So aquarium systems on Antarctic vessels have traditionally been cold rooms with small aquarium
systems recirculating within them, and when you get back to your home port, typically the animals are
taken off in nets into buckets of cold water, packed in ice and trucked to their new home
aquarium on land. That has all sorts of problems with it because there's multiple handling of
the animals and also it's quite a big work health and safety issue to move tonnes of water in buckets
through doorways and ships. What we did was we turned that concept around and went to a much more
logistically streamlined system, where we built the aquariums for Nuyina in containerised laboratory.
We've basically designed this in a containerised system so we can increase the capacity, the safety
and the ability to transport our krill in pristine health. It allows us to safely remove the aquarium
container from the ship, crane it directly onto a truck and then bring it to our Kingston aquarium
where we can safely and efficiently unload the krill. So this removes all of the manual handling
for humans, it removes the double handling for specimens, and provides much more continuity in
the water chemistry control, oxygen control, and so forth, for the specimens in the tanks as well.
We modeled the entire internals of the container in
3D CAD and that allowed us to work out if it could actually fit in the very small space.
And then the construction and fit out was done here in our AAD workshops.
We have two lab containers that are configurable at different temperatures and one container is
for returning our specimens back to our research facility here in Hobart, and the other is
for conducting experiments on the ship.
So for the past 20 years we've been running an Antarctic marine research aquarium
in Kingston, Tasmania, and that's allowed us to answer questions about Antarctic krill.
At very short notice we've been able to do research on them because we have a captive
population that represents wild krill. So putting an aquarium on board the Nuyina that is much more
efficient and much more easy to operate with a small number of people, and much more easy to bring
the samples back to shore, is going to increase our capability to run that sort of research on krill.