On Thursday we headed back out to sea. This was going to be a short fishing cruise to collect samples of Ice Fish for the IcemiR project that is studying the evolution of microRNA control in Antarctic Fish. I have no idea what that means, but I was more than happy to help them catch fish.
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| Heading into some Brash Ice (<2M) |
After sailing for about a day we reached one of the fishing grounds. Hugo Deep is about 640m (2099 ft) deep so with the trawl dragging on the bottom we had about 1,500m (4,921ft) of cable pulling the net. Each cast took about 3 hours total so it was a lot of hurry up and wait. Once the net was on the back deck the science team went to work looking for samples. The goal was to keep the samples alive and return the unwanted by-catch as quick as possible to minimize impact.
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| Working on the back deck. |
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| Digging through the catch looking for target species. |
We got really lucky with the weather, we had pretty calm seas and it was in the mid 20's with 10-15kn wind. We were only on the back deck for about an hour at a time so it wasn't that bad.
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| Dr. Thomas Desvignes with his catch. |
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| Antarctic Ice Fish |
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| Skate |
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| Working in the aquarium room in |
On Friday night we fished from 6:00 PM to 6:20 AM, It was a long night on the back deck and helping with samples in the wet lab but being in good company made the experience enjoyable.
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| Dr. Desvignes and Dr. Alligood taking samples from an Ice Fish |
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| Dissecting an Ice Fish |
Palmer Station has science lectures on Tuesdays so in a few hours, I'll have a little more knowledge about the research.
After the science lecture on Ice Fish, we're watching SHARKNADO!!!! It's gonna be a wild night.
JNIII
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