Where have you been? While "the lab" is where I spend most of my day most days, last week I was fortunate enough to be able to join the Seawolf as crew for one of their trawl series and work in the glorious outdoors. Granted, I now am very sore, very tired, and very behind in the lab, I still had a blast.
So- what is a trawl? Well, it is a giant weighted net that you drag behind a big powerful boat and capture everything that happens to be unfortunate enough to be in front of it but behind the boat. I would equate it to clear cutting a swath of forest to figure out what birds, mammals and insects live there or removing the top of a mountain to mine its minerals.
That sounds destructive? Well yes, it is, but theoretically we are only taking a small sample of what is out there.
What is out there? Lots of cool things,
silver strip anchovy
Sharks and sea robins
Rays
Some fish...
3 comments:
Wow! That's a lot of fish!
Did they all die or were you able to throw some back?
I have never seen such a high density of varied life forms. Can you imagine if you trawled on land? There'd be a big pile of people, and dogs and goats, and snakes, and squirrels, and horses, and...
There is an estimated 80% mortality rate, but it is much higher on larger trawls and depends on the species. I just like to think of what the fish were thinking when they saw the net coming. Most of them have this, it does exist facial expression on them.
Much like the facial expression of the stripped fish.
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