Incredible larval lobster video!
Posted: July 13, 2015 Filed under: Home | Tags: East Australian Current, larval fish, larval lobster, Marine National Facility, Professor Iain Suthers, RV Investigator, UNSW Leave a comment
Professor Iain Suthers from UNSW recently led a voyage on board RV Investigator from Brisbane to Sydney.
The teams were working around the clock to deploy equipment and collect crucial data to help us better understand how cold eddies that spiral off the East Australian Current play a pivotal role in our fisheries.
The larval lobsters collected on the voyage are completely amazing – they’re transparent like a piece of cellophane, and thin and flat like piece of paper.
You should check out the video, it’s incredible!
Check out the volcano cluster found by RV Investigator!
Posted: July 13, 2015 Filed under: Home | Tags: ANU, Extinct volcanoes, Marine National Facility, Professor Iain Suthers, Professor Richard Arculus, RV Investigator, UNSW, Volcanic cluster, Volcano 5 CommentsAustralia’s new ocean-going research vessel Investigator has discovered extinct volcanoes likely to be 50 million years old, about 250 km off the coast of Sydney in 4,900 m of water.
The chief scientist for the voyage, UNSW marine biologist Professor Iain Suthers, said while we searching for the nursery grounds for larval lobsters, the ship was also routinely mapping the seafloor when the volcanoes were discovered.
The centre of the volcanic cluster is 33 31 S, 153 52 E, which is 248 km from Sydney Heads. The cluster is 20 km long and six km wide and the seafloor 4890 metres deep, with the highest point in the cluster rising up to 3998 metres.
RV Investigator discovers a 50 million year old volcano cluster off the coast of Sydney
Posted: July 13, 2015 Filed under: Home | Tags: ANU, Marine National Facility, Professor Iain Suthers, Professor Richard Arculus, RV Investigator, UNSW, Volcanic cluster, Volcano 1 CommentTHIS MEDIA RELEASE WAS DISTRIBUTED BY UNSW AND ANU ON MONDAY 13 JULY 2015
Australia’s new ocean-going research vessel Investigator has discovered extinct volcanoes likely to be 50 million years old, about 250 km off the coast of Sydney in 4,900 m of water.
The chief scientist for the voyage, UNSW marine biologist Professor Iain Suthers, said while we searching for the nursery grounds for larval lobsters, the ship was also routinely mapping the seafloor when the volcanoes were discovered.
“The voyage was enormously successful, not only did we discover a cluster of volcanoes on Sydney’s doorstep, we were amazed to find that an eddy off Sydney was a hotspot for lobster larvae at a time of the year when we were not expecting them,” Professor Suthers said.
The four extinct volcanoes in the cluster are calderas, which form after a volcano erupts and the land around them collapses, forming a crater. The largest is 1.5 km across the rim and it rises 700 m from the sea floor.
Professor Richard Arculus from the Australian National University, an igneous petrologist and a world-leading expert on volcanoes said these particular types of volcanoes are really important to geoscientists, because they’re like windows into the seafloor.
“They tell us part of the story of how New Zealand and Australia separated around 40-80 million years ago and they’ll now help scientists target future exploration of the sea floor to unlock the secrets of the Earth’s crust,’ Professor Arculus said.
“They haven’t been found before now, because the sonar on the previous Marine National Facility (MNF) research vessel, Southern Surveyor, could only map the sea floor to 3,000 m, which left half of Australia’s ocean territory out of reach,” Professor Arculus said.
“On board the new MNF vessel, Investigator, we have sonar that can map the sea floor to any depth, so all of Australia’s vast ocean territory, is now within reach and that is enormously exciting,” Professor Arculus said.
Professor Suthers said the 94 m Investigator has capabilities that marine scientists in Australia have never had before and it will be key to unlocking the secrets the oceans around our continent and beyond.
“Investigator is able to send and receive data while we’re at sea, which meant the team back on base at UNSW in Sydney could analyse the information we were collecting at sea and send back their analysis, along with satellite imagery, so we could chase the eddies as they formed,” Professor Suthers said.
“This is the first time we’ve been able to respond directly to the changing dynamics of the ocean, and for a biological oceanographer like me, it doesn’t get more thrilling,” Professor Suthers said.
“It was astounding to find juvenile commercial fish species like bream and tailor 150 km offshore, as we had thought once they were swept out to sea that was end of them, but in fact these eddies are nursery grounds along the east coast of Australia,’
The research voyage led by Professor Iain Suthers departed Brisbane on 3 June and concluded on 18 June in Sydney, with 28 scientists from UNSW, Latrobe University, the University of British Columbia, the University of Sydney, the University of Auckland, the University of Technology Sydney and Southern Cross University.
The centre of the volcanic cluster is 33 31 S, 153 52 E, which is 248 km from Sydney Heads. The cluster is 20 km long and six km wide and the seafloor 4890 metres deep, with the highest point in the cluster rising up to 3998 metres.
Marine National Facility background
RV Investigator is a 94 metre purpose-built research vessel, capable of travelling 10,000 nm in a single voyage, accommodating up to 40 scientists and support staff, from the equator to the Antarctic ice-edge. The $120 million ship was commissioned into operation in December 2014 by the Minister for Industry and Science, Ian Macfarlane, and supports atmospheric, oceanographic, biological and geoscience research.
The Marine National Facility is a blue-water research capability, funded by the Australian Government and managed by CSIRO on behalf of the nation. It is available to all Australian scientists and their international collaborators, with access granted on the basis of proposals that are internationally peer reviewed, and independently assessed for science quality and contribution to the national interest.
Checking out eddies on the East Australian Current in RV Investigator
Posted: June 11, 2015 Filed under: Home | Tags: East Australian Current, Eddies, Eddy, Fisheries, Marine National Facility, Professor Iain Suthers, RV Investigator, Triaxus, University of New Sout, V03 Leave a commentThe scientists, crew and support staff on board RV Investigator are enjoying some beautiful weather off the coast of northern and central New South Wales this past week.
The vessel is out in the middle of one of Australia’s busiest shipping lanes, conducting research into eddies that spiral off the East Australian Current, with Professor Iain Suthers from the University of New South Wales as the Chief Scientist.
Before the ship departed Brisbane, Professor Suthers sent through the image below of the eddies he was hoping to study. Right now there is a 100 km wide eddy off the coast of Byron Bay and a very productive one only 30 km diameter off the coast of Forster, very similar to the image below. It appears to be an offshore nursery area.
The whales, dolphins and tuna think so too – the officers on the bridge have recorded impressive numbers in the Forster eddy feeding on what appears to be sardine.
Oceanographers from UNSW led by Prof Moninya Roughan have release satellite drifters into the eddies, revealing the characteristic clockwise spiral of these oases in the ocean.
Here’s a photo from on board with the team about to deploy the lagrangian drifter, which is a piece of equipment that can either float on the surface or at a specific ocean depth, to collect data about an ocean current.
Meanwhile scientists from UTS led by Prof Martina Doblin are discovering the basis for this productivity, in the form of single celled algae and photosynthetic bacteria and even viruses.
Around the clock they’ve been deploying equipment and collecting crucial data that will help us better understand how cold eddies play a pivotal role in our fisheries. In the plankton nets we have found over 80 different families of larval fish, including popular species such as larval yellowtail kingfish, dolphinfish, flatfish, and eels. 
Expedition to study ocean eddies
Posted: June 3, 2015 Filed under: Home | Tags: Associate Professor Moninya Roughan, Earth and Environmental Sciences, East Australian Current, Marine National Facility, Media Release, Professor Iain Suthers, RV Investigator, University of New South Wales, UNSW, UNSW School of Biological 2 Comments
THIS MEDIA RELEASE WAS DISTRIBUTED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES ON WEDNESDAY 27 MAY 2015
UNSW marine biologist Professor Iain Suthers will lead a scientific expedition aboard the brand new Marine National Facility research vessel Investigator next week to study the secrets of small eddies along the eastern Australian coastline between Port Macquarie and Newcastle.
“We suspect they are important offshore nurseries for larval fish,” says Professor Suthers, who will head a team of 28 researchers, more than half of them from UNSW, for the 16-day voyage between Brisbane and Sydney.
The team includes Associate Professor Moninya Roughan, head of the coastal and regional oceanography group in the UNSW School of Mathematic and Statistics, who will study the behaviour of ocean currents and the physical dynamics of eddy formation.
As the East Australian Current – a wide and deep marine conveyor belt made famous in the movie Finding Nemo – sweeps down the coast, bringing warm tropical water southward, it often forms large eddies that move slowly in an anti-clockwise direction.
“These large, warm eddies are biological deserts, devoid of much life. But sometimes small, cold eddies also break off from the main current and rotate in a clockwise direction. They pull up nutrient–rich water to the surface and are more like biological rainforests, with a wide diversity of species present, including larval fish,” says Professor Suthers, of the UNSW School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences.
“People think of the ocean as well-mixed and the same everywhere, but you can move from a desert area to a rainforest within a few kilometres.”
The team will use high-tech equipment on the $120 million Investigator to measure the temperature, salinity, and type of plankton in the small eddies to determine if they are offshore nursery grounds.
They will also trawl for larval fish and see whether more of them survive in these protective eddies than elsewhere.
“As many as 99.9 per cent of larval fish along the coastline do not survive to adulthood. But because many billions of eggs are laid, just a slight increase in survival rate can translate into a lot more fish,” says Professor Suthers.
“If we find the small eddies are good nurseries for larval fish, it raises the possibility of putting eggs from big fish such as tuna into the eddies so their chances of survival are better. That way we could help repopulate the ocean.”
The research would be relevant to many coastal areas around the globe where these small eddies are also found between the coast and the main current.
Five members of Associate Professor Roughan’s team are already on the vessel participating in an expedition in which an array of six moorings – strings of instruments and sensors – will be deployed off Brisbane in depths of 200 metres to five kilometres, to monitor changes in the East Australian Current.
“The East Australian Current moves enough water to fill 10,000 Olympic swimming pools southward every second. It not only affects fisheries, it has a major impact on weather, the position of marine parks, tourism, severe storm events, coastal erosion and the distribution of marine species,” says Associate-Professor Roughan.
Purpose-built in Singapore, Investigator can accommodate up to 40 scientists and 20 crew and travel from the tropics to the Antarctic ice-edge on voyages up to 60 days in duration. Overseen by an independent Steering Committee, the Marine National Facility is owned and operated by CSIRO on behalf of the nation.
Here are some great photos from previous voyages with Professor Iain Suthers!
