Animals

We continue bagging hauls. There is room for improvement, but we are covering strata. Yesterday we did all kinds of things. We completed two strata – some of the smallest, yes -, one of them cost us snagging the gear. That meant that the deckhands had to spend more time on deck than usual, in a horribly cold weather. The guys in the engine room have also had their hands full. The catches are not yet those of earlier years but they are improving. The gannets disappeared, I only saw one late in the evening. The day was overcast or foggy, and it rained in the evening. It makes such a difference not to feel cold indoors!

Ramón, chief engineer, Suso and Juan fixing the

Fixing the gear. Alberto, Javier and David, but all deckhands worked on this.

After our haul at 1000m we spent the rest of the day fishing between 150 and 550 m. Except for the first haul, all the others brought redfish, up to a few tons. But this catch was the exception. In general total catches were well below 1 t and were very mixed. We got some juvenile cod, around 30 cm and we have also caught three white halibut, one of them quite nice. Mixed with the redfish there were roughhead grenadiers and that ugly fish called blue antimora.

But today I have decided to give invertebrates the stage. Yesterday we caught some gastropods called Buccinum undatum - common whelks - but they were all very small, below 5 cm in length. This species grows quite large, it is not uncommon to find specimens with shells longer than 10 cm. They are carnivores, and they use their siphon (that protuberance pointing upwards) to detect the presence of prey, which they "smell" thanks to their chemoreceptors. They eat other invertebrates and with their radula (a mouth part similar to a tongue covered with tiny teeth) they can even pierce bivalve shells. Whelks are also scavengers, and they arrive quickly to trawl tracks after fishing operations to feed on the wounded or dead animals left behind. In short, this lovely snail has a reputation as a serial killer back home.

A small common whelk - about 4 cm in shell length

And this is what common whelk eggs look like

A small shark (black dogfish) for Marcos

Fergus doing his thing: hopefully he will give me tomorrow a chance for a better pic.

We have also got a few grams of a soft coral called Gersemia. Corals are colonial animals, and they are made up of many polyps that share connective tissue. Each polyp has a ring of tentacles (eight in the case of soft corals). They use them to capture zooplankton and direct it to the central opening, which functions both as mouth and anus, although not simoultaneously. Nobody is perfect. There is a close relative of this coral in Antarctica, which happens to bear the name Gersemia antarctica, and I have found in an article (Slattery, McClintock & Bowser, 1997) that instead of waiting for food to reach its tentacles, it is able to bend over and pick it up from the seabottom. This is not what we are taught to do, but I guess that when one of your body parts doubles as mouth and anus there is no reason to be picky about eating straight from the floor...

Gersemia sp