Beyond the Surface: The Power of DEEPEND Collaborations

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/