Wolfie joins the small boat survey team.

Wolfie mans the bow of the small boat.

Wolfie is the Stony Brook University mascot and he finally was able to escape the confines of the Laurence M. Gould and join us on the small boat the other day for some survey work in Flandres Bay.  We use a zodiac equipped with an echosounder like we have on the Gould to survey areas here near land where the large boat is unable to go.  While we have nautical charts for the waters we work in, the Captain of the ship is cautious about getting too close to any shallow areas since some areas aren't as well-mapped as the waters around the United States may be.

Wolfie and Chief Scientist Joe Warren discuss where to head next on the survey.

We can also survey into extremely shallow water (a few meters) in our small boat which no large boat can do.  This method is very useful here in the bays of the Gerlache Strait (Wilhelmina, Andvord, and Flandres) where there are lots of rapid bathymetry changes -- the bottom can go from 300 m to 10 m in a very short distance. And its at or past some of these dramatic bottom features that we've found large aggregations of krill here on previous trips.  We didn't see any giant swarms of krill on this trip, but did see some patches in Flandres Bay, but in different spots than we'd surveyed previously.  These were most likely swarms of small juvenile krill which we can identify by looking at the scatter on our echosounder at different acoustic frequencies and with our net tow data.

In Flandres Bay, you can see snow-capped mountains, glaciers, 100m high ice cliffs, icebergs, bergy bits, growlers, and brash ice. Sometimes all of them in the same picture.

In addition to being a neat place to work scientifically, these bays are beautiful with glaciers and ice cliffs reaching down to the waters edge, large and small icebergs scattered throughout the bay, regions of brash ice where we have to go very slowly so we don't damage our equipment, and lots of different wildlife.  We saw a good variety of species of pinnipeds, penguins, and flying seabirds during our small boat work, but not any whales which will be abundant in these waters by the late (Austral) summer.

And Wolfie (like the rest of us) may have gotten a little too much fresh air and sunshine as most of the rest of the small boat team has noses that are the same shade of red as his hat.

- Joe