MAR-ECO Research Cruise

[Tintenfisch]

:periscop:

Having been offline for what feels like years, I'll now drop in again for about a week... during the CIAC Symposium, I was offered the chance to join an upcoming MAR-ECO (http://www.mar-eco.no/) research expedition to the South Atlantic! Good stuff: (other than the obvious going to sea for five weeks and looking at really cool stuff as it comes up :heee:): I'm working on a couple of groups with little reported material from this area; it will be my first time on a proper researchy-type ship (and what a ship (http://www.alvoyages.com/ships/akademik-ioffe/3/) it is (http://www.quarkexpeditions.com/our-fleet/akademik-ioffe)!); and I kind of like the ocean a little bit. Not so good stuff: I will have been back from the previous trip less than three weeks and will leave the day before our first anniversary. :hmm:
We will depart from Las Palmas (Canaries) on 25 October and return into Cape Town on 30 November, zig-zagging our way down the mid-Atlantic Ridge (I believe) and stopping at ten planned stations for nine samples each (three each benthic, midwater and surface). Still working out the exact plan for processing ceph specimens - I have wish lists from about five people so far. :roll:
Not sure how much web access there will be once we depart, but hopefully email at least, so I can send Steve updates!

:boat:

[monty]

Congrats!

[Nancy]

What a wonderful opportunity! Nice ship, too! Am looking forward to your reports (emails to Steve, at least) and to lots of interesting photos!

Nancy

[DWhatley]

Awsome! Just AWSOME!!!

I am not so sure about the gift shop :confused: and all the talk about ice :rolleyes: (We need a polar cepth smiley for you and Greg now).

[gjbarord]

Sounds great!! Looking at that ship makes me not want to get back on my little boats. Have fun!!

Greg

[Jean]

Have a great trip.......totally jealous!

J

[Architeuthoceras]

Enjoy :boat:

[Tintenfisch]

Thanks, I will do my best to send some reports here while I'm on board! Assuming we don't :sink: ...

[DWhatley]

It would be a rather unfortunate event if you happened to prove that there are squid/octos that could sink ships. Always wear your camera so if we find you it can be published that you were the first to film it live. :sagrin:

[DWhatley]

For anyone who has not found it, I went looking for news of Tintenfisch and found the Akademik Ioffe (her ship) journal (http://www.mar-eco.no/Shiptoshore/akademik_ioffe_2009)for this trip.


No whales were sighted today, but hundreds of flying fish have leapt and glided away from the ship's hull (Kat caught one of them in mid-air in this beautiful photo).

10051

[monty]

she's been posting updates on her blog (http://newinkspot.wordpress.com/tag/voyage-2009/) as well.

[Tintenfisch]

Hi guys! Wow, things have changed around here...
The cruise was good fun and there were lots of interesting little cephs to play with. I'll post some photos here soon (after I work out the new format maybe :wink:); I'm also finally getting some posted on my blog (thanks for the link above, Monty). We got ~270 specimens, 44 species from 22 families in total, 25% of which were cranchiids. Also a few onychos, enoplos and histios, gelatinous octos, and some single individuals of rarer stuff like Neoteuthis and Vampyroteuthis. Plenty of stuff to work on now that I'm back!

[OB]

Welcome back, Kat :smile:

[Tintenfisch]

OK, sorry it took me a little while to start posting these. Here are some photos of cephs from the cruise. All the cephs we got were paralarval/juvenile, less than 50mm total length, most ML <20mm.
This is Pterygioteuthis gemmata (http://tolweb.org/Pterygioteuthis_gemmata/19750), which we found in every single midwater sample except one - out of ~270 cephs, we had 86 P. gemmata specimens. It's a really beautiful little squid (mature at ML ~30mm) and the photophores are like fire opals.

[Tintenfisch]

And here are some cranchiids. Bearing in mind that the family is in serious need of revision and ID of juvenile specimens is provisional as best, we think we have (in order): Galiteuthis (http://tolweb.org/Galiteuthis/19557) armata, Liocranchia reinhardti (http://tolweb.org/Liocranchia_reinhardti/19596), and Cranchia scabra (http://tolweb.org/Cranchia/19542). The final one is a small ommastrephid that we also got at most stations but haven't ID'd to species yet.

[Tintenfisch]

Here are some non-ceph but still very cool things. The first is what our catches normally looked like - the fish team would sort out their beasts first and pass the rest on to us. We pulled out all the cephs, ID'd and fixed them, and fixed the rest (crustaceans, jellies, salps, pteropods, etc) for someone else to look at later back on shore. The remaining photos are hatchetfish (also common), the barrel-shrimp Phronima (hollows out salps to live in, pretty cool), and a deep-sea ?viperfish caught mid-snack.

[DWhatley]

Interesting bright red shrimp. They look too bright to be peppermint shrimp but are they? Are there any shallow water cranchiids? Is the one with the green background still alive?

[bluespotocto]

How did you collect every thing? Did you dive?

Not sure where to match the name with the fish but what is the black fish with the little thing on his heads name? It looks like the fish from finding nemo!

[OB]

That Pterygioteuthis is marvelous, a "gem" indeed :wink: Relatively unscathed, considering the harvesting technique, but I take it the hatchet fish lost their tails that way?

[Tintenfisch]

These were collected with an Isaacs-Kidd Midwater Trawl (IKMT), which is pretty fine-meshed, a few hundred microns I believe. It was deployed either to the scattering layer(s) or to a set depth, usually 1000 or 2000m. Most of the stuff came in in pretty good condition, and many of the cephs were still alive (barely). Those we kept, if still active when caught, were gradually euthanized in ethanol before being fixed in formalin. By the end of the cruise, we got a few still-healthy individiuals from taxa we already had well represented, so we were able to release a few. I think the black fish is a kind of viperfish but I'm not sure... the Russians called it something else. :wink:
And there aren't any shallow-dwelling cranchiids that I can think of off-hand. I'll post a few more pics later today - there were some mighty strange-looking ones! Angel Perez, the other squid guy, mentioned that cranchiids are supposed to be the dominant ceph fauna in relatively nutrient-poor environments, which I found interesting. (And Meso might be an exception, as usual?)

[DWhatley]

Those are the darndest looking critters. A shame there are not at least some that could be kept in at least a public aquarium.

[Tintenfisch]

Here are a couple more cranchiids - first Liocranchia reinhardti (http://tolweb.org/Liocranchia_reinhardti/19596) and a close-up of its ventral tubercles, then Egea inermis (http://tolweb.org/Egea_inermis/19563) (as best we could figure).

[Tintenfisch]

And these are Abraliopsis (http://tolweb.org/Abraliopsis/19644) sp. (family Enoploteuthidae (http://tolweb.org/enoploteuthidae/19634)) with progressive zooms on the beautiful ventral photophores.

[DWhatley]

I just love those little cranchiids. Can you imagine an aquarium with several dozen zipping about with light catching their little opals? Or a huge night lit tank with hundreds. It would so get the attention of visitors.

Don't ask why my mind works this way but driving home from my interview the following decomposition of "Home on the Range" came to mind as I was thinking of your seafaring adventure:

Oh, give me a ride
to the octopus side
Where the squid and the nautilus play

Where bubbles are heard
instead of a word
And the sea remains tranquil all day.

:tomato:

[monty]

ventral tubercles? What are those for? Or are they just an anatomical feature for which the physiology isn't known?

[sorseress]

Some great photos! Fascinating stuff.

[Tintenfisch]

ventral tubercles? What are those for? Or are they just an anatomical feature for which the physiology isn't known?

Well... they're very handy for identification purposes... :wink: but I'm not sure whether their function (if any) is known; good question. They're the hallmark feature of the subfamily Cranchiinae (http://tolweb.org/Cranchiinae/19540).

[Tintenfisch]

Hi guys! Long time quiet on this material - sorry. I just started a new lecturing contract at AUT, half teaching, half research. So, finally back to working on the MAR-ECO stuff. I just checked all the cranchiid IDs and come up with a few things we didn't realize we had - Taonius (http://tolweb.org/Taonius/19558) (craziest eyes of any squid!) and Megalocranchia (http://tolweb.org/Megalocranchia/19562), among others. We decided to do some closer investigation of the cranchiid fauna, specifically looking at the tentacle clubs using SEM, so thought I might post a couple of the nicer shots here.

[DWhatley]

In the second SEM, what are the tiny drawn-up anemone looking things lining the sucker? Is that a genetically misplaced one on the right side?

[Tintenfisch]

Those are (creatively) called 'pegs' and they are part of the tentacular sucker ring armature in young squids of many families. I think they were first reported by Degner (1925), and they have been examined in detail by a few authors, notably Nixon & Dilly (1977, see ref below). Their function isn't entirely understood but they may improve the sucker surface's adhesion. In onychoteuthids, some of the suckers like this develop into hooks and the portion with the pegs is lost entirely, but while the suckers are in this stage, the arrangement and number of pegs seems to be a useful character for telling paralarvae apart (see attached photos).

Nixon, M. & Dilly, P.N. 1977. Sucker surfaces and prey capture. Symposium of the Zoological Society of London, 38, 447–511.

[DWhatley]

I can't envison how small these are. Are they on octopus suckers as well?

[Tintenfisch]

D, they're tiny! Tenths to hundredths of a millimeter across. The scale bars are 20 microns (0.02mm) in the first and third photos, and 0.5mm in the second.
Octopus suckers don't have hard sucker rings in them like squid suckers do (see attached photo borrowed from this site (http://www.marinebio.net/marinescience/03ecology/tptre.htm)) - they're just flat, fleshy discs, so no pegs. Although someone just mentioned on this thread (http://www.tonmo.com/forums/showthread.php?21421-Beaks) that there is some chitin in octo suckers as well (http://www.scopus.com/record/display.url?eid=2-s2.0-0000178838&origin=inward&txGid=9BNwwxJMv2aLJH-G5R6yvgp%3a2).

[DWhatley]

I did not think octos had them but I knew they were so tiny that I might not see them on the octos. Do the squid shed the lining of their suckers then? In the octos we see a small "skin" disk with a hole in the center but with these pegs, a single piece is unlikely.

Since the surfaces are so different, is this part of the diagnositic to determine squid vs octopus in some of the stranger species?

[Tintenfisch]

Not the pegs per se - just the presence/absence of sucker rings. I think Steve usually says in his talks that the only character that is guaranteed to differ between squid and octos is the sucker ring - there are octos with fins, and shells, and squid without tentacles, but every squid has sucker rings (or hooks) and no octo does.

Sucker rings are not shed routinely, but they will regrow (along with the new sucker) if the whole sucker is lost. Not sure whether a ring would regenerate in a sucker where just the ring had been lost (anyone know?). Hooks that are lost will go through the whole ontogenetic series too - regrowing as suckers and then transforming into hooks, assuming the remaining lifespan is long enough. Here's a regenerating tentacle club in Onykia robusta (D) and the opposite intact/undamaged club (C). Scale bars = 10mm (from memory).