The winch is fixed, the ship is at sea, and the icefishes came out to greet us. Well, not exactly. We tracked them down. We had a good fishing trip and got what we needed. The whole process is a lot of work but also so interesting. One round takes a little over an hour. The trawl is lowered to the bottom which takes about 20 minutes. Then the ship drags the trawl along the seafloor for 20 minutes, and then it takes another 20 minutes to slowly raise the net up.
You can see the trawl coming in. The silver metal doors are visible. We are very popular with the sea birds when we trawl. We even had some penguins tailing along for a while just waiting for the potential morsels being tossed overboard.
After that we swing into action and get the fish out of the trawl into the aquarium. NO TIME TO WASTE. Everybody else gets tossed back into the ocean.
This is the net that comes up from the deep. We open it up as quickly as possible as there are so many animals, plants, and mud crammed in there. Julie, a marine tech, and I are opening up the trawl. Photo by Harry Snyder
You can get a sense of how many different types of animals come up and how jam packed it is. Again - speed is critical once the trawl comes up. That's an icefish I am holding on the left. Can you see the octopus? Photo by Harry Snyder
We set up a series of water-filled tubs so we can get the fish into water as quickly as possible. They are then transferred to specific tanks in the aquarium.
Here are the tubs lined up to the aquarium door.
I really like this picture because it gives you a sense of the speed and urgency needed to get the fish into the tanks. The icefishes are pretty fragile and need to get back into cold waters quickly.
You never know what all will be in the net. This is an octopus that came up in the trawl. In a future journal I'll put some pictures of all the beautiful creatures we saw. I didn't have much time for pictures this trip as we were pretty busy.
And a thank you to Harry, who took some great pictures of this trawl for me!