Back in the days the early days of the Aurora Australis we used to trawl them out of the ocean
with a with a big troll net nothing unusual about that. When moving krill around the ship
that was always done in buckets so we would just
put the krill into buckets and cut them off to wherever they had to go.
The wet well was born out of making my first sea ice voyage
in 2012. This is the voyage where we were stuck in sea ice that was up to four metres thick around
the Aurora Australis for over three weeks unable to move and yet we know from having a hole in the
ice and putting an ROV through the ice, a little submersible we could see krill all around the ship
but could you put a net in to catch them? No it's just too difficult.
The wet well is effectively a way of getting a sample of water into a ship without using a pump
because the pump will damage the fragile marine life you're trying to collect.
So what we've done is put the wet well below the water line of the ship
it's down inside the engine room. Pipes connect the outside world to the underwater world to the
wet world. There are three of them one at the keel one just a metre below the surface and one sort of
midway between them. They're 125 millimeters in diameter so it's about that sort of size and when
you open the hydraulic valve on them the ship starts to sink so water floods into that room.
I was really excited about this voyage it.
Actually got a bit emotional there so i just gotta wind that back a bit
As we got down past 60 degrees we started getting up earlier and earlier in the morning
so we'd be there at the right time for krill to be at the surface of the night feeding. And
on that occasion we opened up the wet well at night and almost instantaneously a live
Antarctic krill appeared in front of us. Yeah when that first crawl came through
it was pretty much a grand final winning goal. It really was a lot of hooting and lots of fun
we then settled down and just did the methodical job of the scientist.
The survivability of krill caught with the wet world it turned out to be about
95 and that's about an order of magnitude improvement over what we used to get
with troll nets and the old aquarium so it really has revolutionized how we can work.
They've been doing really well and we we've brought back probably eight to ten
thousand krill of differing ages so lots of our juveniles and larvae have continued to develop
and they look really good. And not long after we returned the handful of adults that we did
catch actually spawned and we're raising those those eggs and larvae in captivity as well.
I'm very glad not to have to carry buckets after buckets our pathway from the wet well up through
the ship and out to the aquariums was seamless all done through trolleys. And the ability to
pump clean ocean water directly from the front of the ship and directly into containerised
aquarium is an absolute game changer. I'm looking forward to having an intact back when I'm 50.
Most of the big vertebrate predators the seals penguins whales and other seabirds all rely on
those big schools of krill being there in vast numbers at some time in their reproductive cycle
if they're going to have a successful breeding season. So it's one species that is a linchpin
to the success of the overall ecosystem. I mean they're fundamentally beautiful animals I mean
imagine having a set of blue iridescent lights bioluminescing down your front surface i mean
they don't really need to dress up to go out.