What did you have for lunch today?

Oh my, we are running so late with the blog today! We are very busy, you see… we already got two hauls and we are now casting the first CTD of the day. By the way, do not think Eva just jumped out of bed, she has been all morning typing data, but that’s another story.

First of all everybody up and singing "Happy birthday" to Paco, a Vizconde de Eza crew member. Here's to you, Paco! We wish you a very happy birthday even though we may not be your choice company to spend this day.

We have three trawlers ahead of us, one of them from Portugal, called Santa Isabel, the other two appear nameless.

So far we have a small catch, but the species composition is changing, a bit more of American plaice, a bit less of yellowtail flounder. A few large cod, but do not run for your gear because they have been very few: just seven of them.



This is Paco



Beautiful cod caught this morning

Skates caught early this morning

I have decided to focus on the stomach sampling team today and while shooting and hauling I have been running up and down trying to get descriptive pictures. One of these days I will have to devote the blog to myself and tell what do I do.

If you just had your lunch or coffee you may want to look at the pictures later, if you don’t like them be thankful you cannot smell the stuff, which has a very characteristic odour. Yolanda and Javier started with this right after breakfast. And at least this ship does not work during the night, but I have been in surveys where each team worked 2 six hours shifts and this is what you got at six in the morning, straight out of bed.

The stomach content is identified with as much detail as possible, which depends of how digested each item is. Sometimes fish found in stomachs are good enough as to even measure them, other times it is necessary to count vertebrae, check otolith or look out for other features that aid to identify the species. In the case of small crustacean preys some times there are only pairs of eyes left for counting...so as you can see this kind of sampling requires a good eye and detective skills.

Scroll down for further explanations in the  picture legends.

 

This is what cod breakfast looks like

The guys, sorting the catch.






This was in the stomach of one of the large cod (10 kg), the weight of the stomach content was about 500 g



Three capelin at different digestion stages









Of this fish only the bones remained, but it can be identified from the otolith, the little white "bone" up to the right. Actually it is a calcareous structure found in the inner ear.