By Holly Bik, PhD Student, The Natural History Museum, London
Well, we’ve only got a few more days of ‘science’ left on this cruise, so we’re trying to pack in as much work as possible before we have to start the weeklong steam back to the UK. We’ve been battling against weather and time for four weeks now, trying to collect as much data (and as many animals) as possible for everyone’s research. It is always difficult to get the right balance of work to satisfy everyone’s sampling requirements—things inevitably go wrong with the equipment sometimes, or the weather gets so rough that we can’t get any work done. There’s not much you can do in these situations except dance around in a circle, offer up some deep-sea mud to Poseidon, and cross your fingers that things will go according to plan.
As we near the end of the cruise, everyone is starting to plan their imminent return home. Our conversations have recently centred around our ‘firsts’ once we get back port. We miss our families/partners/children, our huge comfy beds with feather pillows and duvets, driving around in our cars, and walking our dogs (who sadly weren’t allowed to come onboard). We even miss the sight of trees. Or any discernible landscape features, for that matter. Personally, I really miss cooking. Don’t get me wrong—the onboard chefs are amazing, and I have been privy to some amazing pieces of cake over the past four weeks—but I would just like to chop some vegetables and stir them in a pot. I also miss the radio (the music library on my laptop has got quite the sore workout this past month, and it will be nice to have some more variety).
Alas, I digress with my dreams of dry land. We’ve had two straight days of trawling, with a few more planned in the next few days (hopefully). Yesterday was quite the interesting catch. There was a bit of a scare when the trawl got tangled up during the night—we were hoping the equipment would come up ok, and we waited with baited breath until 10am. Finally, it came up, but the catch was…MUD. We couldn’t even see the animals when we emptied the net—nevermind that, we couldn’t even fit the trawl catch into a bucket. The net was so bulging and full of mud that we ended up just emptying it onto the ship’s deck. We had to scoop it all into buckets (an arduous task that filled many, many buckets) and wash out all the mud before we could extract the fish and invertebrates. Needless to say, everyone was so dirty by the end of it that most of us had to be hosed down before we were allowed to go inside. There was mud everywhere—even on our faces and our hair—although a lot of that was put there deliberately. Many of us had our faces streaked with ‘war paint’. Of course, after all the fun we still had to separate all the different taxa and identify the species. We didn’t finish until well after dinnertime!
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- The Muddy Trawl, bulging at the seams. That hose doesn’t seem to be very effective…
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- So heavy, it took all these people to manoevre it.
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- Mud, mud everywhere (can you see it oozing through?)
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- The catch wouldn’t fit in buckets, so we had no choice but to spill it out on deck.
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- The aftermath: Shovelling the mud into buckets so we can wash away the sediment and uncover our catch!
