If you've previously read the post below, please re-read it after the edit I have made to it.

I made a number of grave errors in judgement and assumptions about things that were not the case.

We have, incidentally, picked up speed, so it looks like we will be back on "action stations" on the way into Mauritius starting around 1AM tonight, although CTD dips will only be to 1,500m to save time.

A few days ago now (27th September) we did a trawl on the Hydra Seamount between Madagascar and the southernmost islands of the Seychelles (the Farquhar Group) I mentioned in the previous post. To the left, you can see some of the catch - mainly a scorpaenid that I think is Setarches guentheri (we caught around about 200 of them), but if you look carefully, you'll see some other species. As I mentioned before, seamounts are expected to harbour unknown biodiversity, so it can be quite exciting to see what comes up. I don't think there was anything new, but one of the species didn't match what was in the book very well (the best ID I could give it was Paracallionymus costatus), so perhaps it is something new; I called it "cf. costatus" to indicate that someone should look at the specimens more carefully at a later date. It was rather a pretty fish with some surprisingly bright pink and yellow stripes on it, particularly on the head, and long filaments out of the top of its dorsal fin - many dragonets (Family Callionymidae) are very pretty fishes; they're fun to look at.

EDIT: Some of the more enthusiastic blog-watchers will have seen a long diatribe about data loss here, which I have removed. It turns out that in actual fact absolutely no data was lost, and it was a trail of bad assumptions by myself and insufficient speaking to the right people. Sometimes on a ship it just takes a while to get everything sorted out. It makes me extremely happy that we haven't lost any data and also very apologetic to those whose characters I may have maligned through the previous version of this post.

I did consider how this may make the entire cruise and the people on it look before posting, but in the heat of the moment (and I was pretty stirred up about it) I considered it (obviously retrospectively a bad call) a realistic reflection of the kind of problems one comes across on a cruise.

In my mind, the blog is supposed to be a fairly realistic visit into life on a cruise ship - and that means challenges as well as successes. I mean it as a personal account of this trip, not as an official account of the cruise (posts about lemurs, for example, have absolutely nothing to do with a cruise, yet they are interesting).

I guess that's the difference between being part of a team and being a "neutral third party". Journalists can get away with running in, writing what they see and getting out again - but if you're part of the team, you also have to consider how the other people in the team may react to what you write more than you might under other circumstances. You have to work with them again, and a ship is a very small, close-knit community!

These messages are posted by named individuals, not as an anonymous "official" account of the cruise. They're subject to errors, and are written and edited by the person that writes them, and are thus subject to that individual's foibles. For the most part, mine.

Lesson learnt? Speak to everyone, not just one person, or, even better, head to the top of the team and ask them to look into it before assuming that because team member x can't find something, it is gone and lost. Someone else may know where it is, and team member x may not have asked them.

However, I think, once stripped of the "blame", the previous message still contained some useful points for processing large trawl catches with a lot of unknown species, and I've added a couple of generally good pointers for life in general.

• Number coding only works if you keep the number code associated with the specimen up to and including its being preserved - this means that even if you do lose the sheet on which you were noting the correspondence between Fish 1 and an actual name (or the closest you can get to it) you can always refer it back to not only the specimen, but the trawl datasheet at the other end of the data chain (and everywhere in between), thus ensuring all data can be tied together. And always do your best to update the entire chain back again with species names as soon as you can.
  
• If you can do better than number coding, do so. Numbers are hard for people to remember, whereas taxon names or some kind of unique and meaningful description that would allow someone to look at a picture of something and go "yeah, that one". However, depending on how good people are at describing things, numbers may turn out to be a better bet.
• Your best bet of course is to have people around who are sufficiently familiar with fishes that numbers aren't needed - they can apply either the correct name straight away, or a good approximation of the name with a description to each recognisable taxon. These people are generally taxonomists/systematists, and there are far too few of them around. Some people spend so much of their life looking at fishes that they get this general background in fishes without necessarily being full (or even part) time taxonomists. Again, there are not that many of them.
• If there is a delay in processing data, tell people or put a note in the file that says it's still in progress.
• Communicate. All the time. I think we routinely assume that others have much more knowledge about a particular situation than they do. If you think it's important, tell someone else, rather than assuming they'll just see it or already know. Ask or tell more than one person as well.

In any case, I would like to again apologise to everyone for that version of the post, and to note that I also felt terrible about it - I was awake at the time, and should have personally checked the trawl sheet to make sure it was being updated with the names as they were determined, which I did not do, and coincidentally, spent most of the time whilst I was writing the previous post (and a long time afterwards) kicking myself over this. I've experienced data loss before, and it's something I vowed to myself then would never happen again.

Here are some pictures of some of the things we found:

Inger-Marie Beck with Antigonia hulleyi.







The trawl had quite a few Zeiform fishes in it.

We caught 17 tinselfishes (Xenolepidichthys dalglieshi), one of two species in the Family Grammicolepididae [If I have my Latin/Greek right, a rough translation of Xenolepidichthys is "strange-scaled fish"] on this trawl - which vindicates my identification of some post-larval fisheswhich we have caught in pelagic trawls several times as being in this family; I made the ID based on the unusually elongated scales. The smallest of the specimens we caught (see left) looks similar enough to the postlarvae that we caught previously that I can see the connection quite clearly; the fish change shape fairly drastically during adulthood.

To the left, you can see the shape of the adults alongside the juvenile pictured above (lying on the somewhat larger juvenile), and to the right, a macro photo of the unusual scales.




We also caught some Zenion. They're rather small, and the definitive character, anal fin rays, was painful to count as the fins just didn't want to stay out. They don't have a common name, but I've always thought they should be called "opal fish", as the body has the most amazing opalescent reflective patches when they catch the light just right. Trying to photograph it is decidedly tricky! The picture on the left has been heavily edited to try and get the colours to come out. Below, you can see the whole fish - this picture doesn't do these creatures any justice. I imagine they are absolutely stunning when swimming around.





This fish is Zenopsis conchifer. If you look at the large version of the picture (click on it) you should be able to see the large "bucklers" (enlarged scales) along the dorsal and anal fin bases.
These fish, common to most in the Order Zeiformes, have extremely protrusible mouths. They're apparently mainly ambush predators that sneak up to prey items very slowly, undulating their dorsal and anal fins before shooting out their mouths and vacuuming the tasty morsel into their capacious maws! We caught two other zeiform species, Allocyttus verrucosus and Cyttopsis rosea.

Hydra Seamount is about here.

We're currently finishing off the last station of the Madagascar leg, just south of the Farquhar Island group - the southernmost part of the Seychelles, northeast of Madagascar. We'll be going closer to one of the islands in about an hour or two to have a look at it. Sigbjørn is threatening to do another trawl there, after which, we'll turn south and steam to Mauritius - a lot of just plain sailing with no oceanographic surveying.

This will give me a chance to play "catch up" on a couple of items for the blog, which I will get to after I've had some sleep.

There is also a small possibility we'll do a line of stations into Mauritius to take some of the pressure off the next leg, which has a mere three days to do a very detailed survey around Mauritius - but it all depends on how kind the wind, currents and waves are to us, and what kind of speed we can make. We should arrive in Port St. Louis on the 1st.

Two things about the sea. It's very big. And it's very deep.

The expanse of the sea isn't something I'm going to talk about in this post. This post is all about depth!

On average, the sea is about 2km deep. That's 2,000m of water. On land, or in the air, 2,000m doesn't seem very far, or cause much of a change. But water is heavy. For each 10 meters you go down, the pressure increases by the earth's atmosphere again. So, at 2,000m you have (a bit more than, because seawater weighs more than 1kg per litre because of the salt in it) 200 atmospheres of pressure.

We survey as deeply as we can with the CTD - we're often in water over 4,000m deep, but we only have about 3,000m of wire on our CTD winch, which limits the depth to which we can send the CTD.

Yesterday night, I thought I'd try a fairly classic sort of experiment with the CTD that would illustrate the amounts of pressure we're talking about here. As one of the CTD casts during my shift was due to reach 3,000m, I thought I should find something and put it on the CTD and see what happens. Polystyrene cups are full of air - air that high pressure can squeeze out.

A friend of mine wondered what would happen to an apple- she thought that apples were kind of "foamy", but I suspected they were really pretty much solid and full of fluid; solids and fluids are more or less incompressible (at least compared to gases). So I attached an apple to the CTD too.
The enquiring mind of a scientist is unhappy to rely on conjecture when there is a chance to get some empirical evidence!

Henning made a cunning sample vessel out of a 2l plastic jar and tied it on, once he saw the ziplock bag I was planning to use; he said I'd get better results with a jar. The apple went in my ziplock contraption.

The apple made it back, but sadly, the first trial with the cups went missing... I guess the knots on the jar didn't hold!

So, we tried again, this time with more rope, more holes and a more cunning way of fastening things. Henning even made sure that the lid would stay on by threading string through there too.

Second time lucky!

Anyway, here are some fairly dramatic before and after shots:

To the left, you can see my neatest effort in terms of hand-writing (still terrible), and what things looked like before going to 3,000m.

Alongside the polystyrene cup is a small piece of flat polystyrene I found lying around. I wrote "Pressure" on it.

I thought the calipers looked sufficiently "scientific" and they also give you a scale to refer to...!


To the left, you can see what happened to them after briefly visiting 3,000m - and an un-treated cup to compare it with! Honey, I shrunk the polystyrene cup!





I tried several cups, as you can see on the left (compare with the un-treated cup also in the picture)










The flat piece of polystyrene doesn't look so impressive in the pictures above, but it got seriously squashed. Here is me holding it sideways with an unshrunken piece of polystyrene from the same place.

The one that went to 3,000m is the one at the bottom.


So, what about the apple? No real change, although it did feel slightly more squashy. (The other change was me getting more cunning with flash placement).

< Before









So, there you have it. The sea is deep. And it's pretty squishy down there if you contain compressible airspaces!

Edit:
I thought I'd add something of educational interest to the post. So...

Is this just an amusing quirk? What's the relevance to anything?

Well, think for a moment about fish. Particularly fish that might migrate up and down in the water column (something a lot of them do). As you may or may not know, many fishes have something called a "swimbladder" they use to achieve neutral buoyancy; by filling it with more or less air, they can displace an amount of water roughly equal to their mass, and so become neutrally buoyant (float in the water column, neither going up or sinking) and hover, without expending energy on swimming, much like divers can with their BCDs. There are two basic types of swimbladder, one with a tube connected to the outside [physostomous], and one without [physoclistous]. The latter have to excrete gas into this closed sack, using a structure called the rete mirabile, and remove gases using a similar structure, the oval window. The gas moved is primarily oxygen.

There are two potential problems you then run into. The first is going up too fast; as there is no easy way to "dump" large amounts of the gas inside (at least not in physoclistous species). This means that fish swimming at great speed towards the surface (or getting dragged that way by a trawl) risk severe internal injury as the gas bladder expands far beyond its normal size. Fishes with large swimbladders tend not to change depth particularly fast - and fish that change depth quickly tend not to have large swimbladders, or none at all.

The second problem is that of partial pressure. As you get deeper and deeper, you have to develop a higher and higher partial pressure of oxygen in the rete mirabile in order to "pump" more oxygen into the swimbladder in order to inflate it. There is a physiological limit to how high this pressure can be, so fishes that live deep in the ocean have evolved other ways of maintaining neutral buoyancy, like having very reduced skeletons (bone and cartilage are heavy), light tissues (not much heavy muscle) and lots of oils (which are less dense than water and float) stored in various tissues.

Anything with an airspace inside needs to worry about big pressure changes like this; if you've ever felt uncomfortable in an airplane or car as you go up or down (that "stuffy' feeling in your ears) - that comes from just a fraction of a change of one atmosphere. Those cups were subjected to a change many hundreds of times bigger than this!

Incidentally, if you didn't know, the biggest migration on the planet is not the wildebeest in East Africa, which you've probably seen on TV. It actually happens every single night in the ocean, when literally billions of tons of organisms rise from the depths up into the shallows to feed. This community can clearly be seen on sonar and this is termed by those operating sonar as the "deep scattering layer". During the day, it sits at around 400m or deeper, but moves up into the surface waters at night. This article on lanternfishes, a major constituent of the deep scattering layer, will let you know more about this "diel vertical migration" (and a lot about myctophids) if you are interested!

Oh, and the CTD station where I did this was about here.

We've caught some more pretty neat fishes recently.

Below is the mouth of a ponyfish (Family Leiognathidae), which I think is Equulites elongatus. This species is much more slender than most of the other species in the family; they are also not easy to identify, as so many groups seem to be! The keys for this group also frequently seem to depend only on characters of male fish (the sort of key couplet I hate, along with relative statements like "moderately long", which might make sense if you work with the group regularly, but are more or less meaningless if you just have one specimen, or couplets that only apply to adults and you have a juvenile).

Interestingly, ponyfishes are bioluminescent. They have a layer of tissue containing bioluminescent bacteria wrapped around their gut. It is thought that they use this light, which shines out of transluscent patches on their bodies, to confuse predators, particularly at night in the shallow waters they frequently inhabit, where moonlight shining through the water would otherwise silhouette them strongly. They also seem to show differences between species and sexes, so the light is probably useful for the fish in several ways.

Ponyfishes are fairly important in many tropical countries as a food source; they apparently dry fairly easily, allowing them to be transported and traded as a good source of protein.

Most of the fishes in this group have mouths that are not only protrusible, but extremely so!

Take a look:
Mouth closed (sorry about the label - I cropped this out of a fish pic I took from genetic/stable isotope sampling - somehow, I didn't think to take a picture of the specimen with the mouth closed!).







And... Open!








As neat as that mouth is, the next fish is even more great.

We caught a fairly large flatfish postlarva/juvenile in a pelagic trawl - I noticed it had an extraordinarily long fin ray, so I felt I just had to take some photos! We tried to key it out - we suspect it's in the Family Bothidae, and it may be a Laeops of some sort. Anyway, onto the pictures!

Note the really long fin ray sticking out of the head (the whitish filament).





Here's a close-up of the head. If you look carefully, you can see the upper end of the eye that is migrating around to this side of the body (grey-ish patch above the eye you can clearly see). Yes, you can indeed see its brain and spinal cord, as well as its guts.

I first took pictures of it lying the wrong way around (as if it was a right-eyed flounder), and then took another look at it and realised my mistake! It was quite big and about 3/4 filled the petri dish I put it in to photograph it under a little water to get rid of some of the annoying glistening highlights you get off wet fish (the reason you normally put them in a tank to photograph). These are, however, the right way around. If you ever find yourself having to photograph developing flatfish and want to know which way is the right way up, check which eye is closer to the top of the head - that's going to be the "bottom". All kinds of interesting bone development will probably happen after the eye passes onto the left side of the head.

We caught these fishes about here.

Last time I was on a cruise in the waters around Madagascar for several weeks, I didn't see a single lemur or chameleon. In fact, I spent all of about 3 hours on dry land if memory serves! This meant that a second visit to Madagascar without seeing any would make me extremely bleak. Tommy said that there was some kind of lemur park close to Toamasina, so, at 8 in the morning, after a few moments trying to find Jéssica unsuccessfully to drag her along, Bradley and I more or less ran to the port gates, met up with Tommy, and then found out that not only did he not know where the lemur place was, he couldn't remember its name. And neither Bradley nor I had thought to bring the printout of the locally relevant chapter of the Lonely Planet guide to Madagascar I had purchased, downloaded and printed out the day before. Oops.

I was press-ganged into attempting to communicate with the bicycle taxi drivers near the port in my limited French. I supposed that the French word for lemurs was lemuriens (a group in one of my favoured musical genres is called "Lemurians". Interestingly enough that name has more to do with a hypothetical sunken continent than the primitive primates). Unfortunately, my French was met with fairly blank expressions, as was the word "lemuriens"; I suspect these guys didn't really speak much French. Tommy tried showing them a bank note with a lemur on it. Eventually they were saying "Maki! Maki!", so we assumed this must be the Malagasy word for lemur, and thought we would shortly be amidst a whole stack of lemurs. Maki is actually one of the Malagasy names for the ringtail lemur. Incidentally, for future reference, the Malagasy word for lemur is gidro.

Alas, this was not to be the case. We travelled in several directions around town, doubling back on ourselves at one point. The bicycle taxi is quite the experience, particularly when the guy doing all the hard work manages to get his flip-flop stuck in the chain, loosing the flip-flop and having the chain come loose. This lead to a fairly swift reduction in speed, the surprisingly speedy fixing of the chain and subsequent retrieval of the errant flip-flop. Tommy also heartily recommended the pousse-pousses (hand drawn rickshaws) as a rather unusual method of getting around.

Eventually, we came to a market area, and the bicycle taxi drivers triumphantly pulled up outside of a shop - I had something of a sinking feeling when I noticed that right in front of us was a shopfront, prominently featuring lemurs called... you guessed it... Maki Company! It was closed, but there were people inside - the clothes looked quite cool. They showed no real inclination to open up (presumably they opened at 9 and it was only 8:30), so we decided to wander past the market and hunt down a taxi. This time, one with an engine, reasoning that a lemur park must be some way away from the center of town. Tommy bought a lifetime's supply of vanilla from a stall-holder on our meander past.

We eventually found an impromptu taxi rank outside a petrol station, and tried to get ourselves understood. Again, this group didn't seem too hot on the old French (in fact, their French was worse than mine - but then French is not the national language of Madagascar). Eventually, we seemed to get ourselves understood and enquired about the price. First 5,000 Ariary was mentioned. As it had just cost us about 15,000 Ariary to come a fairly short distance on 3 bicycle taxis, and I overheard them saying something about 12 kilometers outside town, this seemed wrong, so I pressed the issue. We made ourselves understood that we wanted a return trip. Eventually, one of the petrol station attendants was saying "5,000 times ten" in French, so I asked "cinquante mille" (50,000)? This was met with fairly blank stares again, cluing me into the scary fact that I might actually know more French than they did. Finally, we decided both the taxi driver and ourselves were on more or less the same page regarding payment. We just hoped we were going to the right place! As taxis in Madagascar seem to do, the first thing our driver did was get fuel for the journey (they seem to sit around empty, and work on tiny amounts of fuel at at time - literally buying enough for the trip).

Now that we knew the taxi was going to cost us 50,000 Ariary, we suspected that the wildlife park might be quite pricey, particularly after my experiences of parks in East Africa and their dollar-rates for tourists, so we asked the driver to stop at the bank. Tommy and I withdrew money from an ATM (note: some ATMs in Madagascar accept both Mastercard and Visa for cash withdrawals - only Visa work in Tanzania, where Mastercard is generally frowned upon - annoying as my South African card is Mastercard). Bradley decided to exchange some dollars and that took a while longer.

On the way out of the bank, we spotted John Bemiasa and some of the other Malagasy people from the ship and asked him to please make sure that we were actually being taken to the right place - it turned out that we were. The three of us breathed a big sigh of relief, climbed back into the very rickety old French car (I didn't note if it was a Peugeot or Renault; I suspect the latter - there are also some very old Citroens still running around), and off we went. It was rather interesting getting out, as none of the doors had door latches on the inside; my door had to be lifted into just the right position before it would close.

As we drove along I noticed that, just like in the market place, everything that does one kind of activity seems to cluster. So, you'd have an area that sold wood, another that sold roofing materials another that sold furniture and so on. One village on the route seemed to specialise in collecting and selling river sand, whilst the next one along seemed to specialise in breaking rocks (by hand using either another rock or a large hammer) into gravel.

After going quite some distance along some at times rather bumpy roads, with several loud jarring crashes on the underside of the car, and asking the driver to actually go in the direction the signs pointed in, we eventually arrived at our destination, Parc Zoologique Ivoloina.

Lemur time!

First, we paid the very reasonable 10,000 Ariary each, and grabbed some drinks - after a long drive in the very hot car, and each nursing some degree of hangover from the drinks the previous day, all of us were rather keen to get something down our throats! Then we entered the park; we took a walk along a little path next to a lake, and finally ended up in the area of the park with lemurs. Ivoloina boasts around 10 species of lemurs and some other assorted wildlife; around 5 species are allowed to roam around the park at their leisure, whilst the rest are in cages. I was surprised how much noise the lemurs made; the black and white ruffed lemurs were particularly loud screamers; one of the smaller "bamboo lemur" species made extremely cute little whiny noises - and a whole range in between, depending on the species!

Anyway, I feel it is high time for a load of gratuitous lemur pictures:

I rather like the way one of these lemurs is hiding its face with its long tail. These are crowned lemurs, Eulemur coronatus.






This is a black and white ruffed lemur, Varecia variegata. These were the largest (and noisiest!) lemurs at Ivoloina. Lemurs are also rather active creatures, at least when they're awake, so quite a few of the pictures I took suffered from a little motion blur.




Stabbing lemurs in the face with a banana is strictly forbidden at Ivoloina...









Some lemur species occasionally get up on their hind legs and run along, and look overly-cute doing it.
These are white-fronted brown lemurs, Eulemur fulvus albifrons. Apparently, only the males have white colouration. Interestingly, lemurs tend to live in female-dominated groups.



You'll have to look at the larger version to see it (click the picture), but I think this individual has a rather smug expression on his face - a result of a lucky combination of him chewing on a piece of fruit and clicking the shutter at just the right moment. Or perhaps it's smiling at yet another blasted tourist and their camera!



I imagine this lemur hawking this bottle of water to passing tourists - Tommy happened to put it down, and this lemur came to check it out. The lemurs at Ivoloina are extremely tame; you can get surprisingly close to many of them. I imagine if you sat still for long enough, you might well find one climbing on you!











Lemurs have rather long tails!











So, what do you like to do?
Oh, you know, hang out...






By the side of the lake there were several of these unusually-shaped spiders. This is a crop from the original. If I'd had more time, I would have whipped out a flash, macro lens, tripod and 2x teleconverter. Here, I just used the 24-105 and rocked in and out until it looked more or less in focus and grabbed the shot.




There was an enclosure with at least one chameleon in it. They can be rather tricky to spot! They're fascinating animals to watch as they creep along very slowly, gently rocking, with their turret-like eyes swinging around. The enclosure was marked "panther chameleons", so I assume this is a member of that species (Furcifer pardalis).
Madagascar has a strong tradition of taboos, or fady. Chameleons are often the subject of fady, and touching them is generally forbidden by these traditions.

Some radiated tortoises.







The park also had a lot of labelled plants dotted around; this is the orchid from which we obtain vanilla. I'm a big fan of things that have labels attached so you know what they are. It would make my life a lot easier if everything in our nets was already labelled too!



Grass? What's so exciting about grass? Quite a lot if it's got a snake in!






On the way back, I tried shooting some random pictures out of the window, but they generally came out quite poorly - I stupidly didn't think to increase the shutter speed at the time, so they were blurry in the foreground and also generally terribly framed. Some of the least bad of them are in the section above the lemur pictures. (There was a time, not all that long ago, when such actions were almost reflexive - those reflexes have dulled after my camera has languished in a bag, unopened for rather large spans of time).

So, finally! Lemurs and chameleons in Madagascar! Yes!

I could happily have spent the whole day there, watching the lemurs and photographing them, but time was pressing. I had originally expected to get back to the ship by around 10, as there were tours scheduled, but with the unexpected length of time (and adventurous routing) to get to Ivoloina and back, we only made it back to the ship around 12:15 (the walk from the port gate is also rather long). This caused a certain amount of (not unreasonable) bleakness amongst those who had been left to deal with the "chaos" of the morning tour groups; in any case, I tried to make sure the rest of the team got off the ship in the afternoon and got to see a bit of the town at least, which they did.

However, having spent a previous cruise confined to the ship or lecture theatre for PR or technical support purposes whilst most of the rest of the party swanned around various exotic locales, I had decided that, for once, I would bend the rules a little and go and do something I had wanted to do for so long! The death stares, I feel, were ultimately worth it... The experience left me feeling rather less drained that I had felt after so long on the ship. I'm ready for the next section!

On the 17th, we had a major function on board the ship, with invited guests from several Ministries in Madagascar and other more local dignitaries and representatives of various NGOs and other organisations. Unfortunately, due to an event of national importance, the death of Rado, who I am told is one of Madagascar's most treasured poets, as well as being gifted in other artistic disciplines, several of the high profile guests were unable to attend as there were functions in the capital, Antananarivo, to celebrate his life and mourn his passing that required their attendance.

Whilst that made the mood slightly more sombre than it might otherwise have been it was still, I feel, a very successful event. We started the day with breakfast around 7:30am, after which it was non-stop action until about 6PM! The first task of the day was to decorate the ship, and assist the crew in setting out various tables and chairs and so on. After a lot of fairly frantic activity, the ship was ready to receive the invited guests. On the left, you can see a scrum of journalists crammed into the acoustics lab, whilst the function of the various displays and instrumentation are explained.

At around 8am, a group of journalists arrived for a tour of the ship and to hear about our work; we had a press release in both English and French, prepared by our Media Consultant, Claire Attwood. All of them opted for the French version! John Bemiasa (standing in the picture to the left, talking to the journalists), translated Jens-Otto Krakstad and Raymond Roman's presentations about the cruise. Some of them also returned for the function later in the day; we had people from local and national newspapers, along with television and radio crews.

Groups of ten (and sometimes far more - which were difficult to accommodate in the cramped confines of the interior of the ship) were lead on tours of the ship, starting in the bridge to see some of the equipment up there, after which they went down to the acoustics laboratory to learn about acoustic fish surveys and some aspects of the oceanography we are studying on the cruise with Jens-Otto Krakstad and Raymond Roman respectively explaining each of them. Subsequently, the groups were lead down to me in the "dry lab", where, with a quick detour past the CTD to explain its functioning and so they could actually see this piece of equipment that is so central to so much of the work we are doing aboard the Nansen. After explaining a little about what the CTD is and what it does for us, I took the groups into the dry lab to explain how the various water samples we take with the rosette attached to the CTD are processed. I imagine that curious blog-readers are also anxious to learn more about these three mysterious letters and I promise that all will be revealed before the ship docks in Mauritius! To the left, you can see some of the decor. The orange floats are surprisingly heavy and hard - I smacked my head on them several times! Around the upper levels, we had flags from all the countries participating in the project, with the flags of Madagascar and Norway behind the podium, with the UN flag decorating the front.

After my quick summary of the practical aspects of physical and chemical oceanography, the tour groups headed next door, where Bradley Flynn explained his role in zooplankton sampling with the multinet and then the groups were handed over to Jéssica to explain the trawling work, along with genetic and stable isotope analysis. After this, the tour groups had a well-earned rest from having tons of science thrown at them; they were taken out of the back door and handed over to the Captain and senior officers who hosted them on the aft deck with tasty treats and beverages, whilst the other guests were lead through the ship. To the left, Bradley and Irene explain zooplankton sampling to a small group.

After all the guests had an opportunity to see and experience some of the work we do on board, the function was called to order by the Master of Ceremonies, Hajanirina Razafindrainibe, who is the ASCLME Steering Committee member for Madagascar, and there were a series of speeches by various dignitaries after Jens-Otto Krakstad, the Norwegian Cruise Leader, welcomed everyone on board and explained a little about the cruise and its objectives. At this stage, I was busy behind the scenes, doing crazy last minute (second?) organisation, so I am not sure of exactly who spoke and when, but I will get the details and update this post as soon as I can.

This seems to happen to me quite frequently on cruises - on this particular day, I had at least 3 separate roles - organiser of random things, photojournalist and tourist attraction! These are all more or less mutually exclusive roles, so none of them got my full attention, and it was fairly frantic at times; I do, however, seem to thrive under such conditions!


I spent most of the morning putting together a revolving slide show of many of the interesting things we've seen and done aboard the ship - faithful blog-watchers will have seen most of the images (if not all of them!) before. I attempted to add titles to the pictures in both English and French, but ultimately, the translation was proving far too slow, and I stopped after a while. I also suspect many of them were hilariously bad! Haja spent the morning answering calls on the three cellphones she had with her, and of course, everyone was busy preparing either talks, their showcase areas or the public areas of the ship for the event. To the left, you can see a podium the crew built, with the UN flag in front, the Norwegian flag to the left and the flag of Madagascar to the right.

The most frantic part of the day, for me at least, was whilst the speeches were happening; Tommy and I had to prepare personalised letters of thanks from the project for each of the 5 dignitaries who were receiving scale models of the Dr. Fridtjof Nansen prepared by a company in Cape Town. This meant careful attention to spelling, as we both find the spelling of Malagasy surnames rather challenging! And it had to be done before the models needed to be presented, which we kept thinking was any minute. In the end, Haja decided that people needed a break after the long series of speeches and they were handed over by Haja and Tommy in a separate little presentation ceremony after the guests had a chance to mingle and enjoy the food and drink. At this stage, I was running around snapping pictures left, right and center!


To the left, Tommy Bornman with one of the models, as well as a cameraman from a TV station. It's always interesting trying to compete with a whole gaggle of other people trying to "get the shot", but without being pushy or getting in the way. Of course, this means you sometimes get sub-optimal pictures, but I'm sure that getting exposure on national television is rather more of a PR bonanza that a couple of nice pictures we can use on our website or in a report!

Assembled dignitaries along with Jens-Otto Krakstad and John Bemiasa. Further labels to follow!






Science team, MK II. Left to right, more or less as you come to them, Jaques Phillipe, Irene Rasoamananto, Thomas Razafimanambina, Norososa Bakary ("Mama"), Raymond Roman, Jéssica Escobar, Jens-Otto Krakstad, Magne Olsen (crouching), James Stapley, Bradley Flynn; more or less in line with each other, at back, John Bemiasa, in front, Roger and finally Carel Oosthuizen. Not pictured are the instrument technicians Jan Frode Wilhemsen and Kåre Tveit. Science team MK I was minus all the Malagasy scientists and Carel, plus Arrie Klopper and Sean Fennessy.

To the left, almost everyone on board the Nansen up until Toamasina, some of whom are hiding behind other people!
Not in the picture for some reason are the Steward and the two Namibian cadets. I'll try and name everyone in the picture a bit later (when I revisit this post to label the dignitaries).



I have (quite literally) hundreds more pictures, thanks to my brand new Canon EOS 5D, which Tommy kindly brought to me as hand luggage all the way from South Africa, through a ridiculous routing that had him going via Reunion to get to Toamasina and past officious customs agents! The rest of Tommy's luggage didn't even make it to Toamasina (it finally arrived in Antananarivo on the day the ship left) - so Tommy had a chronic shortage of clothing and we lacked the refills of some supplies that ran out - and now, he's had to fly the 50kg of excess luggage all the way back to South Africa - and then to Mauritius...! Thank you very much, South African Airways!

Labels: function

We're currently just drifting, as there was some kind of oil leak; the ship will be unpowered for about an hour and a half whilst the oil leak is fixed.

My good intentions of putting up a whole load of new blog posts last night were demolished when the ship turned around at the end of the last CTD line and headed inshore; for whatever reason, the satellite dish didn't like that direction and couldn't acquire the satellite again until this morning sometime. After about an hour of waiting, I gave up, and partook in movie night, complete with popcorn which I'd cunningly packed for just such an occasion! Now we have internet again, I can resume my posting - the blogger backend system I use to write these posts really needs to be online to work properly. In the end, I had nearly 12 hours of lying in my bed - sadly not all of it sleeping; I have now become a rather light sleeper, so any time someone else in the cabin gets up to do something, I wake up too! Not to mention one of my cabin mates was gently snoring...!

In any case, updates are still coming, and will be posted as and when I get a chance to write them. Right now is looking good!

Well, it's been a busy few days and some time since the last blog update, for which I apologise - so I feel it is high time to do some updating about the events of the last few days, so stay tuned for some bumper edition blog posts!

The Nansen arrived in port at Toamasina/Tamatave on the evening of the 16th of September. We were all, I think, very happy to reach dry land after quite some time at sea and to get off and stretch our legs - and see something other than the same fairly cramped spaces on the ship and miles and miles of blue (or, if it was rough, blue and white!) water. The vessel docked about here, with pride-of-place in front of the port control building.

In the hours we spent languishing around, waiting for permission to dock (we spent about 5 hours just waiting around in the bay), we cleaned the ship. The crew spent the previous days finding and eliminating any rusty patches they could reach on board the vessel, even climbing up onto the cranes to give them a thorough scrub, either using elbow grease, rust remover or paint! The science team (well, the junior members of it - it seems Norwegian scientists and local cruise leaders are exempt - the perks of seniority!) spent some time turning working spaces into clean, neat and tidy showcases. Jéssica's team capitalised on her penchant for orderliness and tidied away the clutter of day-to-day working operations, leaving open spaces so you could actually see lab benches for once! My team was then tasked with the actual cleaning of these workspaces, so we mopped and scrubbed the floors (and, in places, the walls too!) and worksurfaces - particularly those that were covered in fish at some stage. We even washed the rugs that were scattered around the labs. I don't think the floors have been that clean in some time! We used some sort of bio-degradable detergent made from plant oils and, as a result, things smelt rather like linseed oil around here for a while - but I think that is a considerable improvement over old fish!

Once all of the port formalities (customs and immigration) were completed, most of the people aboard the Nansen ended up going ashore and visiting a local hang-out called "Neptune's" in town. As nice as it was to get off the ship and have a few quiet beverages, it was rather marred by the presence of a gaggle of ladies-of-the-night who were not at all subtle in their intentions (or attentions). It was actually rather difficult to dissuade them and it somewhat dampened my spirits on the two occasions we went there; this seems to be the "best" place in Toamasina to go out, hence our return visit the next evening. So, if you find yourself here, you know what to expect.

We were all rather excited to find they served cocktails, particularly Jéssica who had been dying for a Margarita almost since we left Durban! Unfortunately for Jéssica, they didn't know how to make one. And, it turns out, they don't seem to quite know how to make some of the cocktails on the menu either. Tequila Sunrises were rather unlike the way they should be - indeed, most of the ones I saw made (or sampled) didn't even have orange juice in them and they were shaken with large amounts of grenadine to leave something rather unlike any Tequila Sunrise you have ever seen (or tasted) before - the base fruit juice seemed to be pineapple. I seriously considered showing them how it's done, but I couldn't see any orange juice behind the bar, so I ultimately chose not to! Ultimately, I think travel is about novel experiences - and these were certainly novel!

It was great to spend time with scientists and crew outside of the ship - and, whilst I've mentioned some negative points in the paragraph above, it wasn't a total disaster, and they will be evenings I will look back on for some time to come with (mostly) fond memories!

Next up: the Launch event and tours!

Photos courtesy Tommy Bornman (1), James Stapley (3).

Well, I can just see some tall buildings on the horizon from here, which must be Toamasina/Tamatave, so I might be at least next to dry land, if not actually on it, in fairly short order!

Yesterday was very rough, apparently there was a major storm some way off, but the wind was still pretty strong and the swell was something else. Things were literally getting thrown around. It seems that, other than being irritating, the swell doesn't affect me very much now, fortunately. (I've generally been a fairly good sailor in moderately large to large ships, I don't always feel so great on little boats!). Somehow, we managed a trawl at about 4am, but didn't catch very much at all. I imagine at that hour, sensible fish will be sleeping somewhere (a totally unscientific hypothesis!). I know I wished I was!

I tried taking some pictures of the ship rolling about, but it only struck me to try that as the sun was on its way down, so I suspect they'll be a little blurry (I haven't checked them yet). I'll update this post or add a new one a little later.

After the morning shift had a pretty easy day due to very rugged bottom terrain (even a canyon got in the way!), the Nansen finally managed to deploy a bottom trawl during my afternoon shift yesterday (12th September). On the left, you can see Henning manning the trawl winches.



Looks like the trawl managed to go over some reef-y terrain, as we got a lot of reef associated species, like damselfishes and cardinalfishes and a couple of cleaner wrasses and anthiines, and there were quite a few corals and sponges in the trawl net too; the corals looked mostly like Tubastrea-type corals to me (I'm not much good at coral ID!). To the right, some of the science team are picking through the coral rubble for fishes.

A few of the fishes made it through the trawl okay, including another zebra shark and two remoras. Jens-Otto decided it would be cool to try and keep the smaller reef fishes for a few days so that we might have something swimming around to show to the people who visit the ship in Toamasina next week. He found one of Sven's primary production acrylic tanks in the hold under the trawl deck and converted it with the cunning use of duct tape and some kind of glue to seal the holes in the sides and anchor a tap into them. To the left, you can see Jéssica and Bradley with the second zebra shark (Stegostoma fasciatum) of the trip. This one fought back a bit and was slapping Jéssica and Bradley with its long tail all the way across the deck to the JESRT "rescue tank"!

To the left, you can see the top of the head of one of the two remoras, Echeneis naucrates we caught in the trawl. You don't often see the top of their head as they're usually stuck onto something. This "sucker" is actually a highly modified dorsal fin; the remora can flex the muscles associated with the ridges you can see (termed lamellae) in order to create a sucker-disc like effect, anchoring it to whatever it wants to be anchored to. Including people, as you'll see Bradley displaying below. Interestingly, my google search to get the fishbase page on this species also turned up an image of this species attached to a zebra shark!

We also did a trawl in the early hours of this morning, which netted a massive catch - 2 whole squid (yes that was it), which you can see to the left!








We are currently around here, doing another CTD line.
Photos courtesy Bradley Flynn (2), James Stapley (4).

Apologies for the quiet of the last day or so - life aboard the Nansen is more or less falling into a routine and I wasn't feeling particularly inspired to write something! In any case, the survey continues and we do nevertheless continue find interesting things and have novel experiences. So, on to the New and Interesting!




Trawls the other day netted some rather interesting beasts, the most captivating of which was probably a zebra shark, Stegostoma fasciatum. These sluggish sharks spend most of their life lying around on the sea bottom - and a lifestyle like that is good news in terms of surviving a trawl - indeed, after a few moments in a bucket of water, this fish was quite keen to start moving around again - which made measuring it quite tricky! We made the measurements, took a few photos of it and returned it to its watery domain.

Some more pictures of this rather endearing creature:









Now if a zebra shark isn't cute enough for you, we somehow managed to catch a minute postlarval cowfish, Lactoria fornasini in a trawl. Those little black tick marks on the ruler at the bottom are millimeters.








This rather toothy fish is Saurida undosquamis. If you think it looks toothy from the outside, a closely related species, Saurida tumbil, has about twice as many teeth as this on the inside of its mouth too...!





This fish may not look particularly inspiring, but it would fill Arrie with great joy - it is one of two Argyrosomus hololepidotus we caught in a trawl. This species appears to be more or less endemic to southeastern Madagascar, and he specifically wanted DNA samples with a corresponding voucher specimen (one of his primary reasons for coming on the part of this leg he participated in). Unfortunately, someone designated them as eminently suited for the dinner table and they got gutted and bled out. I think we managed to wrestle them away from the galley in the end... Incidentally, this trawl happened over rather dodgy trawling ground, and the bottom trawl got seriously trashed. The entire thing had to be re-made!

We've spent the last day or so doing a CTD line out into the Indian Ocean; we've come back inshore again, and we're now doing an acoustic survey along the coast to the next CTD line. The last station on the line was around here.

Of course, we don't like sitting around not doing anything - and we generally always have something to do on the ship, whether it is catching up on the paperwork, entering data into spreadsheets and/or databases, keeping our office inboxes clear, sorting samples, labelling pictures or processing water or chlorophyll samples. Or in my case, blogging!

One of the regular things one does on an oceanographic expedition is check how accurate the dissolved oxygen sensor on the CTD is. They have a tendency to drift over time as the silver inside them dissolves away and their sensitivity can change with depth (indeed, the extreme pressure of deep CTD casts [particularly over 1,000m] changes the physical structure of the membranes in them to the point that you get different readings on the downcast [going towards the bottom] than on the upcast [coming back up again] - this is termed hysteresis. This pdf explains in more detail). To the left, Roger with the titration equipment.

In any case, we decided it would be valuable to teach everyone on the science team how to do the Winkler titration. Of course, we don't use burettes on a ship; they're actually quite fiddly to use, and, if you try and accurately read a meniscus on a moving ship... well, good luck with that! Instead, there is an electronic "dosimat" which dispenses very accurate volumes of liquid (millilitres to 3 decimal places, i.e. a microlitre at a time, and far more accurate than a burette!); essentially, you push a button and it measures the liquid until you're happy your titration has reached its endpoint. Raymond told us that at his department at UCT, they have a machine that does the entire process for you at the touch of a button. No judging of endpoints! To the right, Jaques Phillipe tries his hand at titration whilst Raymond Roman looks on.

Of course, deciding to show someone a method and actually explaining it can be made considerably more challenging if the two parties are not particularly good at each other's language! Fortunately, John Bemiasa (who speaks very good English - infinitely better than my French - and of course fluent French and Malagasy) was on hand to make sure that the information could flow both ways! To the left, John explains the finer points of titration to Thomas Razafimanambina.

We worked up the 24 oxygen samples that were collected at the end of the CTD line. I will be interested to see what Raymond has to say about the data when he works up the values we got during the titrations - techniques like this take a bit of practice before you get them consistently right.

Raymond and I decided to run a little test earlier; we tested a bottle of water which used the chemicals from the Nansen, and another using the chemicals loaded on the ship specifically for the expedition - they both gave *exactly* the same reading, which is very encouraging. That is rather the point of the Winkler method - consistent results! Both samples were take from the same tap on the ship at more or less the same time. To the right, Thomas practices his titration.

Latest news is that there will be a trawl around 4:30am. I think they're secretly trying to break us!

Photos courtesy Carel Oosthuizen (3), Magne Olsen (1), James Stapley (7).

We're currently on an acoustic survey line, where the ship navigates a course along the coastline of Madagascar.

To the left, you can see "mission control" - part of the acoustics lab. Starting at the computer on the desk on the left, from where the CTD is monitored and controlled, you then have a laptop to the right, which is used to monitor and record data from the thermosalinograph and fluorometer which sample water continuously, 24 hours a day, from about 5m under the surface (a pump sucks water in through a seacock, passes it through the instrumentation, located in the same room the CTD is housed in, and then the water is dumped back overboard). This tells you how warm the water is, what the salinity is, and gives you an idea what the levels of chlorophyll in the water are like - telling you roughly how productive that water is. None of that is acoustics gear, of course (it does nothing with sound!).

Then there are 3 racks of gear. The lefthand most rack contains (from the top) some UPS monitoring instrumentation, then a display that tells you how quickly the CTD is going up or down and how much wire has been let out; below that is a display of the ship's heading; below that there is the CTD deck unit that translates between simple electrical signals the CTD sends and can understand to computer-ese; below that is the ADCP (Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler) which measures currents in the upper few hundred meters 24 hours a day.

The middle rack contains an echosounder display, the ship's log (think of it as the mile-o-meter in your car), below that the multibeam echosounder display (dark screen [off!]) and rack mount PC.

The third rack has more echosounder displays at the top, then there is the Seapath 200 deck unit; this is basically a very accurate inertial navigation system which tracks the vessel's motion in 3 dimensions (particularly pitch and roll); data from there is used to calibrate sensors, particuarly the multibeam echosounder, that are sensitive to the vessel's precise position in the water. Below this is a remote screen and mouse which displays and can control the Olex navigation machine on the bridge. Behind the camera position is a powerful workstation with two enourmous screens used to post-process the echogram data - more on that a bit later.

Never mind the funky-looking toys, what exactly is this acoustic survey business anyway?!

As you may know, many fish species show up on echosounders, and indeed, particular species reflect different sonar frequencies in an often characteristic way (important characters that contribute to this include the size and shape of the swimbladder as well as behaviour - the shape the fish take within their schools and where in the water column they hang out). This allows an experienced observer, with the right tools, to estimate the abundance of particular species of fish without even catching any of them - a pretty ideal situation!

However, it is of course important to calibrate the system; for this reason, trawls of various types are deployed to target characteristic signals in order to calibrate the system (i.e. understand what the various echoes represent) and gather additional data you can't get from echoes alone. The signatures of many major northern hemisphere fishery species are very well known, to the point one can often automate the process; down here in the southern hemisphere, things are a bit more complex and less well studied. So, it's trawling time!

How do we get this magical acoustic data in the first place? Well, the Dr. Fridtjof Nansen is equipped with a Simrad ER60 echosounder system, using 18, 38, 120 and 200kHz frequency transducers. As you're probably well aware, sonar sends out a series of "pings" and measures how long it takes for these to reflect back; if you know the speed of sound through the water, you can work out how far away the object that reflected the sound is. Incidentally, the speed of sound in water changes depending on density - and this may change through the water depth; we use accurate density information from the CTD to create a detailed sound profile of the water column for all the acoustic instrumentation on board. Of course, with the growth of technology, other information other than depth/distance can also be gleaned from not only the time(s) of the echo(es), but subsequent reflected echoes and even the quality ("loudness") of the echo. Different frequencies reflect off different types of objects in different ways, so, once you know what bottom type X looks like on the sonar, you can know what bottom type you're passing over; objects in the water column, like fish, also produce particular echoes.

Recorded echogram data from this system is then post-processed using the Large Scale Survey System (LSSS). This software allows us to reduce the "clutter" in the water column caused by plankton, and focus on the fish. It also allows us to identify fish shoals and allocate them to specific groups, such as "anchovies" or "horse mackerel" or "scads", for example. Even the live view of the echosounder gives us an idea of how many fish there are out there, and a view of the bottom, so we can decide if the bottom looks trawlable or not. Take a look at the two screenshots below:








If you open them up full-size by clicking on them, you'll see a lot more detail. The main part of the window is the sonar echogram. The wavy dark red line is basically the bottom; the little peaks and valleys indicate it's pretty rough (and not good bottom trawling ground). Most of that random-looking blue speckling above the red line is plankton in the water column. On the left side image above, below the wavy bottom line, there is a straight dark red line, which is also the bottom (with the kinks smoothed out digitally), and represents an "expanded view" of the part of the echogram just above the bottom - where fish often lurk! The diagonal line across the screen is a plot of the total power of all the echoes received; when there is a sudden jump, that generally indicates a school of something. Jens-Otto thinks that the pelagic fish (those that live in the water, not near the bottom) are staying much closer to the bottom than normal, and he thinks whales are responsible (the fish are hiding from them) - it's apparently very noticeable on the echogram when whales are around. The little graphs indicate (amongst other things) how the particular target you're examining reflects in the different frequencies; on the right at the bottom one can assign the section of the echogram you've selected to a particular category you define (anchovies, scad, horse mackerel etc.). To the left, I've cropped out what a small school of fish near the bottom looks like; the raised blue-green hump rising up from the reddish bottom represents the fish! The red dot on the map in the bottom left hand corner represents the location of the section of the acoustic readings you're currently looking at.

This software, when correctly calibrated (i.e. you know what the different species look like) allows you to estimate the total biomass of various fish species that you pass over when you survey - and it can do so over any terrain, unlike trawls, and does so without killing anything or trampling all over the seabed like a bottom trawl does. Acoustic surveys are being increasingly used in fisheries management as they allow much more rapid and wide-spread surveying to be done (and you don't smell of fish at the end of the day) - but trawling can give you other useful information, so it is unlikely to ever be totally replaced.

There are, of course better tools than basic echosounders for studying what the bottom looks like; the Nansen is equipped with a Kongsberg EM710 multibeam echosounder system. The user interface is a program called Seafloor Information System (SIS), which gives a real-time view of the seabed in three dimensions - very handy for getting an idea of what the bottom really looks like - and allows control of the system. Data from this system is additionally fed into Olex, the navigation system on board, which can also be viewed in 3D. (Data from the ER60 system is also fed into Olex, and gives an indication of bottom hardness, as well as updating the depth information on the chart in real-time). If you're prepared to spend the time, you can build up really nice 3D pictures of large areas of the seafloor. I'll try and get an image of an area of seabed they surveyed last year off Mozambique using this method at some stage and go into more detail on the multibeam - they're very awesome tools.

Anyway, hopefully this has given you a little bit about what is going on in acoustic surveying; if you want more info, make a comment using the link below and let us know what you'd like to hear more about - or if anything was unclear!

At the time I started this post, we were about to do a trawl around here.

John Bemiasa, one of the people on Jéssica's team, has started up another cruise blog. You will, however, need to be able to read French in order to read most of it! Feel free to have a look at the pictures and few English titles if you'd like a slightly different take on the whole cruise experience!

Of course, if your French is even worse than mine, you could also view a (fairly bad) machine translation of the blog; try Babelfish or Google.

Yesterday we went past Toalanaro again - the place where we swapped crew about a week or so ago. I thought the coastline looked familiar... Seems strange to have gone so far and to have ended up in exactly the same place!

Essentially, we had to rush to Toalanaro because of the bad weather early in the trip, and then rush back the way we had come in order to do the work that we needed to do on that section of coastline; yesterday we completed it and started the survey along the East coast of Madagascar - an area that is very poorly surveyed from an oceanographic point of view, so we're very interested to see what our detailed investigations will show!

Yesterday, I awoke to the sound of what my brain thought was the abandon ship signal. It *was* the abandon ship signal, but it turns out they were only testing the system. Not a great start to the day. Then it was into a whole load of trawling.









On one of the trawls, I noticed a paper nautilus, Argonauta sp., whilst we were sorting. It looked rather unhappy with life, having been more or less separated from its "shell"; I put it in a bucket (which it immediately filled with ink - I washed this away with plenty of water and left the water running). By the time we had finished sorting the catch, it had reattached itself. Paper nautiluses are actually pelagic octopi; the females secrete this "shell" from their egg-glands, whilst the males are comparatively dwarfs and have no shells. This shell is not analagous to the shell of other molluscs - it is a new evolutionary adaptation. Unfortunately, the photos Bradley took didn't come out that well (the macro on his camera isn't easy to use, nor particularly macro!), but I have attached a few here. I think they're quite cute, despite all the tentacle-y sliminess! I suspect, based on the darkness of the shell, it may be Argonauta bottgeri. For more pictures of argonauts, click here. If you look carefully at the bucket picture, you can see the syphon the animal uses to jet-propel itself around sticking out of the lower part. Bradley got squirted in the face when he tried to look at it earlier; clearly they can pump water out of there quite hard! After we took a few quick pictures, I released it back into the sea.

In a later trawl, we caught a sea catfish. These animals have venomous spines and considering my unfortunate history with venomous fishes, I wasn't too keen to have a repeat performance - miles out to sea. Nevertheless, we had to weight it, and I thought some photos would be a good idea. Identifying it proved to be tricky; the key called for examining the inside of the mouth. Clearly, whoever designed that key didn't think they'd be holding a large, live, struggling animal with stout, venomous spines flopping around. I gave that character up as a bad idea; the other part of the key couplet suggested the back of the head was fairly rough. Well, it looked fairly bony to me (as opposed to "covered in muscles"), so I therefore took it to be Ariodes dussumieri. It also went back over the side. We even managed to rescue a few thornfishes and horse mackerel (Terapon theraps and Trachurus delagoa), which recovered nicely in one of the JESRT plastic buckets.

Oooh, the name has changed - I just tried searching for it on Fishbase, and it seems this sea catfish species is now called Plicofollis dussumieri. Latin (scientific) names are often in a state of flux as more research is carried out. Taxonomy is partly a historical detective story (uncovering what has been written about the species you're working on - often in other languages, even Latin sometimes - sometimes with very vague descriptions), partly measuring and observing a hell of a lot of animals (and the analysis of that data) and partly (though I hate to say it) a "gut feeling" thing. Biology isn't neat and tidy like chemistry and physics!

Pinning down exactly what is a species is harder than you might think - and because animals are still evolving, they are not going to be fixed forever! But the pigeonhole of a "species" is certainly very useful in terms of doing research and trying to understand what is going on in an ecosystem. New genetic tools are re-arranging a lot of what we thought we knew about taxonomy. If you look very carefully, the picture on the left has at least 5 species (somewhat) visible in it, but the overwhelming majority is horse mackerel.

Of course, all this flux and uncertainty makes preserving voucher specimens (preferably with an associated DNA sample these days) very valuable. You may think you know what species you're working on, but what happens if someone finds out there are actually two species? Which one was all your work done on? How about if other people want to verify in three hundred years time the work you did, and what species you were referring to? (I regularly used literature [mainly in French, one in Latin] from the late 1700s and early 1800s when I was doing some taxonomic work). The descriptions were not always very good. Putting an example of what you think you're working on in a recognised biological collection and then referring to it in your publications is a very, very good idea.

Preserving specimens in a recognised collection also means that there is a "library" of material that taxonomists can do their work on. As nice as it is to go out there and hunt down elusive species, you often have neither the time nor the funding to do so; carefully preserved specimens are the bread and butter of taxonomists.

We're currently here, steaming along at around 9 knots with nearly 5 kilometers of water under the ship!

Images courtesy Bradley Flynn (3) & James Stapley (1).

Last night was a pretty wild ride, with gale force winds and the ship feeling like it was slamming through huge waves at times; at one stage a wave broke so that water was coming from above the back of the ship. We closed the back door between the fish lab and the aft deck at that stage! People got a fairly long sleep, even if whilst being thrown around, it wasn't necessarily a good nights sleep... Today the weather is fair again, and the sea has more or less calmed down.

On the CTD station we just did we were surrounded by about 6 humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae). But not in the sense that they were just plentiful and all around the ship. These were right up against the ship, passing literally a meter away from the hull sometimes! Quite a few times, they passed right under the ship, upside down with their white undersides clearly showing. It almost seemed as if they were interested in finding out what this ship was doing, why it was making so many funny noises and what all these strange things that were being lowered overboard were all about. They frequently came right past the CTD hatch, which is about 2m above the waterline, so the people there got front row seats to the whole spectacle! They were so close that you wanted more of a wide angle lens than a telephoto lens at times.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so, here are a few thousand words worth! Henning, one of the crew members, has a small video camera and took some footage; I will try and edit together a short clip and upload it later on too.




Here, a humpback sticks its head right out of the water to get a better look at us. At the time, I had my head out of the CTD hatch and got a great view from the side. Sadly, for you, dear reader, my camera is film... This same whale did this at least 3 times; it seems to have a fairly distinctive growth on the right side of it's head that looks a bit like a soft coral (it's a creamy-pinkish colour if you look at the larger version of this picture). You can also see the humpback's distinctive long pectoral fins.








Shots like this one on the left can be used to identify individual whales; they have distinctive markings on the undersides of their tail flukes.





This whale obviously liked the look of us; as I mentioned, it did this three times on this CTD station and then followed us to the next station and did it again!





In other news, when we tried to do a bongo station, the wind took hold of the mesh of the bongo net and smashed one of the cod-ends against the ship so hard the plastic smashed and we lost the cod-end. Which was the last one we had (having lost one earlier to an errant jubilee clip). Fortunately, we managed to find something lurking around at the back of a cupboard that will do the job perfectly - one of the old multinet cod-ends from the Nansen, a piece of gear that looks rather less like your mum sewed it together in about 15 minutes and more like a serious piece of sampling gear (made by your dad in the garage in about an hour)!

The Whale Station was here.

Photos courtesy Magne Olsen.

Last night was a pleasant break - there was absolutely nothing to do during my shift as we were just steaming to the next station, having completed processing the trawl during Jéssica's shift. Jens-Otto said we were free to go to bed if we wished (and that we would be woken if anything interesting that demanded work showed up!). I watched a movie (Next) with Carel and Jéssica; the Dr Fridtjof Nansen is equipped with a rather large screen and surround sound system in the Day Room. After that, I went to bed and had nearly 8 hours of sleep, which was a pleasant change!

To the left you'll see an image from last night's trawl - the bulk of the catch was the aptly-named greeneyes, Chlorophthalmus.

Several people sent me messages about sorting out the position errors I mentioned in an earlier post. Turns out the format of the Nansen's position isn't *that* odd (it's degrees and decimal minutes), and that Google Maps will pretty much play nicely with them (thanks Guy); I had obviously previously tried inputting them in some weird way, or read that google maps needed decimal degrees or something like that!

Tommy Bornman sent me the manual conversion method to decimal degrees:

Saw your entry on the Blog. What you should do is divide the decimal minutes by 60 then add the result to the degrees, e.g.

25° 50.493E = 50.493/60 = 0.84155 then add to degrees = 25.84155°
45° 30.129S = 30.129/60 = 0.50215; + 45 = 45.50215°

So, if you need it, there it is!

We are currently here on a CTD station.

The trawl brought up some pretty neat fishes, and also some sharks, so it was action stations for the Jéssica Escobar Shark Rescue Team (JESRT).

The sharks in the catch were all squaliforms; this means that they have a spiracle on the top of their head, and they're generally quite happy sitting on the bottom, pumping water over their gills; they're not like many pelagic sharks that have to keep swimming to breathe (the latter are termed "obligate ram ventilators"). This also gives them a small chance of surviving the trawl and making it back home - the trick is to minimise stress and get them back into the water as soon as possible. We've come up with the idea of putting them in buckets of water whilst we process them as quickly as possible. After that, they are released back into the water.

The team of people I am not on shift with have dropped hints that they're not happy with the coverage of their activities in this blog, so I shall try to rectify that! On the left, you can see Carel rescusitating a small squaliform shark. The sharks are quickly measured and weighed, and a small tissue sample clipped from the dorsal fin for later genetic analysis.



If you're wondering what spiracles are, take a look at this picture. The half-moon shape behind the eye is a spiracle; you'll notice one on each side of the head. These connect through to the gills (you'll notice the gill slits, where water comes out, a little further down the head).




Here were two of the "fishy" highlights for me:

Malthopsis mitrigera - a rather ridiculously "cute" animal! Yes, those are "legs" you see sticking out of the bottom; they are highly modified pectoral and pelvic fins and many of the fishes in this group walk around on the sea bed using them. Incidentally, the sides of the body are very compressible, I suspect this fish can make itself smaller (less wide) if it wants to.
















A deepwater flathead that didn't look quite like the one in Smith's Sea Fishes, from the Family Bembridae. That nice red blotch on the second dorsal fin should help identify it at some stage. They have pretty awesome spines on their heads. The pins you see in the photo are used to keep the fins nicely displayed; for fish photography, one would traditionally pin out the fish like this and then apply a small amount of concentrated formalin to the base of the fins; this fixes the muscles in position after a short while, so you can pull out the pins and the fins stay nicely splayed. You would then put the fish in a photo tank with water in it to reduce the reflections off the moisture on the surface of the fish (you get *much* better photos this way). Unfortunately, because we're taking DNA and stable isotope samples of pretty much everything, we can't use this method (at least not with the formalin) as it ruins the sample for both subsequent investigations.

To the right, you'll see Jéssica's shift team. From left to right, they are John Bemiasa, Irene Rasoamananto, Giselle Bakary and in the back row, Carel Oosthuizen and Jéssica Escobar. Not pictured is Jan Frode Wilhelmsen, part of the Nansen crew who runs the instrumentation such as the CTD during their shifts.

We've been cruising around looking for seamounts for most of the day. The Nansen is equipped with a multibeam echosounder system which makes it fairly quick to survey a target once it is found.

Whilst seamounts are often marked on charts, they don't always show up quite where you expect them to be; parts of many charts rely on data gathered well before the availability of modern navigational aids such as GPS - indeed, many positions would have been calculated manually using sextants and accurate clocks!

We managed to find both seamounts we were looking for, and we are currently trawling at about 550m or so on the flat top of the second one we found. Seamounts are widely expected to harbour much fairly unknown biodiversity.

Our position a short while ago was here.

I will try and arrange some screenshots from the multibeam system or the ship's electronic navigation system that incorporates the multibeam data and post them here later on. The image attached to this post shows the Nansen's chart table, complete with a paper chart of the region, and of course, various GPS readouts. Most of the day-to-day navigation on the ship is however done in Olex. Olex is an electronic charting system, of which several displays are available around the ship and on the bridge.

It's starting to get to the point where life on the ship is falling into a routine: stumble out of bed at some crazy hour after not nearly enough very disturbed sleep, crawl your way to the lab part of the ship, make measurements and take samples like some kind of zombie, and then repeat this every time there is a station (apart from the getting out of bed part, of course). Offshore, one gets a few hours between station (such that you might only get one CTD cast per shift) but as you go inshore, and CTDs get closer and closer together (and take less time as they are not going to 3000m down and back at about 1 meter per second), things can get quite frantic! We're currently in the frantic inshore phase.

The positions on this ship are recorded in a very odd format - degrees, minutes, seconds - but seconds with three digits (without a . in them)?! An example of the display I access would be 25° 50.493E 45° 30.129S. I've been cheating and simply moving a decimal point when "converting" to decimal degrees that I need for google maps (so this example would become -25.50493,45.30129) - which seemed to work well enough until now, when the ship was apparently inland and still making great progress! I tried dropping the last digit off the seconds, inputting that as a traditional lat/long and converting to decimal properly , and it seems like a more realistic position. Which would put us about here. I was kind of uncertain about this lax conversion, but this certainly shows me the error of my ways - I did think this kind of laziness would catch up with me eventually! I will ask someone exactly what weird format this *is* so I can do real, accurate conversions...

Another friend of mine, Pierre Nel, has come up with an improvement to this blog. Those of you that use Twitter can now follow a Twitter feed that updates itself every time we make a post on this blog. You can access the feed here.

We've been fighting against a "fresh breeze" (it certainly was rather fresh when I went and stood at the front of the ship!) most of the day, and the ship's speed has been 7 knots or so. We're now steaming inshore at a little over 9 knots. Raymond has calculated that we're about 12 hours behind schedule as a result of the slow steaming and all the waiting around we did for that CTD station during the rough weather.

The ship is moving around quite a lot today; there is a strong swell coming from one direction, and a rather choppy sea driven by the wind in the other that ends up with us being gently tossed around. There's been a lot of hammering and angle-grinding going on around us as crew continue their everlasting battle against rust on the outside of the ship which does not help my headache, at all!

The ship's position is currently here.

I mentioned I would try and upload some more pictures from the deep trawl, so, as promised:

Hairy sponge: this sponge stands about 30-50cm high. The tufts sticking out of the top of it are silica (glass) - essentially, this sponge makes fibreglass! If you've ever worked with fibreglass, you'll know how it gets into everything and is very itchy. Touch this at your peril! Some of the catch evidently got up close and personal with some of these, as a lot of them had these silica spicules embedded in them. Incidentally, it looks very similar to (if not the same as) a species that I have seen on footage from below about 135m in Sodwana Bay, South Africa, where, with a team of German scientists, we surveyed the coelacanth population and associated biota. We nicknamed them "hairy sponges" because of these tufts.


These rather funky-looking sharks are probably Deania profundorum.











These are oxeye dories, Oreosoma atlanticum. I don't think whoever named this species ever saw an Oreo cookie!

Edit: Indeed, I don't think Oreos had even been invented in 1829, when this species was first named by Cuvier!



Lots and lots of grenadiers... Most of the fish on that table are grenadiers; we saw 3 distinct taxa, but I wasn't at all happy assigning a firm name to any of them. Grenadiers (Family Macrouridae) are a right bugger to identify in my opinion!

The reddish/pinky-looking fish close to the camera is a Chaunax not quite like those described in the book I refer to most often (Smith's Sea Fishes); I'm not sure if it's a so far undescribed species or something that has a name but isn't in the book! Chaunax is basically a type of anglerfish. We caught quite a few of them in 2003 in the Mozambique channel when we trawled on the bottom in fairly deep water. At my end of the table are all the more unusual fishes, some of which I had seen before and was able to identify to species or at least genus fairly fast. It always helps to have worked with and seen a few species in a particular family. Incidentally, my T-Shirt says "Stand Back: I'm going to try Science!".

These fishes are Beryx splendens. Some of them were over 40cm in length.






It looks like we're getting too close to Madagascar again - the connection keeps dropping. I will end here for now before I get frustrated!

This evening, we made a deep trawl on the top of a seamount, located about here. The trawl was at around 700m. The bottom was hard rock - at least, that was what we could see from the echosounder. We also used the multibeam echosounder to build up a picture of the bottom topography to look for any terrain that would be particularly harsh on the fishing gear - like pinnacles or rocky outcrops. Once we found a likely spot, we deployed the gear. Jens-Otto was somewhat concerned that we might lose the fishing gear on such an uncharted spot, but the careful survey before we did the trawl paid off. To the left, you can see Jéssica sampling some of the fairly large squaliform sharks we caught. They're not quite as big as they look there, it's a cunning camera angle trick. :)

I spent some time up in the bridge whilst the trawl was down, checking out the various control systems up there, particularly those concerned with the trawling. To the left, you can see the trawl winch control panel in the bridge. The computer screen is a readout from the winch control system, which tracks the amount of wire out, the amount of pressure being exerted on the trawl wires, the symmetry of the trawl and other useful information. On the right, you can see Øyvind Nilsen, who was kind enough to show me around the systems related to trawling on the bridge.


The nets are fitted with a fairly advanced netsonde system (Scanmar), which provides information about exactly how the net is lying in the water, particularly, how far apart the two sides of the net are (74m), how high above the sea bottom the bottom of the trawl is (rollers or "tickler chain") - you can see by the way the bottom appears to be dropping away that the trawl is actually on its way up again, and how high off the bottom the top of the net (with floats on) is. On the right, you can see the trawl coming up.

Part of Dr Fridtjof Nansen's spacious, modern and well-appointed bridge. See what I mean about tempting buttons!?






Bradley with one of the deepsea fishes we caught. I think we eventually decided this was Phosichthys argenteus.






I hear the whirling of the CTD winches, so I better go and find out what's going on as I am technically on shift now! I'll try and check in later with some more photos.

Made it back to the office after having departed from the ship at Toalanaro. A task not made easy with the rough seas. Still recovering from the long shifts, standing, sorting and taking samples from fish. Good to see that the new crew did not suffer as much from seasickness as we did, wish them good luck with the weather on the rest of their trip.

Looking back at the trip, I have to say that I learned a lot with collecting water samples for oxygen, nutrient, chlorophyll a and phytoplankton analysing, but probably missing working with the fish and the diversity of fish species the most. Our region is clearly in need of a fully updated fish book(s) and especially keys to help in the identification of the weird and wonderful creatures from below. An electronic key would even be better.

I only had an opportunity to get a brief glimpse of the diversity that the wonderful island of Madagascar holds. Unfortunately I have to say that almost all of what I saw looked almost as if it had been bottom trawled! Still frustratingly few bird species and none of them from the endemic families of Madagascar. But for those of you onboard, here is a teaser of what you are missing out on. In total we saw five species of lemurs, interesting creatures indeed. Although it is in the dry season there were also some of the botanical gems of the island to be seen here and there.

Thanks to those that were on the cruise with me, it was a great time, enjoy the rest of the trip!!

After waiting on station for over 6 hours, things had calmed down enough to do a CTD (but not multinet or bongos). The rest of my shift had assumed the weather was too rough and retired to bed, but I stuck it out and just did the whole thing myself (salinity samples, nutrient samples, phytoplankton samples, chlorophyll samples). I could have woken them up, but now I have the guilt axe to wield when things get tough!

The next station isn't until about 10:40am, well into the next shift, so I'm going to bed now!

Our current position is here.The wind has died down to a moderate breeze of 11-12 knots. The sea still feels fairly rough though and there's quite a lot of water washing around on the aft deck. We're making pretty good speed at just over 10 knots.

Looks like the wind is hampering our scientific endeavours once again! At supper time, the motion of the ship and the pattern of the waves conspired a few times such that the mess room portholes ended up underwater and you got a brief view of the underside of the waves and out into the clear blue water of the open ocean before the ship moved and the porthole leapt back up into daylight.

We've been hanging around the last CTD station for several hours now (since about supper at 5:30PM) - it's about 1AM on board the ship (we're currently following Madagascar local time [GMT/UTC +3 hours]) and unless the weather improves fairly soon, I think we will be aborting this station and moving on.

I've ended up on the top bunk (I think Thomas misunderstood Bradley's saying the bottom two bunks had already been chosen) and getting in and out of that in bad weather is exciting. Particularly the getting out when you're still 3/4 asleep! I didn't sleep well at all between 6 and midnight - I think I was getting tossed around too much! So far, not feeling particularly seasick, but avoided eating anything at dinner. (I was very tired and that usually causes me to feel quite nauseous even without extreme boat motion).

I just spent about 45 minutes hanging out in the wheelhouse/bridge. It's got a great view and so many fun-looking gadgets. I managed to restrain myself from prodding them. Looks like the notice on the door is more to stop a flood of people colonising the bridge and to keep random people whilst the vessel is in port out - a few people occasionally going up there is apparently not a problem.

The wind has dropped down to Fresh Breeze, and is mostly in the 14-16 knot range, with the occasional gust to about 19.

Our position is currently here.

Well, it's rather unpleasant outside - grey skies, rain and stormy-looking seas. The waves aren't too big yet, but I doubt very much the crew will get up to their usual sunbathing on the front of the ship today! The weather station on the ship says the wind is going between Gale and Strong Gale on the Beaufort scale - gusts of wind over 45 knots at times! It's getting pretty wild out there.


This is rather stronger than when everyone got seasick on the way towards Madagascar. Hopefully, I have my "sea legs" by now (I think "Sea Legs" are all the bruises you get from being thrown off-course by unexpected shifts in the ship's movement and consequent banging into things).

A few moments ago, we were here.

Bradley is just using his camera - I will revise this blog when I get a chance to grab some pics of the weather outside.

-Edit-

Here are our new Malagasy colleages who are on my shift along with Bradley. (L-R Roger, Thomas Razafimanambina, Jaques Phillipe). Picture courtesy Bradley Flynn.