Barnacles and sponges from the seafloor

The video shows the so called beam trawl being pulled up on board and emptied. Samples are taken into the laboratory for sorting. Kareen Schnabel shows some of the species that were found and talks about the scientist’s expectations.

Points of interest for teachers:

• Students can take note of the shape of the beam trawl and the contents; note the high content of mud in the net.

• Talk about the types of species that were caught in the beam trawl.

Transcript

KAREEN SCHNABEL

We have an idea of what is probably down there from the camera trawls we did earlier and it’s pretty clear that the bottom contains a lot of these broken and old coral pieces and barnacle hash - these are valves of large Antarctic barnacles and amongst that there was a number of different sponges that are quite distinct, yellow, yellow sponges, relatively small and lots of glass sponges that contain spicules that are made of silica, they are very - they go right through the gloves. And also we can also see and we’ve got some really nice specimens this time, sea slaters or isopods that are quite large and quite magnificent to look at. The under side - you see them hovering just above the ocean floor, in the video camera. And then the usual sea stars and some of the precious coral that we see growing on the rocks - this was obviously broken off.

So overall I think this trawl represents a good number of the species we have been seeing, so this was exactly what we were expecting.