Hey everyone! It’s Pete from the night shift here to talk about shrimp! During our night sampling with the IKMT and the bongo nets we not only catch copepods, juvenile fish, and krill, but also shrimp! These shrimp typically come from our IKMT net, which catches them between the surface and 550 meters deep. Thankfully we can use our sonars to estimate where our catches are coming from based on the markings we see on the screen. For example, if we towed our IKMT net as this reading was being recorded, we could say with confidence that most of our catch will be coming from about 75 meters deep.

The shrimp themselves, even though they can be really hard to identify, look really cool! My favorite shrimp Aristaeomorpha, we caught at our Blake Escarpment site. It has a really deep red color, and is one of the largest shrimps we have caught so far. We've also caught Pleoticus and Haliporus, not to mention plenty of krill which can be easily confused with shrimp. Because these guys can be so small, I use a dissecting microscope to identify certain features and then match them with a dichotomous key which helps me determine genus and species. Check out these cool pictures of both our shrimp and our sonar!