Last night was our first Cobb Trawl of the trip. Basically we throw a big net behind the boat at certain depths for a couple of hours and see what we can catch. From an aquarium stand point we are looking for jellies and cookie cutter sharks, a rare and difficult species to hold in marine aquaria.
This trawl pulled up a lot of interesting fish and onsets but no jellies of interest and no sharks. We caught a lot of squid, shrimp, lantern fish, a hatchet fish, some flatfish, lizardfish, some box jellies and pelagic tunicates. You can google all of these fish if you're interested. What we caught we all in the smaller larval to juvenile stages. We even caught a couple of leptocephalus larvae; one that was almost a meter!
Our night lighting attempt was of no success either but we will try again tonight. So far this morning we have already caught a couple of jellies we are going to try and get larvae from onboard. We just launched the second tow so I will keep you informed as to how the day goes. The wind is picking up wicked so hopefully that won't effect our catch at all.
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