 cephalopod species, 120 crustacean species and 627 fish species!  These are important numbers as in the past the midwater habitat was not considered a particularly diverse region.

Here are the winners for the most abundant animal in each category:

Most abundant fish:  Cyclothone sp.

Most abundant crustacean:  Euphausiids

Most abundant cephalopod:  Pterygioteuthis sp. (P. gemmata and P.giardi)

Hi everyone!

My name is Nina Pruzinsky. I am a graduate research assistant in Dr. Tracey Sutton’s Oceanic Ecology Lab at Nova Southeastern University. I defended my master’s thesis on the “Identification and spatiotemporal dynamics of tuna (Family: Scombridae; Tribe: Thunnini) early life stages in the oceanic Gulf of Mexico” in May and will continue working in Dr. Sutton’s lab post-graduation. In my thesis, I determined characteristics that differentiate juvenile tuna species, which have been previously poorly described, and then mapped the distributions of the most abundant species (little tunny, blackfin tuna, frigate tuna, and skipjack tuna) collected in the Gulf of Mexico from 2010-2011 and 2015-2017.

The DEEPEND program has provided the opportunities for collaboration in so many areas over the last four years!  In the education and outreach arena, we have been working with the Oregon Coast Aquarium (http://aquarium.org/education/oceanscape-network/) who highlights DEEPEND work and created our DEEPEND Vertical Distribution poster.  This collaboration was made possible by one of our EO team members, Ruth Musgrave, who oversees our K-6 education components.  We have worked with middle and high school teachers from Florida to Texas through our Teacher-At-Sea program and have remained in contact with many of them years after their at-sea experiences.  We have also collaborated through community efforts such as the St. Petersburg Science Festival where both DEEEPEND and C-Image consortia shared space to enlighten children and adults about our offshore projects through interactive games and question and answer sessions.

Assessing marine ecosystems health requires multiple tools to study in an integrative way environmental pollution and impacts across different biological levels. One of the main challenges is to link physical, chemical and biological components in large-scale ecosystems when little information is available. For example, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, contaminated the water column in the Gulf of Mexico from the epipelagic (0-200 m) to the mesopelagic (200 -1000) and bathypelagic (>1000 m) habitats; but assessment of the impact to the deep-pelagic GoM was hampered due to a lack of comprehensive data regarding diversity, abundance, distribution, and pollutants baseline-content of pelagic fauna. Several programs since the spill (e.g. DEEPEND Consortium) have improved our knowledge and understanding of the deep-pelagic ecosystem, the largest habitat in the Gulf of Mexico, and on Earth. However, information regarding the source, composition and inputs of chemical contaminants to deep pelagic fauna is still absent. Chemical contaminants can alter biological diversity and ecosystem functioning, therefore are key for linking long-term population dynamics and environmental stressors.