Home / Blog / Diving offshore and more bottom samples

June 8, 2012

Diving offshore and more bottom samples

BY: Christina Abel

Topics: 

 

Christina Abel - Marine scientistAfter having a day with nice weather yesterday, today is foggy, windy, and rainy. Our plan for today is to make a scuba dive near a buoy in Kattegat and collect more bottom samples. The divers jumped into the big waves from the zodiac, and found an exposed sandy bottom, with many starfish, but else not much life. Thereafter we continued towards east, to go to the spot where we earlier have found the little, tube-building crustacean Haploops. We did a couple of bottom samples; one had plenty of Haploops tubes, and the other without any. However, the latter contained lots of animals, including a phosphorescent sea pen, which we have seen earlier with the ROV. As the campaigner onboard it is my duty to go through these samples; it is definitely interesting, but also very time consuming as one sample can take hours to go through, especially here in Kattegat where biodiversity is higher than in the Baltic Sea. As we took half a dozen bottom samples yesterday evening and a couple of more today, the samples are piling up, and I will definitely not get bored the coming days.