By: Heather Judkins

One of the main goals for the DEEPEND team is to strengthen collaborations worldwide through our work.  On April 15th , Co-PI Heather Judkins will be heading out to sea aboard the R/V Falkor (too) from the NE coast of Brazil (Salvador) as part of an expedition exploring the deep sea in this unstudied area using nets, autonomous vehicles and an ROV down to 1200 m depth.  The international team returns to Fortaleza, Brazil on April 30th. The project, titled "Discovery in the Largest Frontier: Advanced imaging and genomics of open ocean animals" is led by Karen Osborn, an invertebrate expert at the Smithsonian Institution and Jan Hemmi, an animal behavior biologist at the University of Western Australia. The overall goal of this award is to accelerate the process of species discovery, classification, and documentation in the largest and least explored oceanic realm—the deep, open ocean or midwater column.  We will be using various genetic, imaging, and collection tools to process samples more efficiently while at sea, which is important as bringing everything back to labs is not as efficient when the team isn't in one spot to do the work post cruise.

This cruise is funded through an OceanShot award we received from the Ocean Policy Research Institute of which DEEPEND is a collaborator.  This is a three-year award and DEEPEND has been providing invertebrate samples from our Gulf of Mexico RESTORE II and Deep Sea Benefits cruises over the last year.  While onboard the Oceanshot cruise, Heather will be working with net deployment and retrieval as well as identifying the various invertebrates that are collected.  A fun part for her is that this cruise is designed for all things invertebrates!  Fish are also being collected of course, but inverts are the goal which is not a typical protocol for her!

You can view the live ROV streams while they are underway at the following site:
https://www.youtube.com/@SchmidtOcean/streams 

The cruise link has more information about the cruise plan and team if you're interested.
https://schmidtocean.org/cruises/ 

The Tulane University Biodiversity Research Institute (TUBRI), home to one of the world’s largest fish collections, has received more than 1,000 deep-sea specimens from the DEEPEND Consortium, bolstering Tulane’s role as a leader in marine biodiversity and conservation research.

Read the full story here....

DEEPEND students, researchers, and collaborators participating in a recent Deep Sea Benefits research cruise in the Gulf of Mexico. From Left: Jane Carrick (PhD student, URI), Nina Ramos (PhD student, FIU), Natalie Howard (PhD student, FAU), Dr. Heather Judkins (USF), Bianca Ruiz (MS student, NSU), Sidney Trimble, MS (Research Tech, NSU)

One of DEEPEND's greatest success stories to date is the training of graduate students as they complete master's and doctoral programs. DEEPEND research has supported 80 graduate students over the years (17 PhD, 63 MS) which has (to date) resulted in 33 publications with students as first authors. We would like to congratulate our recent graduates, highlight the work of current students, and welcome new students that have started this Fall! You can read more about the research of our current students here and our former students here.

Recent DEEPEND graduates, institution (advisor): subject
Claire de Noyo, MS, USF (Judkins): Trophic ecology of the hammerjaw, Omosudis lowii
Emma Schindler, MS, NSU (Sutton): Trophic ecology of pelagic eels
Juliet Tretler, MS, NSU (Sutton): Ecology of stromateoid fishes
Katie Lim, MS, NSU (Sutton): Trophic ecology of the longfin escolar
Natalie Howard, MS, FAU (Moore): Bigscale fishes of the deep-pelagic Gulf
Shannon Riley, MS, USF (Judkins): Cephalopod early life stages in the Gulf
Sidney Trimble, MS, NSU (Milligan): Carbon flux of a deep-sea hatchetfish
Travis Kirk, MS, NSU (Sutton): Trophic ecology of the black swallower

Current DEEPEND graduate students:
Bianca Ruiz, MS, NSU (Sutton): shoreward gradients of deep-pelagic fishes
Gwyn Loughman, MS, NSU (Frank): Spatiotemporal analysis of deep-sea shrimps
Haley Glasmann, Ph.D., FIU (Boswell): deep-pelagic acoustic sensing
Ian Areford, Ph.D., FIU (Boswell): deep scattering layer dynamics
Jacob Hack, MS, NSU (Kerstetter): comparing pelagic sampling gears
Keith Centeno, MS, NSU (Milligan): photophore morphometrics of a dragonfish 
Meta Hughes, MS, NSU (Milligan): modelled light intensity as a pelagic driver
Stormie Collins, Ph.D., FIU (Bracken-Grissom): shrimp genetics and bioluminescence
William Mastandrea, MS, NSU (Sutton): pelagic nekton as prey
Zach Strebeck, MS, NSU (Frank): Spatiotemporal analysis of deep-sea shrimps 
Zyan Brown, MS, NSU (Frank): effects of the DWHOS on krill

New DEEPEND graduate students starting this fall:
Alexander Travagliato, MS, NSU (Milligan): TBD
Alyssa Williams, MS, NSU (Sutton): trophic analysis of a deep-pelagic predator
Haley McCartney, PhD, USC (Romero): pelagic contamination
Lisa Rose-Mann, PhD, USF (Judkins): contamination and feeding of deep-sea squid
Lucille Turner, MS, USC (Romero): pelagic contamination
Natalie Howard, PhD, FAU (Moore): fish family Melamphaidae
Nina Ramos, PhD, FIU (Bracken-Grissom): using eDNA to investigate pelagic ecology
Paolo Soto, MS, NSU (Sutton): spatiotemporal distribution of mesopelagic fishes
Tate Abbott, MS, NSU (Sutton): hatchetfish abundance and vertical distribution

DEEPEND has been funded by a separate NOAA project called Deep-Sea Benefits. The Deep-Sea Benefits project will use monitoring to gather information that will increase our understanding of ecological interactions among fish and water column invertebrates, sea turtles, marine mammals, and mesophotic and deep benthic communities. This information can be used to design restoration actions and calculate the benefits from other restoration activities. For example, the information collected by Deep-Sea Benefits will be incorporated into the Active Management and Protection project activities, including informing other agencies responsible for protecting Gulf benthic habitat and resources about these protections. It will also help protect mesopelagic fish and invertebrate communities situated in the water column above them, thus contributing to protecting water column productivity—which helps support sea turtles, marine mammals, and mesophotic and deep benthic community productivity. These protections would also lead to conservation of the biodiversity inherent to these locations. The Deep-Sea Benefits project is layered—both figuratively and literally—on top of other restoration actions being taken to help restore for the injuries from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. (Above excerpt and image below taken from DSB1 cruise blog by Ian Zink).

DEEPEND is currently at sea for the second Deep-Sea Benefits cruise from August 19-September 1, 2025. We will continue surveying the slope in three different areas of the northern Gulf and recording acoustic data throughout. This second cruise will incorporate two new technologies including a benthic lander and a high throughput environmental DNA (eDNA) sampler. The benthic lander will be outfitted with acoustic sensors, environmental sensors, and a camera to record images and videos. You can learn a lot more about the benthic lander on our cruise blog here. The eDNA sampler will be used to collect DNA from the environment that can then be barcoded to inform us about what species have been in the area. This information will be compared with what we collect in the trawl and data we collect with our shipboard acoustic transducers. An upcoming cruise blog will go into more detail about the eDNA sampler soon so be sure to visit our cruise blog page and subscribe!