Most of the organisms that we are interested in have jellyfish type body tissues. Marine biologists would call this gelatinous. Since these organisms (i.e. called Siphonophors, Salps or Ctenophors) are easily destroyed when we try to collect them in a towed net, we go where they live: in the open sea. They come close to the sea surface and that's where we are. These animals can't really influence where they are going and once found, we try to collect them by using tubes, that we can close from both ends. Then we bring them to the surface and store them for further investigations in little aquariums.

Another activity that requires some diving skills is what we call trash spotting: some crew members stay on the bridge of the Esperanza and report to an inflatable whenever they spot some floating trash in the sea. It could be a bucket, a plastic bottle, parts of boxes, toothbrushes. Simply anything that is made out of plastic. Whenever big pieces of plastic are spotted, some snorkelers jump out of the inflatables to have a closer look, and see if the trash is already overgrown by marine life. Most interesting for me are big chunks of old nets that either get lost in the fishing process or are intenionally discarded by their owners because they don't use them anymore. These nets attract little schools of fish who try to find shelter. The crate where these little fish used to live in even had Japanese characters and it must
have come a long way. Scientists say that this way, lots of species are transported to places where they don't belong: aliens, that invade new habitat. Without any natural enemies their populations explode.

In the next couple of days we are going to dive at a big piece of plastic that over a year ago was marked with a buoy. I'm very excited by what we are going to see when we dive there.

Best,
Thilo