I had a chance tonight to work at the photographic station as a data logger. My job was to watch the HD video feed and instruct the DSC (Digital Still Camera) to snap a photo whenever anything interesting floated, swam, or crawled by (for my biology classes, that would be: ‘plankton’, ‘nekton’, and ‘benthos’ respectively). The photo is automatically logged as soon as the picture is taken (tagging it with time, location, and depth) and I had to add in a brief explanation of what was in the picture. Last night the majority of my comments were simply “Shark”, as we saw a large number of them.
What is really amazing, deep down in the ocean, is the sheer volume of particulate matter and plankton in the water column. As the pilots maneuvered ROPOS along its course, it was as if we were flying through a blizzard. And within this marine snowstorm, the photo logger’s job was to quickly identify the macroscopic marine life from the ‘snow’ and grab a picture before the object of interest drifted or swam out of view.
Blog post and photo by Scott Doehler
Marine Educator
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