Trawler safely delivered to the Scilleys

Another quick blog - just to let you know that the trawler was safely delivered into the hands of the Scilley Isle lifeboat's hands this morning (see photo above). There was also a mad dash to mobile phones as we came within telephone range, and a longing look at land (the Scilleys are a beautiful group of islands).

I have been asked by the birders to mention the great shearwater sighting we had yesterday as we rescued the Crystal Sea - and it was a magnificent sight - gliding aerobatically and smoothly over the waves - it had even me, a non-birder, captivated. It's apparently a rare sight in these waters :o)

Also while en route yesterday evening, since there was no science to be done, we had a Trivial Persuit tournament Liverpool (POL) v Oban (SAMS) v the 'East Coast Posse' (Aberdeen). Despite there only being 6 of us versus 12 SAMS and 7 POL, we, the East Coast Posse won all the cheeses (see photographic proof to right). Ok, SAMS won the 1987 version of the game, and we won the 1990's version of the game. See, we do get to have some relaxation on the ship from time to time!

So today, we spent most of the day steaming back to Jones Bank to retrieve the last of the moorings (all safe and sound on board, despite having problems yesterday with the one on the bank being stuck in the mud), and now we're heading off to the shelf edge to track the internal waves and nutrients from the shelf edge (where the shallow UK shelf drops off into the 4000m abyss) to Jones Bank. The birders & I have high hopes of lots of birds and marine mammal sightings at the shelf edge, so we'll be up at the crack of dawn for a bonanza of top predators ;o)

The Scillies lifeboat towing the Crystal Sea to safety against the backdrop of the island of St Agnes

More trawler in strife!

You would have thought that the Crystal Sea had had more than enough of it's share of bad luck! But those poor crew-members of the Crystal Sea had yet more bad luck in store for them: this morning they managed to snag something in the propeller while towing on the flat (MS4) site and were left helpless floating on the sea. We were in the midst of trying to retrieve the moorings (after 3 weeks of data collection), when we heard their bad luck. So we've come to the rescue (rescue number 2!) & are now towing the somewhat limping Crystal Sea back to the Scilley Isles. And true to form, the common dolphins appeared in the wake of the trawler (do they smell out trouble? Or are the dolphins like the seabirds and prefer feeding off the fish from the trawlers nets than finding their own food? Andy Webb put it nicely by calling it 'fast food').
So here we are slowly towing the Crystal Sea and their two crew & the MRAG observer (Jim) to the safety of the Scilley Isles...
Keep checking the blog for the latest installment of the James Cook Celtic Sea adventure!

Darren (one of the cooks on the ship) pointing out the Crystal Sea being towed behind us

All action day!

Two posts in one day??? Well, today deserved a blog all to itself! This morning I lethargically forced myself out of my bed and tramped heavily up the stairs to the mess to find some breakfast & was delighted to behold through the window a beautiful mirror-calm sea! (I have no porthole in my cabin - it's a bit tomb-like to be truthful). Such calm conditions are so rare, especially so far off shore, so I quickly grabbed some toast, and dashed up to the the birdy 'opera boxes' hoping for some marine mammal action (my particular favourite marine mammals are harbour porpoises - which are one of the smallest species of cetacean (the name given to all whales, dolphins & porpoises), and are very difficult to see except in very calm conditions. They're the most abundant species of cetacean in UK waters). We did indeed see a few porpoises resting on the surface (logging) and swimming past, as well as a lot of birds - mainly following the trawler.

But this trawler was there because we'd asked it to come along to fish for us, and find out what fish are found in the areas we've been surveying (on the bank and off the bank). This is what Beth had been busy organising most of this trip - working out where we'd like them to fish and when, liasing both with the CFPO (Cornish Fishermen Producers Organisation) who were the ones who pursuaded the fishermen to go and fish for us (proven to be invaluable), and with the observers supplied by MRAG (Marine Resource Assessment Group). The observers are recording the species caught by the trawlers, and measuring the size of the fish for us. We've got two trawlers coming out: the Crystal Sea - who is trawling the seabed to see what fish are on the bottom to see if they match the photos on Inigo's seabed camera; and the Imogen - who is carrying out mid-water (pelagic) trawls to find out what fish we're seeing on the echosounder. Unfortunately, the Imogen has been delayed due to engine problems, but the Crystal Sea was out today trawling for us, with Jim the MRAG observer onboard. The first haul brought up 2 large conger eels (no surprise there!), some haddock, John Dory, boarfish...

The second trawl started as I was sitting in the opera boxes watching for birds and marine mammals, the Crystal Sea disappearing into the distance, trawling its nets. But soon there was a commotion - word had come in from the Crystal Sea that a french trawler had been hassling them - circling menacingly, and in the process, the french trawler had trawled up one of our moorings & cut it loose from the buoy that marked it's location. Thankfully the mooring also had an acoustic release (this is a device that we can communicate with via sound - in fact it sounds very much like a dolphin whistle - it can tell us how far away we are from the mooring, and on an acoustic command it releases the lander with the current profiler & my CPOD from the anchor so it can float to the surface). So we managed to retrieve the mooring complete with 3 weeks of current profiler data, to which the oceanographers collectively sighed with relief!

Meanwhile, the Crystal Sea tried to continue fishing while still being hassled by the french trawlermen - who were obviously trying to look threatening by shaking baguettes at the crew of the Crystal Sea - Beth & Inigo laughingly discovered whole baguettes floating in the french fisherman's wake. Eventually the Crystal Sea were left in peace to trawl, but unfortunately one of their crew had an accident and sliced off the tips of a few of his fingers (ouch). We got ready to go to their aid with Malcolm, our medic (see picture of the rescue boat ready to go), but instead we just had to wait for 20-25 minutes before the coastguard sent out the rescue helicopter from HMS Culdrose (pictured with the Crystal Sea below), and the crewman was winched up and flown off to hospital (quite a sight). The whole process was pretty quick & impressive!

HMS Culdrose to the rescue of the crewman of the Crystal Sea (photo by Mark Lewis)

We were all up on the deck or bridge watching the rescue - meanwhile, a small shark swam past (& incidentally a blue shark was seen off the stern of the ship last night) - you can tell I'm a biologist to get distracted by a small shark! And... just to top it off, as the rescue was coming to an end, a large school (or pod) of common dolphins appeared - surrounding the ship, and before long the dolphins were swimming and leaping alongside the ship - which put a big smile on everyone's face after quite a stressful day.

Common dolphin caught post-leap by Mark Lewis

Since then, the Crystal Sea has continued to trawl for us, happily finding lots of nephrops (more of the shrimp like the one shown in the previous blog in the sediment core), and a surprisingly wide variety of fish, and different fish on the bank than on the slope to off the bank - which is fascinating, and interesting. So far it looks as though we have the nephrops (shrimp) off the bank, flat fish on top of the bank (lemon sole, plaice, etc.), and John Dory, along with a number of other species on the bank slope.

So all in all, today felt a bit surreal!
...sending best wishes for the injured crewman of the Crystal Sea from us on the James Cook :o) Hope you're ok out there too Jim!

Catch-up blog: Ships = foraging hotspot

It’s been a lethargic few days, the birders frustrated by lack of birds (see the form for MS5 in the photo above from a few days ago), and when they did appear it was in the wake of the fishing trawlers crossing our bows leaving a stream of stuffed gannets and fulmars sitting on the surface burping (ok, maybe I embellish a little…). Even everyone on the ship has had a sleepy look about them, as if walking in a trance. But the weather has been improving day on day, and with the good weather, more sunfish (check out the two photos on the left), and a large school of mackerel tucked in around the back of the ship, clustered around the turbulence profiler. We watched them glinting in the sun for a few hours before the fishing rod came out, and before long Viv (pictured on the right below with some mackerel), Beth, Inigo, Susan & Romaine had caught 40 mackerel. The chef cooked them up for tea today… yummy :o)

As for the science, it’s been quite interesting to go and explore our new control site (MS5) – which was indeed much like we expected – no feeding birds and not a huge amount of fish. We’ve also done grab sampling of the sediment at the bottom of the sea to see how it changes from MS5, over the bank to MS4. Nick (our benthic animal expert from the University of Dublin) had a lot of fun sifting through the sand or mud digging out the creatures – there were some cool looking worms, and a lovely shrimp with a green head and bright pink body. Even Morten captured a nephrops (type of shrimp) in his core sample, which proceeded to dig a tunnel out of the sand in the core (see photo on the left). You could see the shrimp through the Perspex tube, shovelling sand along the tunnel and out onto the surface – nature in action :o) After taking sediment samples, it was back to the slope part of the bank (MS2) to carry out a 2nd 25 hour turbulence profile station – and with that, and the echosounder we were able to see the classic set-up of the internal waves: the deepening of the thermocline as the current speeds up off the bank, and then as the tidal current relaxes, the thermocline releases with a 30m change in the depth of the thermocline creating internal waves. It wasn’t as dramatic as the last springs (this is a much smaller spring tide than at the beginning of the survey), but it was still nice to watch.

So that’s the catch up blog – and I’ll stop there, because today’s adventures are another blog entirely… and will follow in only an hour or two…

Chasing pink dye

The last couple of days have been monotonous for the birders (very few birds & those seen are nearly exclusively gannets – check out Andy’s blog to get an idea of how they’re enjoying sitting looking at a blank sea). But elsewhere on the ship there is more excitement. We got a really nice clear porpoise click train on the last CPOD deployment (at MS3 – the bottom of the bank), meanwhile Inigo’s camera came up with two uneaten fish (these had gone down frozen), one fish skeleton, and a good sample of the amphipods (sea lice) that are devouring them (see picture above). These were only 6mm long, but some of the ones he’s seen on the camera look more like 5cm long (what with those & the massive conger eels, I think I’ll stay above water thank you!). Others took more simple pleasures – like working outside in the sun (see Matthew Palmer from POL (turbulence man) in the picture to the right).

But the most excitement was in the ‘pink dye team’: Mark Inall (SAMS), Claire Neil (University of Strathclyde) and John Beaton (SAMS). Like earlier in the cruise (see previous blog & picture above of Mark & Claire tracking the dye), the pink dye was injected with a long tube with a weight on the end, into the thermocline (the layer that forms between the warmer surface water and the colder bottom water). They then track its dispersion using the fluorometer (measures the amount of colour in the water column) on the scanfish (the CTD that goes up and down the water column towed behind the ship) – so they can track the dye both vertically and horizontally through space. They tracked the dye after 4 hours, 12 hours, 24 hours and 36 hours, grabbing snatches of sleep in-between. It actually moves with the tidal & wind currents quite a lot even before the dispersal occurs, which means it’s quite challenging to find, even with the drogue with a satellite transmitter on it so you can track the currents (it only gives a position once an hour – so it’s a bit of a guessing game between position updates!). Between Mark, Claire & John and the Captain, they seemed to have a lot of fun trying to calculate the exact position of the dye, and then getting the ship to travel through where they thought the dye would be. Captain Peter Sargeant (pictured right) seemed to enjoy this task immensely, probably a bit like solving the cryptic crosswords he has stashed on the bridge ;o) Anyway, between their combined efforts in predicting tidal & wind drift they were successful and managed to find & track its dispersal over the bank. I’m not sure what they discovered since they finished at 1am and are now tucked up in their cabins catching up on sleep (well except the Captain). Incidentally - you can't get a better captain in my book - Peter is calm, spry and nearly always smiling :o) We have a great crew on the ship.

Meanwhile there have been more CTDs, more ‘giants tights’ bongo samples of zooplankton (there looks like a lot less biomass of zooplankton at the new control site MS5 from early conversations with Beth this morning), more sediment cores… and a very interesting talk about the phytoplankton & bacterial communities that Keith Davidson’s team are investigating. I’ll try and talk about their work a bit more in the next blog. As to me – I’ve been working up some of the fish data to see if we can solve part of the mystery behind few benthic fish on Inigo’s lander, and few feeding birds. As far as I can see there are a lot of fish down there – but then I mainly look at mid-water fish on the echosounder – so I can’t say very much about the fish in the top 10m or on the bottom. So maybe the fish aren’t close enough to the surface for the birds (and not enough marine mammals to bring the fish to the surface in bait balls), and they are mainly mid-water fish rather than bottom fish. It will be interesting to see what the fishermen catch when they come along after us – whether they find benthic fish (like plaice, sole… which Inigo isn't seeing on his lander but we were expecting), and what fish species come up in the mid-water (pelagic) trawls. That starts on Monday, with Beth co-ordinating their fishing efforts having pored for many hours over the fish echograms to work out where they should fish so we can find out what we’re seeing on the fish echosounder.

Still a lot of fun activities ahead… but let’s hope for more birds & marine mammals to break up the birder monotony. And on that note, I will end with an apt picture of gannets flying into the sunset…

gannets flying into the sunset... (& I'm sure the birders would be happy if they didn't come back!)

'A whiff of a porpoise'

Every time the camera lander is deposited on the seabed to take photos, a C-POD is attached to listen for and record the clicks of porpoises and dolphins. So I’ve had a few deployments of the CPOD and each time I have sent the files we collected to Nick Tregenza who built the C-PODs (Chelonia Ltd.), and within hours he’d reply… ‘no animals’. Until yesterday! When Nick reported a ‘whiff of a porpoise’: three minutes of porpoise clicks – wooohooo! Meanwhile, Inigo found few fish in his photographs and wondered whether the porpoise had scared all the fish away.

So that was yesterday’s excitement (thanks Nick!)… that and a ‘muster drill’ – every so often we have to practice the emergency drill – what happens when the emergency alarm goes off. We all gather on the deck complete with warm clothes, woolly hats, and lifejackets. If we have to abandon ship we have assigned life rafts complete with immersion suits – like big waterproof duvets – that we have to don. Yesterday Claire & Chris had to demonstrate the donning of the immersion suits – see the photo to the left! More like a space suit than a sea outfit!!!

Meanwhile, the box circuit over the bank was repeated this time at neap tides – so round and round we go around the oval looking for birds and fish while the scanfish zig-zags up and down the water column measuring temperature and salinity. It looks like more fish, more widely distributed feeding gannets, but fewer feeding storm petrels from a first glance at the data. And certainly much smaller undulations of internal waves – nothing so dramatic as the spring tide internal waves. Not sure what all this means yet, but looking forward to finding out as we do the analysis.

We’ve just finished the neap box circuit, and taking more zooplankton samples, more measurements of the water column with the CTD, and more sediment cores. Talking of which, it’s very clay-like here at the bottom of the bank (we’re at MS3 at the moment), unlike the top which is loose sand. Morten (pictured on the right with his sediment cores) & Susan are collecting these samples – Morten is using the samples to look at the nitrogen cycle within the sediment. What is the nitrogen cycle? Well, nitrogen is an essential element in life – amongst others it is found in DNA and proteins, and luckily there is a lot of nitrogen around since the air we breathe is 78% nitrogen. However the nitrogen in the air is not in a readily usable form, so organisms (especially bacteria – they do have their uses!) have to process it (‘fix’) the nitrogen into a form that can be used by other living organisms. Some bacteria (especially in the ocean) reconvert the nitrogen compounds back into nitrogen gas & so complete the cycle. It’s a bit more complicated than that – I’d recommend reading the Wikipedia guide if you’re interested.

So, anyway, Morten is measuring the nitrogen cycle within the sediment by taking chunks of sediment and ‘incubating’ them (keeping the sediment with all its bacteria in a nice cold room at a similar temperature at which it would have been on the bottom of the sea, and measuring the nitrogen & nitrogen compounds released). He’s also measuring the oxygen in the sediment – since many bacteria need oxygen to live. Apparently here in this offshore turbulent water the oxygen layer depth is only 1cm (so only 1cm has significant levels of oxygen), whereas productive coastal areas have a much deeper oxygen layer – especially undisturbed areas. I think this means there isn’t much activity going on in the sediments here – the sediment bacteria process all the dead animals that should fall to the bottom - so maybe the dead organisms are being swept off elsewhere to settle & feed bacteria elsewhere… science is full of many mysteries… (which is what makes it fun!).

So, is it all work and no play on the ship? Not at all! There’s a library, a video room, a bar (which is well frequented), a gym and a sauna! Now I’ve not tried out the sauna yet, but yesterday I did finally venture to the gym, which isn’t badly equipped for a ship (see photo below)! But for now, I’m off to the bar ;o)

Inigo & Linda 'relaxing' in the gym

Fish madness

Half way point. Two weeks gone since we set food on the RRS James Cook, and two weeks until we get off the ship. This was celebrated last night with a long and fun game of trivial persuit (version 1987!!), along with a good dose of laughter.

So where are we in the plan? Yesterday we did our ‘box’ surveys (more like an oval) of the flat site. So towing the ‘scanfish’ temperature profiler through the water column while recording the fish acoustics & watching for seabirds. We had expected this site to be pretty dull, predicting few fish and little feeding activity (expecting more productivity on the bank than off it). However, it was a fish hotspot (we saw sandeels at the surface at night from the back of the ship) and the day was filled with diving feeding gannets – which is a sight to behold… the gannets hover high up in the sky looking down at the sea, spot a fish, tuck up their wings and plunge beak first into the sea (looks painful).

Despite having more fish & feeding activity than we hypothesised… ahah, a new theory reveals itself… Mark Inall’s drogue (‘underwater parachute used to track currents’) showed that the combination of southerly winds & tidal flow resulted in a net flow from the Jones Bank off to the southeast – directly into the waters where we had stationed our ‘control’ flat site ‘MS4’. This means that the intense mixing that occurs over the edges of the bank is swept over this area, thus increasing productivity in the vicinity… well that’s our current theory. So slight change of plan… we’re going to do another station at the other side of the bank, and this time we theorise there won’t be many fish or feeding birds (the new ‘MS5’). Fun stuff! New discoveries daily :o) Well until this theory is dashed by new data (that’s science for you – it’s more fun when the sea reveals surprises!).

Talking of new discoveries… check out the 1.6m (5’ 3’’ to those imperial – basically my height!) conger eel captured on Inigo’s camera at MS4!!!! Whoa! One massive eel! In fact the majority of the bait had been devoured within a few hours by what look like very small amphipods (think of them as sea fleas) – which was very different from the other deployments on the bank (see previous blog). The conger eel came along to mop up the remains.

Check out this conger eel - the scale shown in the sand is a metre long - so this is a BIG eel!

Yesterday, one highlight of the day was the passing of the Queen Mary II cruise liner – which drew quite a crowd, including ‘muf’ Claire (‘enzyme queen’ who is looking at nutrient limitation for plankton. Plankton take up phosophorous, an essential element, differently dependent on whether there is a lot around or not much around – thus by using enzymes Claire can tell whether the plankton on/off the bank have received enough nutrients or not… why is this important? Well it tells us a bit about nutrient uptake where there is more or less turbulence. You’d expect them to be less nutrient-limited where there is more turbulent mixing. Hopefully I’ve got that right!). Anyway ‘muf’ Claire is pictured here with the Queen Mary in the palm of her hand (muf is the name of the chemicals she uses for her enzyme experiments just in case you were wondering).

Today we’ve been sitting in one spot carrying out turbulence profiling (the chimney brush or toilet brush as many of us call it) – back at the bank slope (MS2) measuring the turbulence through the water column but this time during the neap tides. And as we’d expect there is no internal wave activity at all with the tidal cycle (nothing visible on the fish echosounder anyway). Nice and predictable. Meanwhile we had some great sightings of a couple of sunfish who cruised around the ship flapping their fins & giving us great views (the photo doesn’t do it justice!). And we’re still here, with the profiler going up and down the water column every 5 minutes (operated manually by 3 or 4 people – painstaking!), and I sit here and watch the fish behaviour change as we go from day (more fish towards the bottom) to night (migrate to the surface).

To finish - here is a closer shot of the Queen Mary - for you Mom! (I know it's QMII not QMI but thought it might bring back some memories).