Antarctica (part 1)

Token penguin on top of an iceberg.
The boat in the background was my home for 26 days, the Yuzhmorgeologiya or Yuzmo as we fondly referred to it. It is 105 meters, by far the biggest ship I have worked on. There were 63 of us on board and not all of the bunks were filled.
What was I doing in Antarctica?
I got to participate in the Antarctic Marine Living Resource (AMLR) Program's annual krill survey. I was part of the zooplankton team. We had 101 stations to sample during the survey, two were dropped due to weather. Sampling was done around the clock. I had the night shift, which I actually really enjoyed. At night zooplankton migrate closer to the surface so the catch could be more diverse than during the day, plus I was always awake for sunrise and sunset which was great when it wasn't overcast.
The photo below is a regular size petri dish with a variety of common critters that we saw.
Some of the things we caught as seen under the microscope.....
This is a siphonophore. photo by Maria Paz Andrade Martinez. They form chains and are something like firm jello to touch.
An amphipod, they have shrimp like body armor, sort of the insects of the sea. The petri dish photo above has several other species of amphipod in it (Vibrilia sp., Themisto sp.). We identified this one as Gnathiphimedia sexdentata with the guide books we had, some are going to be sent to an expert to confim the id. We only caught it in one haul, but there were many of them.
Chaetognath! These guys are predators, this photo only shows its head and a small part of the body. Their bodies are perfectly clear and their jaws are huge. photo by Maria Paz Andrade MartinezCheck out those fangs, light brown, and all the jaw structure. I am very happy to be larger than they are. photo by Ryan Driscoll
Baby squid. I know you are all thinking, "that is the cutest cephalopod I have ever seen". photo by Maria Paz Andrade Martinez
photo by Maria Paz Andrade Martinez
This is a copepod and a big one at that. Most of them don't have as much color as this one.
This year turned out to be an odd year for zooplankton, according to those that know about these sorts of things. There were a lot of salps. Salps are another gelatinous animal that forms chains and filter sea water. The red dot is the nucleus the rest of the body is clear. Are you catching the theme?We caught a lot of them in the net, see below.
Tony is happily sorting through all the salps to look for any krill hiding among them. Thanks Tony! This was the largest catch we had over the whole survey. I am thankful for subsampling.Jasmine, Joelle, and Nicolas preparing to eat a salp.
I joined the International Salp Suckers Society. They are salty, and really cold neither of which should have come as a surprise. But the cold part really got me. I could feel it sliding down my throat and then it took a while for my throat to warm up again.
The net we use is shown below. The mesh is really fine to capture all the little critters. On the front is the sled that helps drive the net down. There is a flow meter attached to measure the amount of water filtered.
From time to time we would get a myctophid (small fish that migrate up and down following isolumes, light levels, and have many photophores). We also caught larval fish my two favorites are shown below. The first is an ice fish. The pectoral fins are so large they have the look of a dragon:This next photo is just to show how clear the body tissue is, you can see the back of its eye from the bottom of the jaw.This is a Harpagifer sp. larvae. I think they are pretty cute, big blue eyes and lots of yellow and black pigment spots.
Every once in a while we would catch some krill.Krill are very similar to shrimp in look. They are the primary food source for many of the predators in Antarctica, whales, seals, penguins. Joelle and I also discovered that they are good for short range water fights. All those legs trap water, so when you pick them up and they continue to try to swim away = instant water flinger. It is important to keep yourself entertained as you sort through hauls.
More later