A cheeky bunch

My father was the first to read the new entry last night. I don’t know if it was pure chance or if he sleeps with the tablet under the pillow, but as I finished the upload, went to check the stats (which I never do at that time of the nigth) and I saw the number of accesses increase by one. In Alicante. My father, no doubt. I bet a cod. Dad, if it was you, I’ll give you two!

We also got lots of readers in Galicia, which is no wonder. Most of the Vizconde de Eza crew members are Galician, and so are some of the biologists. But other Spanish regions are represented on board: Murcia, Aragón, Madrid, Catalonia… or so I thought.

On board we have what we call “Radio Trancanil”, the sea equivalent of hearing something through the grapevine. The “trancanil” carries off the water from the deck. Radio Trancanil informs, mostly misreports, and it is very good for practical jokes. Nothing like letting somethin juicy spread through Radio Trancanil.

It so happens that last week I realised that tomorrow is a holiday day in Murcia, and I thought how nice it would be to take the day off :-) , and give it off to Iñaki, who is not from Murcia but has been based there long enough. Nobody said anything but this week I noticed an increasing interest on Murcia, peaking with leaflets on the wall nearly wherever I go, as these you can see below, honestly, this is not very subtle, is it? As if I could be fooled… every person born in Murcia knows none of us would say “Todos somos Murcia” with so many Ss :-)

"We are all Murcia", says the cheeky bunch

"Murcia tastes special"

But it has been good fun, nevertheless, because most of the Vzconde crew did not know. Yesterday I found David and Paco reading one of the leaflets and wondering aloud who the hell was from Murcia.

I hope we can celebrate in stile, as we know: with eight hauls full of fish, one after the other. Anyway, enough of chit-chat: let’s talk fish. I am worried about the comments in the blog and the reports I get on board from the far away relatives and friends: that we are fishing ugly fish, gosh they look nasty, what on Earth are those and so on… I really would like you to look at them with a bit of love. Do you think that they would find us handsome if they could come up and take a look at us? Would you like to be described as ugly, alien, terrifying? There you go. No fish for you today, folks.

But I will show you instead a spider crab (Lithodes maja), very fond of cold waters and not an stranger in our hauls from the slope. 

Lithodes maja

 

 

And this is a brachiopod. Not a bivalve, a very different animal, so much that it belongs to another animal group (phyllum) that has nothing to do with bivalves. With that fragile look it has been around for more than 500 million years. It has seen everything. Shame they cannot tell us. Now there are a few hundred species, but they were in the thousands. And by the way, unlike bivalves, brachiopods have lower and upper valvess, not right and left. It is a matter of simmetry. Bivalves have got (most of them) two equal valves. Brachiopods have vertical simmetry, not horizontal.

A delicate brachiopod tough enough to survive several mass extinctions

And just to let you know, we have been all day at great depths, above 800 m, meaning we could only take 5 hauls today, as each of them takes forever. The CTD has become the one-who-must-not-be-mentioned and I am neither going to get angry nor loose my sleep over it. Small catches, the usual array of blue antimora, black dogfish, grenadiers, chimeras, my dear “little black fishes”, everything in rather small amounts. It has been raining for hours, so a very long day for the deckhands. Here are some pics of their hard work.

Very well stowed cable to port...Luis and Juan

....and very well stowed to starboard. Paco and Rubén

From left to right, Rubén, Paco, Juan and Luis in horrendous weather

 

And the icing on the cake: this iceberg we saw last evening, photo courtesy of Eduardo. 

Iceberg. Photo Eduardo López