What a summer!
Now that we're back and starting the new academic year, it seems like a good time to highlight a few of the big events that took place over the summer!
After kicking off the summer with the 2026 Gulf Conference and our 11th DEEPEND research cruise,
we took a short pause for breath, and then Tracey Sutton and I headed out to the inaugural MIDSEC meeting, held in a beautiful castle in Sweden. This meeting was held over the course of 5 days and brought together a number of world-leading scientists and engineers from the midwater research community across all career stages for the first time. Organized by Dr. Karen Osborne, we got to hear a range of presentations discussing the current state(s) of the art in midwater research over the course of the six-day residential meeting, including talks by some true giants and pioneers of the field, such as Drs. Edie Widder and Bruce Robison, as well as several talks from the next generation of PhD students and post-docs who are entering the field for the first time. A few of us from the DEEPEND consortium were in attendance to talk about the lessons we've learned from the Gulf of Mexico after 16 years of effort. Deep-pelagic ecology is a relatively young and emergent field, but I think that by the end of the MIDSEC meeting we all felt like we were part of a real field of ecology and I'm excited to see how the community develops over the coming years.
A couple of photos from the MIDSEC meeting
After MIDSEC, we got a well-earned pause through July for catching up on a bit of research, and then it was back to sea for our third and final Deep-Sea Benefits Cruise. Under this research program, we're extending our studies of the Gulf's deep pelagic realm to better understand the oceanic rim, a region between the continental shelf and the offshore space, and essentially the space where we transition from inshore to offshore ecosystems and communities. We brought many of the core DEEPEND team with us as usual, and were once again lucky enough to be joined by the Davies Lab team from URI and their lander, Wall-E. We used the benthic lander to target specific locations at the seafloor and gather oceanographic and imaging data which we will hopefully use (alongside DNA and active acoustic data) to generate a more complete picture of the organisms in this zone, from the surface to the seafloor.
The DSB3 team, the ALBEX lander (Wall-E), our MOCNESS and a couple of photos of the catches. I am the stand-in specimen photographer for these cruises - you can see more of those (non cell phone) images in the gallery
The last bit of good news from the summer is that our big research paper describing the patterns of faunal decline has been provisionally accepted for publication by PNAS. This paper has been years in the making, and we're really excited to see it moving towards publication! The paper itself is under embargo for the moment, but I'll have a more detailed update for you all once it's printed and available to read, so watch this space for updates:
Sutton, T.T., Milligan, R.J., Cook, A.B., Boswell, K.M., Bracken-Grissom, H., Frank, T., Judkins, H., Moore, J.A., Romero, I., Vecchione, M., D’Elia, M., Johnston, M.W., Peres, P., Pruzinsky, N.M., Quinlan, J.A., Warren, J.D., and Hahn, D.R. (accepted). Immense but not immutable: A sudden and sustained decline in deep-pelagic life in a large oceanic ecosystem. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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