11 March 2015
Dr Richard O’Driscoll, Voyage Leader aboard RV Tangaroa for the NZ-Australia Antarctica Ecosystems Voyage 2015 says the research project accomplished all science objectives they set out to achieve.
Some summary facts and figures from the voyage include:
- Nearly 15,000 km travelled.
- Over 520 hours of whale song recordings with more than 40,000 individual calls detected.
- Photo-identification of 58 individual blue whales (including re-sightings).
- Biopsy samples from 11 humpback and blue whales.
- 40 trawls (18 demersal tows and 22 midwater tows).
- 111 species or species groups caught.
- 3,129 fish and krill individually measured.
- 370 biological sample lots retained for further analysis.
- 345 gigabytes of echosounder acoustic data recorded.
- Nearly 1,000 hours of continuous underway oceanographic and atmospheric data collection.
- Over 3,500 litres of seawater filtered.
- 33 on-board experiments to measure primary production.
- 55 underway conductivity-temperature-depth (CTD) profiles.
- Twelve Argo oceanographic floats deployed.
- Ten deployments of a continuous plankton recorder (CPR).
- 200 days recording time for moored echosounder monitoring silverfish migration in Terra Nova Bay over winter.
- Eight scientific echosounders calibrated.
This is a satisfying list of achievements to contribute to scientific knowledge of the Antarctic ecosystems and the result of fantastic teamwork by the large group that made this voyage a success.
Read NIWA's wrap-up report of the voyage: Scientists return from successful Antarctic research voyage