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July 1, 2013

Monday 1 July 2013

BY: Carlos Minguell

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© OCEANA / Carlos Minguell

 

The first of July is a diving day. Based on the findings of the two previous ROVs in the area, Hanna decided to perform two dives in Norrskar´s vicinity. The first dive gave us the usual picture of dead and dying fish: struck by the fact that in every dive, besides small dead fish bodies, we always find gasping fish. I hadn´t seen that before, not even in the Baltic; bad feeling…

The good part is that I found a tiny nudibranch between the ubiquitous algae, it is the first nudibranch we have seen in a 3-year campaign in the zone. It is a Tenellia adspersa and is one of few species of nudibranch described for the Baltic, so it is not surprising we hadn´t seen it before.

The second dive was next to a net that drew our attention towards it due to its large mesh. It made a wall of hundreds of meters from the surface to a depth of three meters to the bottom and ended in another kind of trammel net with a smaller mesh size. Under the mesh we found  salmon remains. Probably it is a fishing gear used to catch these fish and the remains are fish that were “stolen” from the net and eaten by seals. I guess the fishermen of this area are not exactly big fans of seals.