Blog post by Hannah Blair, Stony Brook University graduate student.

The night watch crew had quite the enjoyable Thanksgiving on the R/V Armstrong, from finding squid in our trawl net (one of my favorite animal groups!) in the early hours of the morning, to a giant buffet in the galley for Thanksgiving dinner – or for us, Thanksgiving breakfast.

Despite some of us still reeling from food hangovers, we were back on the job last night. We began our watch with a fine-scale acoustic survey of ADEON’s second site off of Cape Hatteras. We frequently refer to this type of survey as ‘mowing the lawn,’ because the ship moves in a systematic grid pattern over a small area. This allows us to examine the area in fine detail using instruments called echosounders. Echosounders are essentially high-tech fish-finders, which let us view the water column using sonar. We use the echosounders to find the sections of the water column with lots of zooplankton, so that we know how deep to lower our trawl nets and find more cool animals like these squid!