All around the South Shetland Islands

At that time we, that are Magnus Lucassen, Chiara Papetti and Nils Koschnick, felt already much comfortable. Right at the beginning of the expedition we could deploy our fish traps at Admiralty Bay (Picture 2). Two days we waited and trembled that our predictions about our target species, the Antarctic eelpout, would become true, especially, when considering that our last catch was almost nine years ago. After releasing the traps in more than 400 meter water depths by remote control we had to wait for nearly ten nerve-wracking minutes until the traps reached the sea surface. But we were really impressed after recovering the traps, more than 500 eelpouts could be retrieved alive aboard. Now they found a new home in our special aquaria container (Picture 3), which is capable of transporting Antarctic animals even at tropical temperatures across the equator. Now, we take care about the eelpouts, until our colleagues will escort them to Bremerhaven on the following cruise leg.

As members of the section Integrative Ecophysiology at AWI we investigate the evolutionary adaptation of fish and other marine animals to the extreme temperature conditions of Antarctica. Certainly, we aim to answer also the question, how these specialists may respond to the ongoing climate change, which is especially pronounced already at the Antarctic Peninsula. It turned out during our past research that the Antarctic eelpout serves as a good model system to answer these fundamental questions. But surely, the Antarctic fish fauna is very diverse, and therefore another topic of our cruise will be the characterisation of the fish fauna at the Antarctic Peninsula and the collection of samples from diverse fish groups for ongoing genetic studies. This is the main research area of our team member, Chiara Papetti, from the University of Padova. Together with her we would also like to learn more about the Antarctic toothfish, which is due to its size and the market prize of high economical interest. As one of the longest-living fish in Antarctica and late maturity it might be particularly endangered, when commercial fishery becomes permitted.

Back to Deception Island: Here our colleagues were finally successful and could catch alive krill and even the extremely fragile salps for their experiments aboard. About these experiments we certainly hear more during the next weeks. After having a nice Easter at Deception Island thanks to the excellent dishes, but without searching for Easter eggs, we passed the Southern tip of the South Shetland Islands on Monday and turned back to the Drake Passage. From there we moved in a zigzag line along the North-Western side of the islands towards the North, to complete the next CCAMLR transect (Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources). On the shelf, these transects were interrupted by our bottom trawls for catching fish. Facilitated by unusual good weather conditions in the Drake Passage we proceeded fast, and so we will reach Elephant Island at this weekend. Here, further process studies on salps and krill will be the focus for the upcoming days. More about this will follow soon.

With best wishes from Polarstern on behalf of the chief scientist, Bettina Meyer and all participants,

Magnus Lucassen