ROV SuBastianDive 402 (Pt E) - Wreck Bay Plunge Pool, Australia - FK200930

hi merrick marty here can you hear me okay yeah marty how you doing yeah really good thanks for joining us yeah no worries pity i'm not on the bike last eye very exciting last drive two thousand meters yeah we would have loved to have had you on board with us oh well covered etc couldn't get it there so while you've been sorting out your audio connection what have you i'm not sure how much of the video you've actually been watching but if you've seen this uh rather unusual specimen that we've just collected no i just saw it go into the quiver that was all i saw but last i saw you're looking at looking for a spider then the feed dropped out everyone here is scratching our heads saying what is that anyway safely tucked away into one of the quivers and um it looks like it's baby like an octopus yeah yeah unless there was a bunch of zooans attached to it which also had collaborators in japan i'd love to look at that but hopefully find some more stuff on the bottom here where it's nice and deep yeah nice and deep today we don't have a lot of time we can't really do much of what we would normally do which would be an exploratory uh dive where uh we go on a bit of a tour but we're so deep today and we've already done the midwater plankton part of the the survey so we really can't linger longer we need to kind of stick to our transect and and make our way uh towards what will what we hope will be um quite a hard rock uh outcrop the face of this plunge pool that is about a 650 meter high cliff that we'll be ascending up uh so hopefully we i mean if we obviously we're keeping our eyes out for carnivorous sponges which is uh your specialty and we're just on a soft sediment substrate at the moment but ahead of us we should fairly fairly soon come to the base of the cliff and we'll start making our ascent that's great yeah well hopefully we'll whiz past some carnivorous sponge and grab a couple on the way up a lot of them occur on soft sediments as well as hard sediments [Music] hey merrick it's rob beamon here can you hear me rob hang going yeah i can hear you very well yeah good we're trying to squeeze a lot into this dive today uh so we've had dougal on uh most of the morning and and now we're on the seafloor it's uh [Music] 2054 meters deep uh 2.3 degrees c we've taken out well look at some big blocks here it's quite a lumpy seafloor uh we're going to have to continue moving we've got a quite a high vertical height to reach today at least 600 meters vertical height we're trying to get in a couple of hours so we'll do some sampling a brief sampling as long as it doesn't take too much time and then we'll just continue up upslope there's a big block here it's fantastic it's a big an enemy on it it looks like we've got uh a probably a bamboo coral or uh we'll see if we can if we can see the bamboo nodes bamboo coral nodes beautiful in enemies here that's good i'm sure you guys take the whole block good geology in there on the surface hey merrick uh it's vicky here i don't think we've spoken before yeah you too this is um quite an unusual lot of rocks we've found down here and so we've got a cabinet for these guys yeah we've got bamboo coral here yep you can see the nodes down near the base there are these sections and they've got these dark internodes so we're going to try and get a sample of this for the quiver to be flash frozen uh but we just need to snap a little bit off the end and put it in our quiver and then we'll continue on our way it's quite an interesting field of anemones here so we think these rocks here are probably uh originally uh calcitic so limestone all the deep rocks that we found in this area have all been some form of limestone calcareous being possibly uh shallow water corals or other calcareous organisms like forams but it's very very hard rock uh it's clearly quite old uh probably my scene and age at a time when uh the first coral reefs developed uh up in the the what's now the far northern great barrier reef but if we go back say 20 million years or so when the australian plates first moved into these these warmer tropical waters we're looking at a a big carbonate or calcium carbonate province uh that is left these uh it's like a deep ledge as the and obviously parts of it have broken off and we're looking at this sort of boulder field we're at the the base of uh what looks like an old an ancient waterfall so if you think of a waterfall on land there's always lots of rocks and things boulders at the bottom of the the waterfall and i think that's what uh you know you can imagine what this this now drowned landscape is yeah so just definitely sedimentary rocks but still very very hard as we've discovered just trying just trying to break a piece off has been quite challenging yeah so we're just prepping the the quiver here uh and just to remind people the two the two ways that we're preserving samples uh most of most of our samples are going into those bio boxes and they just get preserved with ethanol and they they preserve the skeleton quite well uh but we are working with uh the uh the sanger foundation and the smithsonian institute through jeremy horowitz and tom bridge to do full genomic testing on these deep marine animals including uh the the symbionts the animals that that live in amongst the the skeleton the flesh of these living animals and so the the the singer foundation's aim is to do full genome test uh sequences of these animals uh and to do that we have to preserve them very carefully and we have liquid nitrogen on board so we're just just gonna see if we can snap a piece off this this uh bamboo coral and slot it into the the quiver when it gets when it comes back on deck uh we will flash freeze it with our liquid nitrogen we've got something swimming towards us oh it's a fish we've got a large fish swimming towards us yeah this crazy fish coming in we just saw the shadow and it was like oh is this a uh is this like an octopus or something but it's one of these these deep these very strange deep fish so i hope we got our fish army helping us here i hope it gets close enough that we can uh we can see it without having to move okay we'll just get this in the quiver and we'll have a closer look at this fish and he's saying it's a cuskill yeah thanks glenn uh we're also joined by john pognoski and will white from csiro in hobart they're they're our official uh fish taxonomist joining us on this expedition but of course we're uh we're taking advice from everybody ashore we're very pleased to have you joining us on this dive um myself i'm a marine geologist vicky you you're a southern ocean expert yes well uh southern ocean person uh yeah i study um radiolaria down in the southern ocean looking at using them to reconstruct past ocean conditions um particularly over the last uh glacial cycle yeah and speaking of southern ocean i mean this temperature is 2.2 degrees celsius it's very cold yeah so this water originated in the southern ocean and comes up here and it brings with it the uh rather cold temperatures uh just had an enemy sorry a the fish is having a bit of a swim around the bio boxes in the other camera you still with us there eric here i am rob yeah okay so uh yeah we're just putting the quiver away and then we'll get going but we did see some of these strange christmas tree like uh salicious sponges on the sea floor so we'll uh uh we'll be able to stop and probably sample them uh since we they come into view yeah sounds good i was just trying to see if the camera can look slightly to the left between the brittle star and the and the bamboo coral where that was a shadow or a light cream kind of respond to them yeah just lift to the left of this brittle star left to the left of the brittle star yeah start to look like a smaller one of the bamboo corals but okay so not not sponge then i don't think so but i quite get a good focus on it yeah but it's about the size we're looking for unfortunately they're not huge that's why they were discovered until the 90s really okay no worries um yeah we just thought that might be a sponge uh for your benefit but we're going to get going now uh we've got we've got about 600 meter vertical climb in front of us so we'll just uh we'll stop of course if we see something amazing but we need to get a bit of a move along here so rob just remind us again um what the goal is for this uh this section here well number one is the curiosity what what would be living at the base of one of these big plunge pools so this punch bill is a big scale feature imagine a waterfall on the oh this is a great tripod fish right in front of us there's there's a lot happening in front of us here i'll get to context descriptions in a little bit but let's just stop for the animals eh bethe pittori sorry bethy toys if i got that right there john yeah quite amazing i just we have seen a few of these on our previous dives i never get tired of looking at them i'm just curious are we looking at spines or rays that um that hold the fish off the ground like are they uh are they hard spines or are they just very very soft rays holding the animal up and i'm guessing the the um the pectoral fins on the side they're part of this detection of animals coming past and then they like just grab them i guess as they detect something swimming by them it's pronounced bathiopterus for those who are interested yeah thanks john uh modified rose that uh slightly spine like very very handsome fish and his uh some kind of rat tail fish coming in the background this so we've got a lovely uh really quite a large cold water coral here on the on the right uh you might be able to get a closer look at it and a very white bleached white possibly squat lobster just uh to the left underneath this rock uh yeah so you're asking me before there vicki i mean this is imagine a waterfall the base of a waterfall and there's a lot going on here uh and you know we've got lots of boulders and these boulders are very likely uh limestone that have broken off uh through who knows what geological forces have broken these off um perhaps even earthquakes and they've tumbled down slope and now they're just lying as a scattered bunch of boulders down in the uh the base of this plunge pool and it's about 800 meters wide and it's got a uh about a 600 meter vertical cliff uh up uh that we're going to try and climb up today so we're really at the base of this the side walls and these side walls are all we're seeing just big tumbled boulders uh these are sedimentary rocks but very hard as we found out wow wait look at this this jumbled landscape and of course when sedimentary rocks break they tend to break along the the weaker sedimentary layers the strata and so we end up with this kind of flat pancake look you can actually see some of the layering in these rocks but boy can you imagine you think about the geological forces you need to actually break off such a tumbled mass of of boulders at this scale i guess when you think about the size of the waterfall that's at the top of it though um there's the scale of it is enormous and the pr the power of the water that would have been up at the top but so yeah as you said maybe faulting and earthquakes could have brought some of these down as well just cuskier on the left uh just coming into view now obviously attracted by the lights there's a second one that's drifted towards us boy aren't they a strange looking fish we've had a question on youtube about um how the why the rocks are shaped the way they are they're such uh they're quite block shaped and uh there's a question about that yeah sure i mean sedimentary rocks they build up layer upon layer and typically you have you know weak layers uh which might be muddy uh mud originally mud and then you might get sand building on top of that and so you get this kind of wedding cake layer effect each each component of it will have a different uh strength and so when there's any kind of pressure or shear could even be like a you know an earthquake shaking then they crack along the weak uh the weaker horizontal layers and uh you know fractured down whatever joints and and other weak layers that that are cut through the rock and so you end up with this very blocky shape uh when when sandstone for instance is broken up it tends to shear mostly upon along these horizontal layers it's because it's not horizontal now we're just looking at individual layered rocks i mean look at this one on the right really big flat layer just tumbled on each other it's really incredible but of course there's actually some interesting marine life in amongst it all lots of nooks and crannies uh we've seen some cuscales already uh merrick i'm not sure if you can see it looks like a salicious sponge we're just going to zoom in closer to it yeah rob it does look like a glass sponge here as well yeah so you have to let us know if we're going to sample because we really need to keep moving along here you know you have to decide fairly quick whether it's sampling or not otherwise we could keep going yeah well how many quivers you got left i thought i was trying to reserve them for ones that are really good we got plenty of room so it's your call merrick you just say what you want and we'll collect you know this this opportunity may never happen again in our lifetime so let's let's make use of it let's look at small things see that little white pendulum hanging off the edge that what more my target species look like uh merrick we've got six quivers left and we do have loads of room in the buyer boxes but in terms of the quivers there's six left okay that's all right i'm happy to go to the buyer box yeah what's that card there it's really good apologies merrick uh it's actually four quivers left that's all right i'm happy for samples to be bumped onto each other but like i said once in a lifetime be able to get out there i think we might need the avalancheometer today yeah cheers leave one of these but which one do you pull out or do they all just tumble down is that uh coral jenga again deep sea jenga yeah if it's possible to grab one of those sponges look like a lollipop at the moment that'd be fantastic all right we're going to do that yeah you put in a quiver if you can yeah since we've got four left uh merrick did you want to flash frozen or in ethanol ethanol is fine yeah ethanol okay thanks frozen and we've got ourselves a rock because we love our rocks here uh we weren't gonna even we're not even considering breaking this off this would be so hard we've tried before we just end up polishing it so this will be fine we can actually break it here on board the falcore so it's just a lot easier to do the snapping and braking uh once it's back on on on the ship if it's possible to get one of those lollipops before we get too far away possible yeah sure no we haven't lost it we just uh we just tucked this uh bit of rock away and we'll have another go at that that sponge thank you um [Music] oh sorry i get too excited by the carnival sponges only started working on them a couple years ago but the great thing i love about them is every time you get one it's a brand new species yeah uh america have you got any of the sponges from the previous expedition are they they're down in brisbane already they are in brisbane but i haven't had a chance to look under a microscope unfortunately the museum here has been they use red they use the cove it is a good time to renovate the whole place so we were basically kicked out of our labs and offices for the last nine months so only just got into our labs two weeks ago so just start working again so but i'm dying to believe me it's nice when you get work you're excited about doing that that's one of the things i love about science you know would be new stuff you know just to be able to see the environment in which they're collected i mean you've talked a lot about the early expeditions it's all like rock dredges and you you kind of put some put it down the sea floor and hope to get something but to see them connected and attached to the you know the surrounding environment is just as a whole others you know a level of excitement yeah that's exactly right actually seeing what they look like underwater for the first time is fantastic there's a lot of wool boots that shape on collections got a sea cucumber just above this uh you know i always think of sea cucumbers as the soft sediment environment this one's just clinging to the side of a rock yeah that's right they want to be away from a lot of the sort of snow a lot of times if you're attached to a rock or something usually in a better position so you don't get smothered by snow you can spend time yeah vikki's just pointing out the some of the the cleaner faces of the rocks you can see the strata the different layering in the rocks so you know that just explains it shows much better the the sedimentary uh i guess shape of the of the rocks as they appear here because these all just tumble down in the great uh chaotic mass but in fact when they were first laid down as calcium carbonate they would be in nice horizontal layers perfect catch guys that's great it's even got the hold fast where it was attached to the rock which is great so the same before with things like rock bridges and that usually all that sort of part of the specimen is all lost and sometimes that's very critical it's got different type of spikules in that part of the sponge which lets you tell it what type of they are so that's great great work guys so you're saying the whole animal is is just as important as the i guess the working the working part the big tulip part of the the sponge is that right mary yeah that's exactly right some of them have really distinctive spickles which are like ones shaped like um little mesh like jigsaw pieces in the in the face or hold fast there that are in no other part of it and that's how you can tell species and sometimes even general apart yeah supposedly cool one thing i love about sponges they're a bit like stem cells that they can direct differ past them to become different organelles if you like so sometimes particularly with carnivorous sponges though when they actually capture something they'll actually tell that particular cells okay you've got to be a digestive organ now so they can break it down and then later on it'll tell it to organize it to become another cell as yet no one knows how this is done it's another bit of science we don't know all right merrick uh you're cool you just tell us to stop if you see something really interesting we're happy to take samples uh but long we're just going to continue cruising up slope so we've just started the very base of this plunge pool and it's an even more dramatic environment that i expected uh boy like i was ex i was thinking it would just be a kind of a side wall that we've seen in submarine canyons which is kind of muddy but steep but this is it's quite surprising really just how dramatic this landscape is anyway you call it and we'll stop i'm seeing a xena 504 down here on the bottom left it's really amazing for omniphra make these quite spectacular sort of golf ball or softball sized uh tests on the sleeve oh big spider crab coming into view just just stop there chris it's just underneath us uh there's lots of animals crawling around in the nooks and crannies here just got a glimpse and we're going to see if we can angle it down there it is it's just under just on the right of center there we go big big spider crab definitely dinner plate sized all right thanks very much chris i think i think you're going to get in trouble if you keep stopping us like that yeah it's true we have to keep going i've already been to the bridge once to say oh we might be a little delayed anyway we'll keep moving uh boy so many things to see here it's great and the geology is really spectacular yeah these are these tall colonies they're likely to be bamboo corals like the one we sampled when we first landed and we got these really interesting anemones popping into view there actually you can see them under most of these rocks here and a few sea cucumbers yeah featherstar just sitting there uh i'm on the lookout for the stalked feather stars these are the sea lilies we may see them certainly we've seen them in other in these depths before i'm quite surprised how much life there is down here sitting on the rocks looks like we've got sponge here uh it's it's not like can you see that one merrick is just disappearing up there oh we've got another skill coming out and yeah we'll see it's sliding past guys so strange down here these these very the fish life is so strange it is alien isn't it alien like they're vicky it is quite alien a rag cusk thanks very much see something white over here on the uh right hand side here just looks like plastic yeah it looks like rubbish wouldn't be the first rubbish we've seen here uh down in we was at naughty rodder canyon we actually saw quite a bit of rubbish uh remember this is part of fun northern great barrier that where very few people live so if we can't we can't really point the finger at communities close to the coast because there really aren't any uh this would have to have been brought here by by ocean currents surface currents from you know much further away there we go sebastian doing the right thing give a bit of a leather collection and looks like it's got lighting on it yeah it's definitely plastic yeah for sure don't recognize that looks like a logo or some writing but you can see it's it's i mean it's hardly degraded is it there vicky it's actually quite uh intact yeah a bag of rice john's saying bag of rice that's a shame it's all the way down here but uh not surprising i did a um worked on some sediments in antarctica prids bay and i was finding micro plastics in the sediment down there so yeah it's it's unfortunately not very surprising yeah and i first became really aware of it when i did a voyage on the southern surveyor australia's marine national facility vessel back in 2012 we went from brisbane to fiji and about every degree of longitude we stopped and did a a very fine micro plastics tools only about five minutes in the top ten centimeters of water so it was pretty brief and we just did that all the way across to fiji and every single trawl had microplastics in it so just drifting around that surface waters but of course the the bigger pieces end up being becoming waterlogged and down here on the seafloor yeah unfortunately this is the kind of plastic that um damages the turtles and whales and the the bigger marine life okay looks like we're running out of boulders here it's not that big dramatic boulder landscape uh just the insert shows the 3d map that we've been producing over the past few weeks and we're in what we call a plunge pool at the mouth of wreck bay that's this very large horseshoe shaped bay that's about 20 kilometers uh wide so it's quite a big bay and the plunge pool is what's the second of two plungeables imagine a great waterfall carved environment when this land was you know the long geological past was up above uh see the sea surface so it was exposed to the air and fresh water would have carved this landscape and i would say we're looking at boulders that have have been knocked or broken off from the edges and tumbled down slope so at the very bottom of this it's about a 400 500 meter high sidewall to this plunge pool and we've just started our climber and a shout out to my brother greg who's watching from kiawa sunshine coast welcome aboard greg and i think my sister is watching as well carrie hi gary hi will i win glenn and milly uh we just went over anthem masters this is a really interesting soft coral it's got it's a gorgon's head soft coral we're going to see more of these obviously so it's 2.3 degrees here and when we were coming down it was 2.3 degrees for quite a way it's gonna be very very cold probably right to the top of the um right to the top of the waterfall here yeah so we've got uh sea cucumber just passing underneath us got a big squat lobster sitting on the rock uh center right and and uh vicky what do you make of these look like big tubes underneath on the other side of rocks yeah it's hard to tell what they are whether they're um polychaete tubes they're very large for polykey tubes we do get worm snails at this depth they're gastropods you know they're snails but they make these long fat uh calcareous tubes so i wonder if that's what we're looking at yeah possibly it's more in enemies at the top of the screen yeah this is uh i guess the beauty of this sedimentary rock when it when it fractures you have these very big flat ledges as they tipping over on each other so lots happening under underneath these these ledges thank you um just having looking under this rock here the america does look sponge-like uh with all those uh filaments hanging out it looks a bit awkward to pull it out though it's kind of tucked away under that that rock it's got filaments yeah it's good for me it's a bit hard to get you done what do you think is this one that you might that you think we should uh try and collect because the guys can try for it let's have a closer look at look at it i haven't got a very good image of it so do you think it's alive there merrick or is this just the uh the specules exposed spirituals of a dead sponge um i don't think it'll be a dead sponge but not even sure it's sponge at the moment yeah if that one's difficult let's move on or yeah i'm not even sure it's a sponge that one we can try and grab it for you we probably put it in the bio box yeah grab it from the bio box actually you see the filament above it hanging down that that's actually even more more interesting to me because that single filament and that's just for ethanol merrick yes just put everything in ethanol it's fine thank you well just slipped out of our fingers here so just trying again unfortunately that's a problem with my my ones they're so small in order to see them you have to go really slowly and really zoom in to see them which is why you know they weren't really discovered until the 90s all this time great one thank you [Music] uh just pulling away from the rocks here while we uh tuck away the sample and then we'll continue up slope great work very exciting so america take it you'll only be able to use look at the specules what after this has been preserved like there's not much you can use from the the uh the flesh or what what what is it in uh these siliceous sponges what's the uh the non-silica part of it well there's other proteins in there there's um um the spickels do two things one is they provide the structure to support it and they also provide protection in this case they are used to capture the other things but there's a lot of proteins in there um um collagen is one of the main ones that you'll find um making up the rest of the body so it doesn't really matter it's easy to get dna from the rest of it anyway it's not it's not like the the black corals we only get the flesh on the outside because the flesh is inside all of the sponges sometimes have spicules as armor but usually it's the center like a like a bone skeleton if you like to think of in humans or something and one's on the outside so there's no problem about not having enough tissue yeah we've got a nice cup coral underneath this big boulder in front of us and looks like probably uh bamboo coral i've got a good question here from radiga why isn't a fair manganese and crust station on the rocks and that is a good question it's not as dark as i'd expected typically uh rocks when they're exposed to the sea water for really long periods of time and you know even millions of years have this very very dark crust on it and we've seen this over in uh like osprey reef is a good example all the rocks we saw there very very black and in some parts of the the coral sea where i've sampled you can have this fair manganese oxide build up like this huge crust uh centimeters thick but here we're not seeing it so much now this might speak to how recent in geological terms this rockfall may have happened so that really we're not talking about rocks that have been sitting here exposed for very long again it's a bit of a question as to how long uh perhaps that rock that we uh took earl uh sample earlier will give us a clue as to how when you know the age of these rocks but um you know just the fact that it's not covered in fair manganese oxide just says to me that that they're uh that they've been tumbled down in more recent geological time as opposed to being exposed on the sea floor for you know millions and millions of years without any disturbance we're just gonna boop this one for science okay boop the science oh a little bit of reaction all right might try its neighbor so you know quite quite different animals here one's a sand dwelling and i mean the other one's completely attached to a rock let's see what we get here a bit of an anti-climax boop though one yeah yeah exactly at two degrees i don't think i'd be responding very quickly yeah that's right everything moves slowly down here so you know it's it's i guess about energy and things like that these animals don't have to move much at all they just sit there quietly and growing slowly we know that the cold water corals take you know hundreds of years to grow in in places so uh everything moves you know slowly so it's probably not no surprise the the tentacles didn't pull in as quickly as say shallow water and enemies what are these big sponges here merrick do you know what that is uh look almost looks like a lily just uh moving over to it now uh let's try to tell if it's a glass sponge or a rock sponge from here the rock sponges are probably coralistiis and they've got they've got amazing spirituals and this is one that's got these 3d mage it's just like 3d jigsaw puzzles all wedged together and it makes up the whole solar thing so just solid rocks possibly coralisties yeah some of the glass ones are probably a bit softer some of the similar glass sponges you probably saw like the sea lilies they're a bit softer you pull them up and they're made of glass but it's it's a fine line like mesh another one that it's like solid as a rock just to shout out to my wife diane who's just joined us on facebook so hello diane i'll be uh home in a few days uh this is our last dive today and uh we'll be heading back to cairns tonight you've had pretty good weather the whole way rob yeah i did get seasick on the first day but uh we've been really lucky it's just it's very nice conditions up here the water's warm the sun's shining got a light breeze yesterday was like a swimming pool on the great barrier reef merrick do you want this sponge otherwise we'll keep moving if it's easy grab it it's not a high priority that one it looks a bit hard to get in there okay we'll continue up yeah i think we've got a c really here i mentioned these before if this is one of these sea lilies it's a stalked crinoid no we haven't um so you know our focus has mainly been on sponges and corals and our permit does allow us to collect other invertebrates but we you know we're circumspect about how we do that so you know for this dive our focus is really on the sponges for your benefit thanks rob it is so he didn't mess with my sponges we've had quite a few objectives for this dive today so we wanted to do the google dive and uh we managed to stick to time there we've gotten to the bottom weren't sure we would fit everything in but uh because we're disciplined we'll stay on track yeah but what a landscape to explore uh we're enjoying looking at the rocks the different strata here you know we're just remarking how how sharp edged all these are you know as if someone's hit these rocks with a giant hammer and they've split along the horizontal strata but also vertically with but this is an unusual uh in any kind of rock that have been that's weathered over time you get faults in it and so they can you know when there's any kind of forces breaking it up they can they shear along whatever the weak sediment plane is and also across the fault lines uh you know the cracks and so you can end up quite easily with big sharp edged boulders as we've got here but it's still remarkable to see you know such large boulders all tumbled down on each other so rob what's the uh what's the pressure down here how many atmospheres are we experiencing on the rov uh just over 200 bar 200 atmospheres so if you are a scuba diver you typically pump your air pressure up to this same pressure right so how i remember it is is you look at the depth in meters and you take you uh divided by 10 so we're over 2000 meters we're in about 200 bar and i'm a scuba diver and your air pressure is usually pumped up to 200 bar uh or atmosphere so it is there's a lot of pressure and of course it could anything could implode uh here we had a lovely stalked coronoids see lily right in front of us we're just drifting over it we just got a report from just under 3000 psi apparently yeah 200 bar about 3 000 psi so some serious pressure here foreign all right just reaching out to our scientists ashore giving us some advice uh on on some of the cold water corals to collect so we may uh if we if we see a bamboo coral we'll try and get that in a quiver so we can flash freeze it there's a nice cup coral right in the center of the screen we're not going to collect it but it's a classic cup coral with all its tentacles out yeah merrick we're just moving over to this bowl that's got these uh these bamboo coral uh colonies hanging off it uh more for the genome project if they've got any uh any animals like amphipods or whatever you attach to the the tip we'll see if we can break a piece off uh otherwise if we can't see it we'll just continue uh flying up slope yeah that's good rob okay we may have a candidate here this is a bamboo coral and uh we've got like perhaps a little squat lobster sitting in amongst a lovely sea lily in the background there this might be this might be one that we can sample for our quiver yeah good question does does animal life suffer from the bends well uh certainly there are fish with swim bladders uh mainly in the shallower waters they have swim blowers to help them keep buoy keep them neutrally buoyant at whatever depth they're in you know if if you bring these if you catch them on a fishing line and pull them up to too fast the swim bladder really expands and and can uh and can kill them uh down here it's different story though i'm not sure if the fish here have swim bladders maybe john or will can explain that one but um you know when we we're bringing animals these are samples uh from these deeper depths uh not many of them are actually alive by the time they get to the surface you know this is something that we consider we are not just willy-nilly collecting uh samples for sample sake where we have a real uh decision-making process on board about what we intend to collect and why we are collecting them so we only collect within the limits of our permits and if we already have a sample for a particular need we don't collect any more than we we need to uh to do that just for the science must foreign um right this is one of these samples going to be flash frozen so we put them in the quiver and when it gets up on on deck we'll put it into liquid nitrogen yeah thanks john jones is saying that some of these really deep sea fish also have swim bladders so they can they could suffer from the bends you know reverse bends as they they come up to shallow waters where they their swim bladders are like a little balloon with with gas inside uh and they would expand too much and dem and kill them but uh you know we're not collecting fish here we're just looking at them and then admiring them so some of those swim bladders are much um possibly smaller than the shallow water species they're not as not as big uh they do perform the same same task but say yeah no no collecting of those today i don't believe we've got a permit to do any vertebrates at all no that's right so sorry john and will no fish collecting here but uh certainly the vision's pretty good and that should help for any post voyage analysis and leg three which happens after we arrive back in cairns elect3 is going to take the falco through the 17th of november um no the rov won't be used it's only mapping and uh there's a few other things happening through that as well we're going to do a lot of some more ctd conductivity temperature depth profiler uh sampling down in the the southern great barrier reef and then the ship's heading out into the tasmanian seamounts which is in the coral sea marine park and tasmania sea or a a chain of extinct volcanoes and uh we've got some interesting tasks there so the falco will be mapping around the steeper flanks of these extinct volcanoes uh they're within australian waters and some of these uh extinct volcanoes actually have coral reefs on top of them including uh islands and sand caves they're some of the most isolated sand case uh islands in in all of australia's marine marine estate uh hundreds of hundreds of kilometers away from the mainland and uh they're very important for sea birds and turtles and things like that so we're going to try and uh uh get the falcore team to go on there to help parks australia get a snapshot of marine debris or if there's any invasive species on there like ants or things like that that would really disrupt the ecology of these really small little dots in the ocean um we'll have uh our media correspondent taking lots of photos but it'll be quite an interesting uh addition to the the normal expedition that we originally started uh planning for about a month or so ago you've seen some of those islands before haven't you rob yeah that's right i was in the navy and uh worked on a vessel at a helicopter and we were we were dropped off on some of these remote islands to do geodetic work we're basically setting up geodetic gps to to to accurately position where the islands were now that might sound funny in this day and age but you have to remember back well pre-gps a lot of these islands were only marked by uh by astro navigation where people had used sun sights and to to work out exactly where they were in geographic space and so going on the ship was a chance to put these uh very accurate gps on the middle of the island and so they flew us out by helicopter and left us there for marooned quite amazing islands really they're not big you can walk around them quite easily but you know just absolutely covered in in sea birds and you'd see turtles and sharks swimming in the shallow waters and so you you guys are going to have all of that fun ahead of you in the next few weeks so i have to ask how accurate was the uh with the maps previous maps once you got the gps points yes a rule of thumb with that kind of astro style navigation is you know you can you can pretty accurately find yourself on earth within about a nautical mile or so so they weren't too far out but of course as satellite imagery got better and better and people needed to you know we needed to improve our our charts uh what we went we did was we actually flew onto the island and we set a benchmark down there so that you may even see that it might even still still be still be standing so we actually took cement and put a a big metal benchmark into the middle of the island and uh and that that's kind of a solid bit of a fixture point from which you can get your latitude and longitude and that hopefully they'll still be there well i hope i'm one of the people that have picked to go ashore that day so i can find your benchmark yeah good vicky so but you know it's just fascinating places and there's also shipwrecks on them some of them quite uh historic shipwrecks so uh that that will be a part of this leg three as well as the the mapping that we've got planned around the steeper flanks yeah i think it might be time to keep moving now we're still at uh almost 2020 meters yeah we've got a long way to go that's right it's about a 600 meter climb is what we planned and we just need to get a just keep on moving up slope so again uh merrick uh please sing out if you think there's a sponge that we should stop and collect we're happy to do that uh otherwise we're just going to do this lovely drift over this quite spectacular landscape yeah die rob i'll sing out and i can see something with collecting it's just great to watch and these sunset view shows where we are we've dived into the uh the center of this what we think is an a giant waterfall carved landscape that would have been exposed at the above the sea you know probably millions and millions of years ago at the the whole edge of australia has now warped downwards uh subsiding down down we're at 2000 metres deep so this rock probably was shallow water if it's if it's limestone but now millions of years later it's two kilometers down and it's been carved it's like almost big valley and we're just climbing up the side of the sidewalls and you see how this is just the 3d depth model how steep it is but in reality it looks just far steeper i actually thought it was just all mud and sand you know like we've seen in some of these other canyon environments but you know to see these jumbled boulders like this is really quite remarkable we're saying cat shark is coming into view catch up behind us we're just going to spin around here uh will will white if you're watching we're just trying to find a cat art that came into view because we've got 10 cameras on us we can look 360. what you get is the science camera most of the time but just spinning around now to see if we can pick it up yeah we're looking at the other cameras here [Music] uh just trying to spin it around in the water it's been sebastian around the water column here to look at this cat shark so if will white's watching uh if you go to the schmidt ocean institute website the the latest cruise blog is a critter feature by will white one of our fish taxonomists and he's written about the uh cat shark that we saw earlier here we go coming into view now no it's uh another cuskill now we've lost looks like we may have lost that cat shot so we've got a wall on the uh on the side here uh it looks like it goes for quite a way it's very layered oh yeah i mean this is classic sedimentary rock here you can see where all these all these boulders have come from this is the outcrop the laid acro we're gonna see if we can grab all this rock here boy jeez look at that it's just yeah the faults so this is how we're getting these really sharp edges you've not only got that horizontal layering of course it's not horizontal now it's all warped downwards uh but there are these uh there are these cracks and crevices broken through and so this is how you end up with these really sharp cornered boulders just peeling off the edge now notice how black how dark this rock is compared to the boulders downslope so this would be a face that's been exposed for some time now this is a black fairy manganese oxide coating we're going to try and find a rock that we can pick up i don't think we're going to break anything off but if there's anything loose uh what's good about this is we can see what layer it's it's at we know that it's actually outcrop rock sebastian's going to have a go at breaking it off just having a bit of a poke around so if there's anything that's sticking out we might be able to lever off oh no i think the rocks beat us this time we're just going to see if we can find anything loose um we have tried this in the past merrick and it's just too too hard we've ended up polishing the rock at times we're going to try and grab a bit of rock before we head up onto that soft sediment so just looking keep your eyes peeled for any any loose small boulder or rock that'll be perfect for us looks like a candidate hey good job well done perfect perfect now we can actually break that here on on the ship and uh that's just exactly what we need i think the rock knows we're in a rush today might have a few of those tubes attached yeah we've seen these really large tubes there's uh really large chips haven't we vicky curious as to what they are i might uh might have to put those under the microscope when we get it back into the lab here we go there's some there that's a keeper that's exactly what we're after thank you good job joe rod and cody thank you team texas so clint asked about the water here um so just to put things in geological perspective the rock that we're seeing here probably is made in shallower shallower higher up in the water column much longer ago and then as sea levels fall or this would have been exposed then fresh water then carved the landscape into this waterfall style plunge pools and then to make it even more complex the whole edge of australia has been uh angled downwards so the whole whole area here has subsided and so it's now deep uh down and 2000 meters down so it's a little hard to get your head around the long geological time uh and processes that have acted on this this landscape but you know you can only explain that the carving that we are seeing through fresh water when all of this may have been pushed up and exposed to the air but the actual rock itself is shallow limestone most likely and would have been made in shallower seas probably even you know during my scene so 20 million years ago when australia first moved as a moving plate into warmer tropical seas that's when we see the first turn on of of limestone rock at the very far northern uh reaches of the great barrier reef so this is a very ancient landscape that's had a lot of different forces acting upon it so it didn't form down here it's simply the preserve remains of a carved landscape that is now subsided and now deep deep down to two kilometers down underwater oh oh we got this is uh we've got something interesting right in front of us and yeah we have seen these before what do you what are they america they react they close up like a balloon they've got big tentacles at the end oh rob i think it's some sort of an enemy but i'm not sure oh looks like a jellyfish there it's it's not a corellomorph is it well chrome also sort of based the top of an enemy so it could be here we found quite a few of them on the deep-sea trawls as well okay but we'll uh we'll continue moving up slopes still got a ways to go hey this looks quite different now from what it was uh over 2000 meters we've now just got mud again hey merrick we're just going to swap around here vicky and i are just having a break we'll go on to the loggers and we're going to going to bring uh two students in who can introduce themselves okay you ready a flat worm scale look under that shelf there's those ones hanging down potential there's some kind of sponges there so uh hey merrick uh so can you describe it one more time okay go left where the black section is there's tiny little like a further coming down it's got like a little disc on it down down the bottom one okay i'm having trouble seeing it on my screen is it the one with like a little orange dots in the middle i can't see any orange dots but um uh we're zooming in see the ones yeah those ones there the little really white ones that have all the filaments on the outer center yeah this one if you grab some of them that would be amazing yeah do you think it's oh now i see the orange one i can see the orange one as well if you could get if you could possibly get all three all three of these in the frame right now okay uh can we grab and put in a bio box yes oh that looks fantastic yeah there we go another two new species [Laughter] there are a lot of going on before valerian i can reintroduce us again and say hi to merrick uh we've been collecting sponge blisters for you for this like two weeks on falcore but we haven't officially said hi to each other yeah exactly hi america it's nice to finally meet you hello nice to meet you too yeah i work at the queensland museum on sponges and and obsidians and off to corals and lots of other groups as well but at the moment particularly on this expedition kind of response is what i mentioned in because there is so many new species it's fantastic such a fun field to work into i've never known there was never a species before so it is very interesting yeah well people collected these couple hundred years ago but no one knew they were carnivorous and it was until someone in the 90s found some you know shallow water cave or scuba diving depth in europe and they went hang on these are carnivorous and they went back and and now people have gone back and looked at the old specimens and worked out you're right they don't have any aquiferous channels they're not they're not sucking in the water and filtering it so and that's really good from a describing point of view they don't have 200 year old wrong taxonomy poorly described specimens to work from you could start start afresh and so it's much faster yep got one fantastic good work guys little daisies with the robotic arm exactly these actually also remind me of a couple dives ago i'm sure that you watched it happen but we collected those really really small sponges and we found like a whole field of them and i know those were one of the target species that we're speaking to jeremy about and in just that small field i think we must have found at least two or three different species yeah that was the one on top of the snow filled boulder yeah that was great chances are these are different species again so until now how many carnivorous sponges said we know already um i'm trying to think it's around about 100 100 between 150 last time so i mean i just described 17 new species from a previous expeditions so it goes up and up great work guys and the most important thing too is with this we get images of these things which you've never really seen before there's a lot of time as you probably have you talked a lot about they're collected by a troll or something so they come up in this they come up with all this mud and speaking of other things parts of whale flesh and everything and so when you've got something so tiny with fine little filaments and i guess you crush it in mud in every sediment it loses a lot of its shape so we get these fantastic photos brand new stuff exactly whoa and as you said even these um these samples that we're collecting right now even though we're not trolling them uh once we bring them in the lab they they really look completely different when you see them in situ like right now so it is really useful to get those photos beforehand yeah that's right it's been stuck there yeah um and if you think about two we're talking about two degree water so any animal you bring up even if the surface it's only 18 to 20 degrees at the surface there these things going to be par boiled by the time you get there so we go through a big pressure differential but probably more importantly it's a lot of temperature differential as well i think the pilot is just trying to grab two more so in case that'd be great thanks yeah fantastic they're so small by the time i cut a bit out for to do an sem on it and cut a bit out get out for dna there's not much left of it [Music] um great work guys thank you that made my week i've actually got a question because jeremy was also telling us describing all these carnivorous sponges when we're saying describing a sponge what are the features or characteristics you're trying to describe here well with most sponges it's actually the silicon spicules um what defines basically family and genera and species and you get everything from large speckles which could be several millimeters long but most of the ones we're interested in probably about seven or eight micrometers long and they'll have different shapes so we use a lot of them and we're also using molecular work at the moment to show that these particular specular types are characteristic for the different genera and families and that's what that's what the science is going on about but also the morphology of the shapes like you saw this one here looks like a is like a flattened poly lollipop with um lots of filaments coming out in basically one plane only that's very different flattened sacks and no one quite knew what they were for it was until we had an rov down with the camera down there and someone went these are actually spheres that the sponge fills with with um a little bit of gas and liquid and so it allowed enables it to float off and hold it off the floor it will be away from all the all the sediment and so there's an example another really different type of structure really different shape it's really characteristic and um yeah and if we hadn't had cameras and robs down there we wouldn't know that what that was but yeah so it could use these spheres to hold it up rather than relying on all the silicon to hold it up i mean the good thing is there's lots of silicon down at this depth there's 150 times more silicon in the water here than there is at the top of the ocean that's one of the reason why we have a lot of glass sponges down here as well oh that's great guys right so uh merrick would you say that uh with sponges since i guess um right now you said for the carnivorous sponges there's only you know over a hundred species that are described do they also have the same problem in taxonomy where some may be misclassified or are you know classified in a way that you don't actually believe they're in the right genera or is that not so much of a problem yet just because you're still discovering a lot of them yeah yes you're right in both ways um with sponge taxonomy it changes a lot i mean the carnivorous ones i've just decided to move these things at a different genera and um some people probably have said another paper saying that's not right but but with sponges in general yeah it's it's no surprise at all suddenly this family will move to a different order that happens all the time in sponge taxonomy general move around families and all that and if you've got to think about it the whole idea of having genera and family and orders is is really a human construct to to make it easy for our pea brain bodies to be able to understand what's actually going on you know it helps sure showing evolutionary trees and that a lot of us just so we can categorize things in in ways that we can understand and now we've got molecular dna showing a lot of all these old sponge groups are totally wrong and moved around so it's science in progress i think yeah i guess that's the classic case same as corals you know it starts off as morphology and then it moves on to whether you know you should define species by uh genetics so it's yeah it's i think one of those fields where taxonomy innately is quite a hard thing uh to get into no matter you know what species or what gender or what family you're looking at oh okay you see i don't know your camera but you said oh no well that's a bamboo coral to the right their little feather type one yeah sorry but you're exactly right same sort of problem and because a lot of these things were described hundreds of years ago and there's a tiny dried-up fragment in a museum in in europe that you may or may not be able to get hold of you can't do dna on that so you've got to go back and recollect the whole things prove it's the same thing and then we can start moving ahead with dna and then of course with dna problems is people are using small sequences and then later on someone else uses a different sequence i'll probably get a different answer and we can do a whole genome sequencing but then people go okay what about post-transcriptional modification and all that as well so in another 10 years there'll be a new technique we haven't even thought of which will move us ahead so we've got two questions also on youtube channel i think uh the rov tip can help us to answer one of the questions how do we calculate our current depth is it due to the pressure sensor yes so that is one answer for that uh a second answer maybe marty can help us to answer this uh did it go uh there's one question about usually how strong the currents are when we're at the other steps oh this looks like an interesting sponge in front of us merrick do you care to comment i don't know anything much about this it looks quite new to me it looks like a glass bunch if he looks easy to grab why don't we grab it yeah and get some family on that yeah so this looks like an interesting glass sponge species and we're going to collect this and back to the current question i don't know if you guys heard it but our rov team was saying usually when you go to deeper places the current tends to be weaker but apparently not in australia this is quite a special place and we have the antarctic current down below to influence the deep water here sometime we can actually get really strong current in deep water as well yeah that looks good because that glass sponge from from here anyway looks like there's one we keep collecting from these deep sea things not from an rov but from trolls in it and every time we bring it up it's being like what we call dead because all this all the super fine spirituals have been washed out and there's no living materials just the big specular matrix is there and you can't use that to tell even if what order some of these sponges are so and we keep finding it but we haven't found a live one so because i saw a glass we go well has it been dead for 10 years 100 years or these things like a thousand years old and just hanging on like an old dear tree stump and we still don't know what they are so i keep hoping we'll find a live one and that looks pretty good and then we might be able to also do some dna sequencing on it as well so finally we'll be able to describe this thing properly rather just call it unknown that's what i love about exhibitions like this answer so many questions and ask so many more but it's a beauty discovery of science yeah that's a favorite and uh i think what's so amazing is that we get to as we said today you know started off as a dougal dive and now it's a merrick dive and we really get to discover so many um things about so many different fields yeah i'm watching on on youtube's people's suggestions for for names so i'll keep that in mind if you describe the new one these rock formations i can't comment much on them but i'm sure that rob and marty would probably comment on how amazing you can see these clear stacks on top of each other i don't really know why this happens i don't know if anyone out there could comment on it but i think so it's like sedimentary so it just deposits in layers but um yeah it just makes this amazing formation i guess when you you know as we're going up with it and we get to see these beautiful layers it's you know quite the difference from how we started the dive with those huge crumbling boulders hmm so uh merrick i have a question about um the range of uh coral of sponges sorry that you've been collecting have you collected much at this depth or is it you know one of the few times right now that we've been collecting samples at this depth um it's probably the only time we've been collecting at this depth at 2000 meters with an rov here in australia some of the french people have done it in other parts of the world but um we've collected at 2 000 meters and 4 000 metres but only only probably about three times the challenger expedition in late 1800s and there was sodarius exhibition in the 1970s and there was investigative position back in 2017 so this will probably be the fourth time at these depths around australia at all for the first time with cameras and being able to pick them up so that's fantastic the rest was like trolls across the bottom and see what what turns up this is the first yeah 2000 meters is good depth i like that i'm not concerned about anything about 500 meters of shallow water you know yeah exactly so that's another foul core first i think that's very exciting it is very exciting just just great they would have the camera down there and be able to manipulate and pick up things just spectacular see things in their proper habitat um um here on the youtube channel we're showing again an insert of um topography map that we recently mapped resume i think we've been so lucky today for our final dive to get such a diverse dive with our midwater dive in the beginning and then going so deep now and just through looking at that map it it kind of takes me aback a little bit to see how we're going up this you know waterfall slope and yeah i'm just amazed that's all i can really say i can't i'm so happy i guess for our last dive that we got to do something that was so diverse i remember like couple of our dives when we drop down it's just sandy bottom like really covered with fine sediments now this dive around this plunge pool that we have rock formation that's so huge that sort of cool looking sponge there is that a sponge can you see closely on this is it the one next to the branched uh octagon looks like the bars looking straight on it it's possible could we grab that stick in the firebox please yeah sure thing we can put in the bio box so when you look at the sponge it kind of looks like there's some algae growing on it or is it just sediments that have deposited on it is that i'm guessing it's not really like coral uh where you know things depositing on it actually is a good sign of you know i'd say it's lots about yeah i'd say lots of other things growing on top of it you can get corals you can have brittle stars you can have worm tubes in fact all the time we call them um sponge hotels because they have so much epi fauna attached to it whoops catch oh beautiful boss good catch um um it can be a bit of a delicate sponge that one so apparently this one is quite delicate it's hard to grasp i have to go without smashing it yet what does that do the does the robotic arm have feedback sensors on them no it doesn't [Music] um i think we can we're looking at another one of the cameras and we can see the sponge slowly falling down the slope but the arm is there waiting to hopefully catch it that's all right yeah glass sponges are funny because sometimes they're hard and super fragile like a champagne flute and other times they're they're woven like a sheet of um fiberglass if anyone's worked with fibreglass and it's all soft but um really um quite strong so they can they're quite variable so some are very hard to pick up champagne flutes off the bottom that's why i asked whether you had sort of a pressure sensor on the on the arms or not i think um that one it's a little bit too hard to grab and it's think the robbie pilot thinks it might be really really that so it's quite fragile well even even some of the live ones are fragile but that's all right you can look out for another one of those as you can imagine big glass sponges like that have been uh more likely to be caught over the last couple hundred years by dredges and so forth whereas the super tiny can't ever sponges like a saw hanging off the wall before uh either overlooked or washed through big nets that were great along the bottom that's why they knew yeah it's funny speaking of uh all these glass sponges we've been handling because we've we've collected quite a few big ones spiky ones and joan and i never really know you know how they feel so you know we've held a couple of them and realized that you know we we've had little splinters from them or um some of them just crumble within our fingers because you look at them but you really it's hard to guess um how fragile they are or how sturdy they are some of the time yeah that's right same as shallow water sponges and you could use that for quite a few ids to help you actually give it the poke test underwater and see what it feels like and then on top um back in the lab when we're trying to identify it actually you know squeezing them and trying to rip them apart also becomes part of a description of a sponge because they're very different the way they feel and behave but it's not as much it's a very non-mathematical part of description those ones yeah if anything it's a the fun part of trying to describe them to be able to feel them with your own hands and yeah as you said rip them apart or squeeze them and we've had to you know cut off small pieces and fit them into vials and you know even through just doing that you can yeah you can feel the crunch sometimes between your fingers and those that kind of description is really only something that you can do when you hold it with your own hands now we're looking at a very pretty gastropod here um so apparently we have a permit uh to collect these gas reports so if it's possible we we're going to try to collect this if it doesn't roll far from us or roll down the hill so apparently there's a scientist called dr patrick patrick from belgium who specifically asked for this kind of sample so a top snail so yeah this is actually ideal we weren't expecting this but somehow i think today we have our avalanche meter on this is definitely my first time seeing a snail moving that fast it has really strong upper body strength just to push himself out of the way yeah he really has moved very far just in that you know those few seconds of not being able to see much i think he's managed to escape oh that looks like it might be it right there we got him hopefully fingers crossed it's a very delicate grab of this gastropod very good job so so uh we saw this question from clint on youtube uh so about the permits uh since the great barrier of marine park it's a really big authorization and this is a very well protected area depends on the research need we usually will apply for permits according to our trip target or of with the science science team here we have we have coral specialists we have invertebrate specialists oh um all all marine lives are equal but it's just uh depends on each trip we have a different target so that's why during this trip we're mainly focusing on coral and sponges and if necessary this type of gastropod that are closely associated with the coral reef or deep water so the gas triple we just collected is a type of top shell and hopefully um our onshore scientist patrick from belgium he'll be very happy for this species that we just collected um so as a rob just explained to us you can it's really interesting to look at these rock formations because just by looking at the color you can see you can see right in front of us the lighter colors are where it hasn't been as exposed and so it doesn't have this layer of fairness uh vernees oxide on them there are magnesium yeah there are magnesium oxide on them um so you can tell that a layer has fallen off and has shown this less exposed part which is why it's a different color and lighter my oh it looks like to the left there there's some more sponges i don't know if these are similar to the one we collected that lollipop looking one in the beginning i don't quite see it but if you can grab it that'll be amazing news yep we can do that right sure yes there's a fantastic thank you yes you there fantastic so um so merrick is this type of sponge we collected um a type of glass sponge since they don't really have the tentacles or also carnivorous sponge has another type of appearance yeah that's right there are glass sponges and they're kind of a sponge that both have this sort of tulip like shape yeah and it has a whole lot of these anchor shaped spicules inside the tulip shape thing that um antipods and isopods have a whole lot of hairy appendages and they all get caught a little hairy appendages get caught by one two three and then by the time they've caught by 20 or so of the anchor shaped spicules then it's trapped and that's when the sponge can start digesting it so yeah so that shape can be a glass sponge or it can't ever sponge if you really want to look under the microscope i'll be able to tell so great work guys great daisies in tulips this is some amazing control plus luck just let it free fall to the boxes that we want to uh sorry the wrong word so apparently this is um the business skill that our rov pilots are referring to okay so someone just asked if there's an ambient hydrophone on sebastian and the answer is no there is not thank you guys i think if we did have a hydrophone you know the noises that you guys were hearing today complaining about on the live stream you'd probably hear something like that great work guys in the rv i particularly love the way you just quickly pluck it so it grabs the attachments fantastic job i assume the hd cameras rolling at the same time as well yes it is always rolling so we have great footage of all of this it's so useful having everything shot in 4k but also sometimes going through it just means i know that on my laptop it gets quite slow when i'm trying to watch everything in such good quality so just it makes it a little bit difficult but at the same time it's so useful you know especially if we're describing a new undescribed species all right i think we'll probably move on upwards a little bit yeah thank you guys we'll probably move on a little bit it's i think we're trying to move as quickly as possible and we're we're you know making our way upwards it's just so tempting to stop all the time especially when this is the only chance we get ah these look like very beautiful sponges any of these of interest oh yeah grab grab the whole rock if you like what looked often grab the rock and it's got you'll get at least two sponges and a rock sample yeah true win-win we can please everyone in the room now let's see if this rock is going to be a pain to remove or if it's going to slip out easily i highly doubt it but you know fingers crossed we've been lucky in the past there we go perfect yeah um that's amazing thank you guys everyone will be very happy with this um i have been talking about how we're pleasing everyone we do have to mention though we are not collecting as many black corals as obviously we would want to know joan and i that's our that's our job so we should also be looking out for those because you know we have to try and please everyone on this dive including you jeremy shout out we would really all agree that just now is really good catch of this trying to escape sponge it was a good job um yeah that sponge is a it's a glass sponge it's possibly one called fire okay um yeah what's really interesting about it last time we got one from osprey once recently and it has a whole lot of super tiny um episodes which are going to be a new species as well on it but until we look it under the microscope i can't tell what species of sponge it is and then we'll have to look at the zoo anthony if it's on there see if that's a new species too it's all pretty exciting now we are seeing at the bottom it's a headless chicken monster it's a deep sea uh sea cucumber the color is really nice now it's trying to swimming upwards in the water column and i think the pilot developed a habit from my story yesterday trying to look at a specific part of the sea cucumber okay it really does have this beautiful color and it's funny to think because at first i thought you know looking for a dumbo octopus everywhere i thought it may have been a dumbo octopus but has similar shape but you know when you look at this you really don't well me personally i don't really think it's very cute at all and i think having eyes really makes the whole difference to differentiate what is cute and what is not exactly especially thinking about sea cucumbers diets they are usually feeding on sand which they're trying to extract those organic nutrients from the sand make it available in food web again and poop they're having are basically just cling sand so they are actually very important to the ecosystem just to recycle the nutrient and clean the sand and usually when we're saying in a shallow reef a sea cucumber can help to reduce the nutrient amount in the water column that can help the growth of corals and others like sea grasses that requires relatively lower nutrient level dissolved in the water yeah it looks like a big tulip one what about the small little white spots to the right of it is this the one we're currently looking at or yeah it's closer up for nothing it's just not worth crapping thank you [Music] see that that whip that's hanging down i'm sorry so is it the like a whip shape with some spikes have a look at the whip one does it yeah does it have a whole lot of filaments all the right angles to it we're zooming in and trying to focus right now thank you yeah that looks good that looks like a carnivorous sponge if you possibly grab that one for me please oh you see the tentacles it's got tentacles it's not a sponge but if this fine fill on it it would be a strong i think it looks like fine filaments but yeah we were collecting it now yeah it's probably quicker to grab it very exciting uh just answer a couple of questions on the youtube channel uh currently we think this is a sponge uh since it's having verifying filaments that doesn't look like a coral tissue covering on top of skeleton but since we are trying to climb up the hill in a relatively short time so we will have a closer look after we take it back to the lab it does it looks like a kind of response all right i feel like foul course log book will be like new species look a new species third new species and just keep going yeah that's right we actually need a new species ometer i think that's the the exciting meter that we we haven't had yet that would be off the charts i think at this point yeah that'd be great now the only problem is it probably takes about two years to prove it not as fast as other other groups like fish much faster to see if it's in this species isn't it the harsh reality of science yeah that's right and yeah somebody just science moved faster and um you're talking earlier about about sponges moving between groups and um i love a quote and i can't remember whether it's marconi i think might have said it and it was um science moves one funeral at a time sometimes you have to wait till someone's passed on before we're allowed to get rid of that theory and they won't argue about it stressfully and everyone will accept the new theory so it's faster than that by this one yeah that's a grim thought but that is true you have to keep powering on through it i think it's it's good that we have so many people who are so passionate because otherwise it would be hard to know that you know a lot of the things that you do in your lifetime you have to wait for as i said as you said a funeral um we're looking at another sponge right now it's like a really big body but attached onto a very thin stem or stock-like structure this usually be a strategy for them to extend out and feed in the water column yeah that's exactly right they'll have have the right this is a glass sponge so this is a filter feeder but they'll have exactly the right amount of um they want to get where the current is just at the right level for them you know strong enough to be bringing nutrients in i'm probably not too strong to blow them away but they want to keep away from the sediment layer and the still water layer the lamina effect yeah do you think this one is worth collecting or we had something similar already i think we have something similar but but um it's an easy one to grab why don't we grab it you can compare it to the other ones it looks a lot bigger than the other ones my yeah we're starting to realize that we have our boxes filling up um because we've we're just trying to figure out which box to put what in because we've got plenty and i think we're all getting really excited yeah exactly and we usually have it all separated in different boxes so it's not as difficult and in our notes where we're logging we actually write a little description so it isn't too hard for us but that's something we have to look forward to after this dive well thank you very much guys for sorting out doing the on deck sort too that's great sorry i'm gonna be there to help you out with it oh no of course it's our pleasure if anything i know that you know especially for me and joan as students we're we're so lucky to be here so if anything you know we we'd be happy to do anything oh it's always great and because you're so deep here and this stuff is you know brand new to science no one ever gets there so it's fantastic to be able to look at it and i shouldn't see it you know i still remember the first time i went and did some deep water stuff too it's all like oh i don't know it's all new so it's really good yeah exactly good experience pretty much exactly how me and joan react every single time we touch something new and we get yesterday actually we collected some very slimy uh black corals as we mentioned on the live stream and touching them was even more slimy than we could have expected and we were washing our hands several times nothing was coming off you know we didn't even want to go eat dinner because it was just sticky everywhere and as as i've said with the sponges as well you know we've we've come back from the lab with little spines in our in our fingers and it's just been you know uh an exciting time in the lab every single time so we have no idea what we have to expect that's one thing about sponges you inevitably end up with little spidules in your in your fingers there is there is one of the sponges in shallow water like as in 30 meters this black sponge i atrocious and every time you pick it up you don't notice it but about a week later all the top layer of your skin all peels off okay i'm guessing that's only for shallow sponges and we don't have to expect that for ourselves not that we know of no i noted that's good to know what about this uh sponge in front of us yeah stick it room in the buyer box store it's a beautiful glass bars oh it's great you can see all the all the specular filaments on the outside that's the sort of thing that never gets captured before either you never see that sort of thing that structure is always breaking off so again another first sebastian so we're actually thinking of uh maybe flash freezing this one because oh the coral next to it okay um we've got yeah this sponge that we're going to collect and we're also going to collect the octocoral on the side for jeremy it's a double win again this sponge is probably a euflecta species and possibly has two two shrimp in it a male female so i think they are they um and when the sponge is young this the shrimp go inside of the sponge so it grows around them like a net and they're trapped in there for our life and japanese people should survive fantastic vision oh thank you no so i think we're actually gonna skip this uh coral because we we actually were thinking about flash freezing the sponge but unfortunately it was a bit too big for the quiver so i think we're gonna move on um um my um okay um we're just having a discussion back here in the control room because we're looking at everything that we have in the bio boxes and i think we still have uh just about 45 minutes left to this dive approximately maybe a little bit more um but we're worrying that we have to start focusing really on our priorities to sample because a few of the boxes we can't actually open because there's a lot of floating samples in there and we wouldn't want to lose everything um so yeah i think we're gonna try and get the the most important ones right now if possible for everyone on shore and merrick don't worry about the big glass sponges or the big sponges a much more simple tiny one to myself we can't ever respond i think what we were just seeing now is a little scale worm that was swimming in the water car and there was another snail a similar one to a top shell this one's a lot less frantic than the the other one that we saw that was jumping around everywhere and trying to escape us he looks a lot more relaxed i think it's getting late and they are getting a little bit tired as well and right now we are at the depths of a hundred and eight sorry a thousand eighteen hundred meter below and the temperature is only around two point four degrees this is really cold i can never imagine myself swimming in the water at this temperature no neither i already start to get cold at about 28 degrees celsius so i can't really imagine i mean i have gone you know swimming in maybe sub 10 but yeah as i said even below 28 degrees celsius i start to complain so 2.4 i would definitely not get in the water i've probably only just done it once i think in iceland uh went to diving between two tectonic plates uh in the silver fissure but um yeah that was ridiculously cold uh and it's one of those things that was amazing to do once but i i'm not sure if i would do it again uh um oh this looks like a prime avalanche zone so i can see a lot of things like have left trails while falling here we have something hanging on the rock looks like a safana for this orange stomach or swimmer structure on top is it um something that maybe juggle would be interested in if he's still here with us i know in one of the previous dives he was looking out for a benthic syphonophore so not sure if this is of interest we have no sample jars for that for sure apparently we tried to sample the spandex of final fours before but they are a bit extra sensitive so once we get too close they might just spit all of their guts out and make it quite difficult for us to do anything else good to just admire from afar i guess and get some nice pictures or video footage of it yeah that looks like the like we collected just before i can't see anything if he's doing anything yeah i have a question actually in the center you can see there's a slight pink tinge to to the sponge is that because there's a worm inside or is is yeah what could that be you're uh it could be possibly anything inside there i said before the sponge hotels particularly this one which is like a whole whole series of cylinders so anything small enough can wander in there and stay in there could be a very small lobster could be anything yeah worm yeah so it's not the sponge but one of its hotel clients if you like beautiful photo high supply fantastic guys let's see what looks like i support us sitting outside i think oh oh i think we have more sponges here the one on the left looks quite interesting foreign it looks like the same species as before and got the same patrons of the hotel as well yeah exactly look like little squat lobsters or something residing in them um you can see we're really hitting a great depth and obviously just current for these two particular sponges these big tulip sponges and the para opera one so they're obviously got their niche right there yeah we've managed to see quite a few of them in different shapes and sizes scattered around i think we managed to sample quite a few so be good to take a closer look at them later as well we've got a really colorful c lily that is coming up oh nice it's a beautiful color i'm not gonna click one unfortunately we don't have a specialist on this yet i think there'd be quite a few people who would be interested in that if you can collect it yeah i think unfortunately we don't have a much space even if we did have the permits yeah fair enough we had exactly the same effect over an osprey reef many years ago with an rov and we collected two of these uh orange one a yellow one and we went back to get a third thing and as we picked it up and opened the case the two counoids floated off into space never be seen again we never found them ever again and apparently just thought our camera lens might be a proper food to grab this is a very nice rock nice little cave below it another one of those snails rolling around we've got another bamboo coral here similar to the one we collected earlier with little squat lobsters on them oh oh yep so we're gonna collect the sample [Music] again so uh this bamboo coral that we're collecting is for the full genome project so we will be flash freezing this one in liquid nitrogen hey that's funny to think this will be the last time that we'll be opening the doer and flash freezing all our samples today a little bit sad about that no i will miss that a little bit for sure thinking how cold those liquid nitrogens are and we need to put two gloves onto those metal rods in order to pull them out and it is quite a tricky design to pull the spoon out but after a while when we get used to it it is still very cool to see all those danced air and water molecules plus nitrogen is coming out of that big jeweler yeah i know i know that joan you've worked with liquid nitrogen before but i had never previously so this was actually my first time i think i don't know if we'll be there to witness them pouring it all out but i hope that we are back when we return to townsville and we meet up with uh jeremy horowitz and tom bridge back in at jcu so hopefully we'll be able to witness that and see you know our little piece of equipment that been we've been using for the past month and um yeah hopefully we will get to witness the end of it we're just handing this back to marty and rob hey again you're still online yeah i am i'm saying that yellow is fun past the robotic army oh yeah uh just having a look uh just marty and i are settling back in the audio chair here oh it's been a big thank you very much to um valerie and jane for looking after the commentary for a little while while we were busy doing other things on board the ship and and also to vikki for chatting on the commentary but earlier on today alright so we are really at the tail end here we're just going to roll up the slope for a little while longer but not much longer that's for the next five minutes or so and then we'll uh we'll call it we'll call it quits there's no one of these top snails doing this weird weird dance over the over the the mud but we've got a we got some samples of this that'll keep patrick happy uh patrick's uh i forget his last name but it's um he's been uh interested in these right from the beginning uh when we first started looking at the coral sea and he would send me these very grainy uh youtube snapshots and so please please can i get one of these and anyway eventually we managed to get a permit for him so uh here we are we've got a couple of samples of his tops now so they they'll i think they'll end up with you merrick and uh and then we'll have to coordinate to get them to belgium but i'll i'll give you the details of that uh later on so look we're just gonna crank it on up we should get some music going some texan some texan music that's what we really need the texan crew here we've got jayrod cody of course chris is part of the team we've had john and james on wirecast throughout the dive uh marty it's been a real pleasure on this dive we wanted steep and deep and didn't we get it we certainly got it didn't we how good was that at the bottom of that waterfall those boulders um yeah we didn't know what we were going to find it could have just been a pile of mud but i was expecting a pile of mine today steep mud i was expecting steep mud but nothing quite as spectacular as this you know just jumble piles of rocks and you know i'm a marine geologist and i loved uh you know as an undergraduate we've i've walked over many a a sedimentary rock environment and it's just incredible to see it down here two kilometers deep yeah that's right we'll actually be going back over this video footage many many times i would imagine looking at all these different uh rocks and the stratigraphy the layering that we could see so even though we weren't in the control room for a while uh there are screens all over the ship so yeah we were certainly watching uh yeah you know and i do love those there's quiet moments where you just zoom in on a on a stalk lily you know i i think they're amazing they are a relic animal and here they are in the deep deep great barrier reef just sitting there quietly you know they're uh just amazing animals in the inside there you can see our dive track today um from where we started off at the bottom of the plunge pool and we've made some pretty good progress up the side wall of the plunge pool yeah pretty good progress but we're still only halfway up we're halfway out through what we planned yeah but we had the we had the pleasure of uh dougal lindsay joining us from midwater dive so it was it's quite a lot to con uh you know combine all together uh boy i do like looking at these layers here but you know we we do have to say uh good night and goodbye uh farewell au voir vida zane because it's getting on here uh at the on the falcore the we've been diving all day it's going to take a good hour to recover on board and if we don't get going soon it'll be night time and we've still got lots of work to do in fact the rov sebastian is being packed away this is its last dive this is the last dive not only for our expedition but this is the last rov dive for uh schmidt ocean institute and rv falco for the for the year that's right in australian waters so it'd be packed up over the next few days as we head down into uh into us towards cairns which is the end of our leg two uh the voyage continues uh it'll be leg three but it'll be mainly focused on a multi-beam uh mapping exercise uh there'll still be outreach i will still be writing blogs uh karli weiner our hard working uh director of outreach and communications will be helping getting her team to help continue to put out outreach so the expedition isn't over we just won't have the rov with us the team the rv team is heading home for well-earned break uh but gee it's been just a fantastic ride yeah it really has i mean when we set out from brisbane uh four weeks or so ago how long ago was that how long ago was that uh yeah with i don't know an open mind as to what we might discover and uncover and it's certainly just i guess been well and above beyond any any expectations it's been really fantastic the things that we've mapped and discovered and uncovered whether it's the geology or the biology or the sea floor features that we've mapped um it's just really been quite extraordinary and an absolute pleasure and a thrill to be a part of something like this that's so significant yeah that's right it has been a pleasure and to see the to see everyone in in action here it's not just the control room but the entire falcore team both ashore and on board we have uh about i think 25 20 26 or so full you know crew members uh you know the the the stewards the chefs the engineers of course the bridge team working 24 7. uh you know it's an amazing team effort it's been a it's just wonderful to be on board and just see everyone working together you know in support of us uh yeah we feel very much like a part of the family here and i guess that sort of brings me into the the the uh the chat family all of the those familiar names and handles that we've seen over all of these dives uh we don't know your faces but you do feel uh very close uh you become very familiar the the comments we have we really appreciate the humor uh that helps us and also you know the the commentary the audi uh the audio from the other scientists who are joining us but yeah i i think overall the what i've learned from listening and also watching reading all the different chats that's been fantastic isn't it the people are sure yeah absolutely i mean we think of them as armchair experts but there's really has been a lot of expertise coming through on the youtube chat there's only a small science team on board and we certainly don't have breadth of expertise across all of the disciplines that you can experience on on these expeditions and rov dives so really having that contribution from onshore whether it's our scientific colleagues or everybody at home onshore that joins in and chats with us and and a lot of expertise there as well which is really really fantastic yeah thanks everyone great to be joining it even though i've been such a long way away but thank you thanks for all your great work on board great work guys yeah thanks merrick okay well we'll finish it up here um so just uh say this is dr robin being from james cook university saying farewell from the far northern great barrier reef offshore cape york area this is the end of falco dive 402 and from here we are heading back to cairns so say good night good night everybody you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you foreign you you you

Channel: Schmidt Ocean

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Id: K9SGggy4BfQ

Length: 204min 41sec (12281 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 27 2020