Scavengers

Our catch of amphipods in a dish in the lab

Well, we've been prevented from working on Teisten for the past couple of days by excessive wind, so we re-calibrateded our expectations, had a brainstorm, and figured out what else we could do. We deployed some scavenger traps in the harbor just outside Ny-Ålesund and were able to catch animals that way.

The ribbon worm

Scavenger traps are simple: just mesh cylinders with funnels on each end and a piece of raw fish inside. We recovered the traps this morning to see if anything was there, and we actually had some pretty cool specimens! Most of them were amphipods (I think the scientific name is Eurythenes). Amphipods are small, shrimp-like creatures that live in the water column or just above the seafloor and can smell a dead animal from a long way away. They're not picky eaters - they eat fish, algae, anything else that's recently died. They're very common in seafloor environments around the world. 

The snail Margarites helicina

The scavenger trap also caught a snail and a ribbon worm, so I'm pretty interested to figure out what species they are. I think the snail is Margarites helicina, which is pretty common around Svalbard, but I have no idea for the ribbon worm. Ribbon worms have simple body forms and few distinctive characters, so they're pretty hard to identify. Once I identify the species, I'll be able to say that it's active in the polar night - swimming, feeding, doing its animal thing. 

You might think that all biological activity ceases in the polar night, but this is far from true. There's actually a large collaborative project called Marine Night that has found high levels of biological activity in the dark winter season. For the scavengers, I'm not surprised. Think about it: scavengers eat dead things, and they find it by smell. That means they don't rely on light for anything! Things die in the winter as well as in the summer, so scavengers always have food. They're good to go!

Even though we couldn't go on Teisten, I'm glad we got to sample the scavenging community in Ny-Ålesund harbor. We got some very cool organisms!