Coral-vana

Been a busy few days since we got on Station AA and tomorrow
afternoon we'll head out to Station B. The lettering of these
stations is a little non-intuitive, we'll miss out a few letters here
and there - thats because this group has been to this area before and
have other stations with letters already.

So - yesterday just after midnight our first bottom trawl came up
onboard, and was totally chock full of corals! More corals than I
have ever seen down here before, so I was kept very busy until well
after 2pm, when I got to climb into my bunk and sleep for a few
hours. The trawl was generally small but had a good diversity of
animals, I think most people were happy (though especially me, as it
was dominated by corals and anemones!). To be honest I lost count at
40 of one species, so gave up from there - but i've already used up
the entire set (minus two) of labeled tubes I made during our Drake
crossing (that were supposed to last pretty much the whole cruise),
and I now have 12 adults and 30 baby corals growing up in the fridge
- they're so cute! Hope they survive and start to build their
skeletons - it's nice to have these babies on the first day, gives
them the whole cruise to do what they need to do! I also managed to
get lots of nice anemone samples for my reproduction and population
genetics work, so thats great too.

Well, I should probably go and label more tubes, as we do have one
more trawl here to do before we head to the new site, and if it's
anything like the first, I need to start preparing now!