Another Great Cruise in the Books!

Sunset over the Gulf of Mexico from the back deck of the RV Point Sur

We're just back from our second cruise for the Deep-Sea Benefits Program. In this research program, we're studying the deep-pelagic boundary communities that live around the shelf break at key locations of conservation interest in the norther Gulf of Mexico. Our first cruise was in September last year, where we visited locations of interest at Desoto Canyon and Viosca Knoll (interrupted briefly by Hurricane Francine which sent us to take shelter in Pensacola for a couple of days), and then we were back in August this year to revisit those two sites, and also check out a new location further west near the Texan shelf. Using the same 10-m2 MOCNESS (Multiple Opening-Closing Net and Environmental Sensing System) that we use to survey the offshore Gulf under the DEEPEND and DEEPEND|RESTORE programs we targeted organisms living closer to the seafloor and will match those net catches with acoustic data collected at the same time, to get a better idea of how to characterize these shelf-edge locations and assess their potential ecological importance as notable spawning or feeding grounds for example. We also had Dr. Andrew Davies and Dr. Jane Carrick sailing with us from the University of Rhode Island and the MDBC program to deploy their lander Wall-E and gather continuous data over a 12-day period while we collected samples with the MOC10. Now that we're back, we will be busy analyzing the data over the winter ready for next year's field season!

Some of the equipment used on this cruise. From left to right: Our CTD with eDNA pump; the WALL-E benthic lander (operated by Dr. Andrew Davies, URI); the 10-2 MOCNESS with nets that allow us to sample specific depth ranges.

To learn more about the details of the work we did at sea this month, you can check out the official cruise blog at the DEEPEND | RESTORE project website, which starts here: https://restore.deependconsortium.org/index.php/cruises/cruiseblog/492-lander-ho

To learn more about the Mesophotic and Deep Benthic Communities projects, visit: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/southeast/habitat-conservation/mesophotic-and-deep-benthic-communities-restoration.

To learn more about the Deep-Sea Benefits project, visit: https://www.gulfspillrestoration.noaa.gov/project?id=350.