Larsen doesn't reveal itself easily... (1)

20.03.2011
Blog by Charlotte Havermans

After a successful week of sampling in the Larsen A and B area, we continued our way a little bit further south close to the Larsen C, which is still covered by a thick ice-shelf but it’s surrounding, being still pristine and undisturbed, served as a control area. By investigating its shelf fauna, we could see if it could be a recruitment area for colonizing Larsen A and B, after the ice-shelf collapsed a few years ago. Surprisingly, the Agassiz and bottom trawls filled with mud and stones were very poor of benthic organisms and fish. This could explain the slow colonization process of the other areas.

Some days, the sea is like a mirror.

Seals in their habitat.

Our traps... trapped

We also deployed our amphipod trap, which stayed at the bottom for 48 hours. When we came back to retrieve our traps, we had to face the fact that a huge sheet of ice was covering the area. This would have been a big problem for recovering them if we could not rely on the expertise of the captain and crew who made the ship liberating the area by breaking the ice all around. We were incredibly happy to see our traps, with the self-made museum flag, appearing at the surface!! To make the picture even more complete, five curious emperor penguins were watching the whole scene from an iceberg close to the ship.

We recovered four big buckets full of small scavenger amphipods. After counting a sub sample of this catch, we estimated that we had more than 20000 amphipods!! Some of them were fixed for DNA analysis, and the rest will be used by an Italian research team for physiological experiments and also for feeding experiments for other teams working on fish.