UPDATE: Our connections with the boat are running perfectly now that we’ve figured out that the Museum’s spam filter was the culprit, and so we’re going to quickly play catch-up with the blog posts now starting with a message from Friday night. There have been some great finds over the weekend and some fantastic pics have come in – just a little bit jealous of the team on the ship!
It’s 8.30 pm on Friday night, and it’s still all action out on deck. The land team visited two islands today (more on their adventures tomorrow), and the marine team did two fish collecting dives and also went fishing in a big intertidal rock pool. The fish folk are now busy processing their catch of the day on the back deck – there’s usually four of them lined up, sorting the fish by type and size, measuring them, recording all the details, and then giving every specimen a unique identifying number before they are variously frozen, or preserved in formalin or ethanol.
The fish folk are now busy processing their catch of the day on the back deck
Mandy and Stephen, the marine invertebrate team, are busy entering information in their database. As well as collecting their own material other people have been bringing them various shells (including a poisonous cone shell), crabs, pretty nudibranchs and even an octopus. I promise to tell you more soon!
Clinton reports that he seen a few Galapagos sharks while swimming his underwater transects but he’s not sure where all the spotted black grouper are hanging out – they certainly come in to check out the action when lots of divers are in the water. There are a good number of sharks swimming around the boat tonight, no doubt attracted by fish that are in turn attracted by the boat lights. Clinton has been catching a few of those to take small biopsy samples, and I was out on deck earlier when he pulled in a 1.5 metre-long male.
Clinton puts a Galapagos shark into a temporary state of “tonic immobility” ready to take a biopsy
Malcolm and Clinton had been talking earlier about the fact they were seeing only female sharks, so they were interested to see this immature male (it had very small claspers, which is how they could tell both that it was a male but not yet a grown-up shark). Clinton wrestled it upside – down, at which point the shark went very quiet, a state known as tonic immobility. Ged quickly took a small sample of tissue from its back, and then the shark was quickly returned to the water, very much alive and kicking.
