Back at Sea for the DEEPEND program

We're back out in the Gulf this week, collecting more time-series data for our long-term study of the deep-pelagic fauna. We've been studying this region for the past 15 years now, and now have the single largest deep-pelagic collection of micronekton (fishes and shrimp mostly) anywhere in the world. Through this program, we study the long-term dynamics of the communities present in the deep midwater (0 - 1500 m depth), how they are impacted by natural environmental variability (e.g., ocean currents), and how their populations may change in the future.

All of the organisms that we collect during these cruises are carefully identified by our team of taxonomic experts (led by Tracey Sutton, Tammy Frank, Jon Moore, Mike Vecchione, Heather Judkins), recorded, and stored in our collections for future study. We also collect active acoustic data (team led by Kevin Boswell), genetic data (team led by Heather Bracken-Grissom), and chemical analyses (team led by Isabel Romero). I help run the MOCNESS system while we're at sea to actually collect the samples we use, but my major role all this comes once we get back to shore and I can get my hands on the datasets to run the analyses on the trawl data! We have a couple of new papers out from DEEPEND this year already, and hope to have a couple more out in the coming months once they make it through the review process. As always, you can see what we're working on on the lab's publications page.

This cruise is our 11th of the research program, and you can follow our progress at the official cruise blog here: https://restore.deependconsortium.org/index.php/cruises/cruiseblog