Today is St. Nicholas Day and my birthday. Saint Nicholas has been busy during the night, and yesterday he actually came all the way from Holland and brought us beautiful stationary with expedition stamps, and on top of all that he had even written a poem!
Last night I could not wait for the morning after all, so I curiously looked at all the little presents my loved ones had smuggled into my sea chest (it was shortly after Midnight and therefore already the 6th :-). I got some really nice surprises and enjoyed them very much, and when I got on deck this morning to see what my fellow scientists had collected with their first box cores and multicorers and whether they had been successful (all of them were), I kept running into even more little gifts.
How lucky I was! Everybody said happy birthday, and all day long I got nice presents. It was my first birthday on Polarstern, and it was wonderful — thanks so much!!
As we are on station, I was on duty all day and could only sit down to write this report after midnight. My first task was to run the Agassiz trawl with Dorte, who wants to learn how to do this. Neptune was very gracious, and Dorte could bring a nice haul on deck during teatime. A towed gear needs about 4500m of deep-sea cable (which, by the way, has an impressive diameter of 18 mm) to trawl in 3000m depth. A station thus takes about 5 hours, and once we work in greater depths, it will take even longer.
In the net there was very little mud, which consisted of globigerines and foraminiferans, small unicellular organisms, and plants, and within that mud the big megabenthic animals were found. These included at least 6 different species of sea cucumbers, many starfish and brittle stars, a sea anemone, fish, isopods, amphipods and many other things.
One of the most bizarre animals was a 30 cm long, flat, purple sea cucumber which reminded me instantly of the Swiss deep sea researcher Jacques Piccard who reached the sea floor in 10,916 m depth in the Mariana Trench with his submersible “Trieste”. Quite excitedly he reported from the deep: “...during the last stretch I discovered something wonderful. Exactly beneath us there lay a flatfish, quite like a sole, about 30 cm long and 15 cm wide...” I wonder if Jacques Piccard possibly could have seen such a sea cucumber.
The epibenthic sled just came out of the water, the sampling was successful!
A. Brandt, University of Hamburg
Photos: A. Brandt, University of Hamburg, and V. Wadley, australian Antarctic Division