Hi everyone!  Heather J here to share that the DEEPEND team has made it to their homes today-  we spent some time breaking down the lab, nets, and acoustics Tuesday and Wednesday, loading the truck and helped packed the last samples this morning at 3:30 am. Whew!

Hello, deep-sea enthusiasts! It is Pedro A. Peres again with one more post on the blog. Today, I will talk more about metabarcoding environmental DNA (a long and fancy name for eDNA) being used to answer questions about the deep sea.

By Aedan Mell

Hello, I am a research technician from the Marine Ecology and Acoustics Lab at FIU under Professor Boswell. I just graduated last spring with my bachelors and now I’m taking some time to gain more experience before graduate school. I got the opportunity to come along on this trip to help out with the acoustic transect surveys. We have 4 echosounders each transmitting adifferent frequency to allow us to observe Diel Vertical Migration, the largest animal migration on Earth that happens every day. It describes the synchronized vertical movement of deep sea animals and zooplankton to the surface at night to feed on phytoplankton. With our echosounders, we can observe this phenomenon as deep scattering layers that we can track vertically over the course of a 24-hour period.

Hello everyone! My name is Zachary Strebeck and I am a graduate student in Dr Tammy Frank’s deep-sea crustacean lab. I have spent a large amount of time identifying different deep-sea shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico down to species level!

Photo:  Zach; Photo credit: Savannah Strebeck