26.01.2013 - First sampling stations

26.01.2013 (Saturday). North of Joinville Island. Morning sunny but fairly cold (I guess around 0°C). Sea very calm. Scarce small iceflows and the two first tabular icebergs of the cruise: not very high but yet nice to see. Test of the camera with the Sigma objective on the photographic board. Problems for getting enough field depth (my knowledge of this gear is still very basic). The first Agassiz trawl has been postponed to 15:00. We are all impatient to get our first samples but, as said yesterday, I fear that the first time it will be a little chaotic. Early in the afternoon, from a control room of the ship, we look at images taken by OFOS submarine camera at around 200 m depth. The bottom looks flat and muddy, with a lot of life: Flustra-like bryozoans, sea stars, ophiurids, crinoids, irregular sea urchins, sea anemones, etc). A bit after 15:15, the Agassiz trawl is put at sea, at 62°34'S 56°29.5'W at about 250 m of water. I will record this with my GOPRO video camera mounted on my helmet. When it comes back on board, we are all very excited, but this is a poor catch. The material is sieved and sorted in the wet lab. Not so much crustaceans: small cirolanid isopods, a few arcturid isopods, mysids (Antarctomysis spp.), shrimps (Chorismus antarcticus), some amphipods including a young Paraceradocus gibber of only (!) 50 mm. Pablo Lopez gets a huge ten-legged pycnogonid (leg span about 20 cm), looking like the larva of the Giger's alien monster. When we have just finished the sample pre-sorting on deck, some whales come fairly close to the ship. We see them blowing several time and we also see their backs and once the tail of one of them. Then we use the Rauschert dredge (20 minutes on the bottom). Also poor catch except for crinoids. Difficulties to remove the front weight of 30 kg: we have to (re-)learn a lot of things. The material is sieved, put in water and stored in the cool container with an aquarium bubbler, as we have no time to sort it now. Then we got the second Agassiz trawl. Huge catch: mud, stones and bryozoans. A lot of organisms of every kind. We only sort them roughly on deck because it is already late and we have little time. Some interesting amphipod crustaceans, including epimeriids and iphimediids (big ones): very beautiful crustaceans which will be very useful for Marie's thesis. Then we have to throw away the hundred of kilograms of mud, stones and remaining organisms left on deck. We use shovels and bucket. To my surprise, Marie takes a very active part to that job, which is quite hard. We are close to midnight. Sunset. The moon is full. Little pieces of ice are drifting in clusters on a sea calm as a lake. A small iceberg crowded with pinguins is drifting close to us. We go to the labs for processing our samples from the Agassiz trawl. It is midnight...

 Our first tabular iceberg.

Emptying the second Agassiz trawl.

Paraceradocus gibber is a common giant Antarctic amphipod. This one is only 50 mm long but the species can overreach 100 mm.

Epimeria aff. macrodonta. This fairly common Antarctic amphipod is closely related to Epimeria macrodonta, but the species remains so far undescribed.

Ice cubes clustering at dusk on the sea.

(Cédric)

Today’s the first day of sampling. We are all set and enthusiastic. Waiting for the first Agassiz Trawl, we go up to watch the OFOS videos. It’s an underwater camera that drifts with the boat and films the bottom of the sea, so I can get a first idea of what it looks like.  I’m surprised by the quality of the pictures. We can see a rich sessile fauna on a muddy ground, and ophiurids, seastars, urchins, crinoids as well… The trawl is deployed around 15h. All the benthos people gather on the working deck. But the first catch is very poor, not even enough for the 50 kg subsample, which was supposed to be thorouyghly examined. A few amphipods. 3h later we put the Rauschert Dredge in the water. The catch is quite small also, a lot of crinoids but not so many amphipods. We are then told that the Agassiz will be re-deployed to compensate for the disappointing catch. The second try is the good one : the net releases on the ground of the working deck a huge amount of mud filled with all kind of organisms. Then begins the dirty treasure hunting: we all search in the mud  for our organisms of interest. Every now and then, you hear a shout in the crowd : “ophiurid”, “sea urchin”, “amphipod”, everytime someone finds something interesting for a colleague. We put all the amphipods, isopods, decapods and mysids we can find in a jar with sea water. We spend a few hours like this collecting our samples. Then, we have to clear the mess we’ve done on the deck. We put the rest of mud and animals in buckets and throw them overboard. We don’t have the time to sieve, to look for smaller organisms. Amphipods are quite difficult to spot in the mud. Then we clean the deck with water. It’s almost midnight and the sky is still so clear. It’s difficult to keep track of time in those conditions. Your mind seems to tell you that it’s still day-time and you don’t really feel sleepy. But when we get back inside in a darker and calmer environment, I begin to feel that it’s already late. We sort out roughly the catch in the common wet lab, then we head to our personal dry lab. We identify the amphipods by family and when possible, by genus or species. We then fix them in ethanol, so they can be used for molecular studies. We catched some Paraceradocus gibber, which is a big species, very tough. They are impressive and very nice to look at alive. We work until around 3:00 in the morning. The shifts will be quite irregular, sometimes we won’t avoid the night-time working because everything has to be fixed as soon as possible or the material will be degraded and not useful for DNA studies anymore. 

(Marie)