We Found Krill!!

One of the Krill from our nets!

Yesterday, we carried out a MOCNESS tow and found some krill! What is a MOCNESS you ask? MOCNESS stands for Multiple Open and Closing Net with an Environmental Sensing System. The MOCNESS is designed to easily sample the entire water column. When one net closes the next one opens so when we bring the MOCNESS to the surface we have 9 different nets that represent different areas of the water column. For acoustic data it is important to ground truth, or show that the backscatter that you

see on the computer actually represents your target organism. The MOCNESS allows us to do this quite accurately. Our MOCNESS tow went well with very little setbacks. We caught a lot of krill of all sizes. The biggest krill seemed to be at the bottom of the water column, and they got smaller as we got closer to the surface which matches what our acoustic data suggested. We didn’t only catch Krill, we also got a lot of Salps at the surface, and some Ctenophores and Amphipods. We even got a couple of small fish! After we bring the nets on board we empty our nets into buckets and then put the contents in jars and preserve them for later sizing and counting. All in all it was great to be able to see krill in person and confirm that the scattering we are seeing are patches of krill.Yesterday, we carried out a MOCNESS tow and found some krill! What is a MOCNESS you ask? MOCNESS stands for Multiple Open and Closing Net with an Environmental Sensing System. The MOCNESS is designed to easily sample the entire water column. When one net closes the next one opens so when we bring the MOCNESS to the surface we have 9 different nets that represent different areas of the water column. For Acoustic data it is important to ground truth, or show that the backscatter that you see on the computer actually represents your target organism. The MOCNESS allows us to do this quite accurately. Our MOCNESS tow went well with very little setbacks. We caught a lot of krill of all sizes. The biggest krill seemed to be at the bottom of the water column, and they got smaller as we got closer to the surface which matches what our acoustic data suggested. We didn’t only catch Krill, we also got a lot of Salps at the surface, and some Ctenophores and Amphipods. We even got a couple of small fish! After we bring the nets on board we empty our nets into buckets and then put the contents in jars and preserve them for later sizing and counting. All in all it was great to be able to see krill in person and confirm that the scattering we are seeing are patches of krill.

Deploying the MOCNESS (from left to right)

Dr. Gareth Lawson, Nick Woods, Wu-Jung Lee, and Dave Nelson

Photo Credit: Peter Wiebe

Recovering the MOCNESS : spraying down the nets

and putting the organisms in buckets

(from left to right)

Wu-Jung Lee, Nick Woods, and me!

Photo credit: Peter Wiebe