Dr Graham Oliver and Dr Andy Mackie from the Department of Biodiversity and Systematic Biology have been offered the chance to take part in a research cruise to the Arctic waters of northern Norway. This cruise is part of the Mareano project, which aims to map the bathymetry, sedimentology and biology of the seabed around Norway. Graham and Andy will be looking for deep water bivalves and ploychaete worms to augment their research here.

Graham takes up the story:

Our ship is in port and we are now on board waiting to depart for the research area south of the Lofoten Islands. Once there we will be taking samples from depths between 200 and 2500metres.

We have arrived in late spring but already the days are long with the sun coming up well before 5am, but then we are north of the Arctic Circle. The snow is still lying thickly but the bright weather makes the mountainous backdrop really spectacular.

We sail around midnight and it will take 24 hours to reach our first station when we start our 12-hour shifts. Lets hope we can then show you the ship at work and hopefully some of the marine life in the Norwegian Sea.

In the meantime here is a flavour of Tromsø. The town is a mixture of old and new, all jumbled up and reflecting a boom time in the 1960’s. The wooden houses are typical of the old town and the Polar museum represents a most modern addition. The city is surrounded by rugged scenery of fjords and mountains. Our ship the GOSars is named after an eminent marine biologist and one of the most modern in the Norwegian research fleet.

We spent the last 24 hours doing little while a Force 9 gale stoped all sampling, waves were washing over the trawl deck. At last the beam trawl is out now and sampling at just under 2000m. We have completed one station at 660m.

At every station we take samples with a Van Veen grab, a box core, a beam trawl and an epibenthic sledge. The grab and box core are launched from the hangar which is in the middle of the ship, and the doors open close to the sea level. The sledge and trawl are launched off the trawl deck at the stern of the ship. The pictures show the hangar with doors closed and a remote video camera array in the corner. With the doors open the Van Veen grab is launched by the crew, not the scientists, we have no intention of falling into the Arctic waters.

The first beam trawl from 660m is now up and our first sight of life in the Norwegian Sea is on deck. This sample has many kinds of starfish and brittlestars of stunning colours along with an angler fish.

We have stopped and started since Monday due to bad weather and with waves up to 8.5 metres the ship cannot launch the sampling gear. It has also been snowing!  It is very difficult to show the sea in still photos but views from the bridge give some idea.

The GO Sars is a modern research ship with dynamic positioning; this gives impressive accuracy for sampling and bottom photography as well as returning to an exact position for repeat sampling. We have managed a deep station over 2200m with the beam trawl and the sample has some strange fish along with crustaceans and starfishes of many kinds.

A sledge haul from the same site came up with four purple sea urchins along with three of the bivalves that I had come to collect. Hopefully colleagues in Paris will be able to identify the symbiotic bacteria that live in the gills of the bivalve.

We will now move to shallower water where sampling will be quicker, not the 4 hours it takes to do a trawl in abyssal depths.

As with last year the Peregrines were around over the winter, I could see, or hear, them from the office most days. It seems August/September is when they are least visible, probably while they are moulting their feathers after the breeding season.

The camera was back up and running in mid-March just in time to see the female start incubating eggs some time around the 20th.

Let's hope that they have a better season than last year!

Or at least the Peregrines do. There was a worrying moment yesterday morning when I didn't see any activity around the nest for hours, I couldn't see a bird on the nest - and it was raining. I eventually saw the female at the nest late morning but she just had a cursory glance at the nest then flew off.

She returned a little while later and then sat on the nest for the rest of the day. The male flew in a couple fo times and on one occasion I am pretty certain brought in a little lump of food. The female didn't stir but it's possible the chick hatched sometime yesterday (or over the weekend).

When I switched the camera monitor on in my office this morning I saw the female was sitting on the nest then the male popped in with a morsel of food. The female stood on the edge of the nest, started tearing small chunks off and was stretching into the back of the nest to offer the food to the chick. This went on for about 10 minutes until the female resumed incubation.

Peregrines normally lay 3-4 eggs and start incubating as soon as they lay the first one, which means the first egg laid hatches first. Assuming the other eggs hatch there will likely be more chicks over the next few days but it could be a couple of weeks before they are big enough to be seen over the rim of the nest.