Yesterday was an exciting science day! We anxiously awaited the return of the OTTER trawl and we were delighted to see some animals in our nets! Even though it is very cold, there are a lot of different organisms that can tolerate the depths of the Antarctic Ocean. Some examples of critters you may stumble across are seastars, anemones, fish with antifreeze proteins in their blood, little crustaceans and even some species of corals. In the image below, you can see Katie holding up a few of the seastars that we caught. Next, we were ready to put our camera called ‘SeaSled’ into the water. The wonderful thing about SeaSled is that we can see the images we are taking on our computer monitors at the surface at the same time that the camera is gliding over the ocean floor. We all piled into the Aft Control room where we had three computer monitors set up. The first computer monitor was designated to the crew members operating the cable that was attached to SeaSled, and the other two were for us to search for king crabs. We did have a king-crab sighting so we even dropped one of our lines of pots into the water. Part of our group looked a little chilly doing the finishing touches on the crab pots as puffy flakes of snow floated down on their heads!
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| Katie showing off some seastars |
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| Dan, Ally, and Maggie Amsler checking the crab pots |
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