The Search for Didemnum: Day 5 (Now THAT'S More Like It)

Thursday, October 15, 2009

We got off to a great start!

Clear water, proper bottom type, and great lighting. Today is a day to find didemnum!


With the vehicle fully functional after the previous day's repairs, Seth and Mike began fishing in earnest.


We're no experts on identifying tunicates, but we had no problem finding spectacular examples of sea life amongst the volumes of images that Odyssey brought back.

This is a sunflower sea star.


A skate...


A flounder, doing a good job of blending in...


A tiny solaster (literally, a sun star)...


After taking a few thousand pictures, we decided to seek out more rocky bottomed waters by moving further east.

Our recovery was complicated by the rocking of the boat, but as a team we are getting used to handling the swinging vehicle.


(There were also some good pictures of the water column!)


Our second deployment went very smoothly.


Unfortunately, the water was far more turbid in our second area of operation. Sponges, anemones, and redfish dominated the images.


The sponges look like potatoes in these images.


Although beautiful to look at, anemones are not what we are after.


As the light faded, we made our last recovery for the week and prepared to head back.


We had pictures of too many starfish to count, in all shapes and sizes.


This one was hanging out inside a mussel shell. I can't tell if it's eating or just resting.


There were also quite a few crabs, hermit crabs, and sunflower sea stars.