Our first OBS retrieval at night
We have now recovered 5 OBS’s out of 6 attempted. OBS NZ17 did not respond to our contact attempts. The ship made a search pattern circuit of one mile radius while we continued attempts to contact the OBS, but heard nothing. We think that either the OBS was trawled up by a fishing vessel and dropped off somewhere else, or that it was somehow damaged and not able to communicate with us. It was in fairly shallow water (less than 600 m) and in an area that is heavily fished.
Many of the OBS's retrieved were covered with some sort of deep water coral growing on them
A couple snails/mollusks that came up with one of the OBS's
Cleaning off an OBS
OBS retrieval
Photo of an orange roughy fish. These deep-water fish live to be over 100 years old, and their fishery is being depleted, in large part by bottom trawling.
Illustration of the fishery bottom trawling process, which pulled up one of our OBS's prematurely in July, and might have something to do with the disappearance of our OBS17. Figure credit BBC.
Thanks for sharing the link Anne – all so interesting!