We are about 75 nautical miles away from Mawson Station.
The water depth here is about 1500 meters and we've just retrieved
on KOMBI Two from the seafloor. It's been down there for the last
two years and the purpose of this KOMBI was to help us understand
how Antarctic krill use the seafloor habitats in this area.
So the KOMBI has been recording the presence of krill on video recording
as well as using an echo sounder. It's also been recording temperature
and current data and it has been recording the vocalizations of marine
mammals on the hydrophone, many of which will be krill predators.
So we're really excited to see what data this is collected and
we're going to put it in a container and take it home.
Real hard to study in winter because of the sea ice.
So in summer we're able to get to Antarctica and study krill
using sound and also collecting krill by trawling.
In winter we can't do that because of the ice.
So the KOMBI enables us to study krill all year round,
including that sea floor habitat.
So my role with the KOMBI's has been to look at all of the echo sounder
data for the full year that our first mooring was deployed,
and that's involved finding out what is krill and what's not krill and
looking at their distributions in the water column for the whole season.
We don't really know very much about what krill do on the seafloor
and how their behavior with the seafloor changes through the season.
So figuring out what they're doing down there and how often they're
there and how much of them there are down there will help us to
sustainably manage the fisheries. I love just scrolling through
all of the echo grams. It's like you get this picture
of everything in the water column for the whole year and
you see the changes through the season just so easily.
It's night and day, you know, krill moving through the water
column all the time and just enormous swarms as well.