Mud glorious mud

What’s at the bottom of the deep blue sea? MUD! Woody and Meg have been having A LOT of fun with the mud from the bottom of the sea, 2000m deep (200 double decker buses deep). The sea bottom is called the benthos, and to collect animals that live on the bottom of the sea we use a benthic sled (not Santa’s sled!) that is dropped very very slowly to the bottom, then towed along the bottom for over an hour, and then slowly brought back up again. Each tow takes 5 hours (half a day!) – it takes nearly 2 hours just to get the sled to the bottom of the sea! Here’s a picture of Woody & Meg with the benthic sled, and Meg helping with shovelling the mud:

The sled has a bag attached to the back of it with a fine mesh to collect all the mud and animals that are skimmed off the sea bottom. Meg and Woody’s first task is to dig the mud out of the sled and put it into buckets – this is GREAT MUDDY FUN. The mud is gooey, squidgy and oozy and feels lovely between your fingers, on your face and covering your clothes :) Here is Meg with some of her buckets of mud from the bottom of the sea:

 

Meg’s managed to keep fairly clean, unlike some of us! Hidden in the mud are lots of animals of all shapes and sizes – but mostly lots of sea stars and worms*. To find them we have to sieve all the mud, and when there are 15 large buckets of mud it takes a long time to sieve it all to find the animals! Here is Woody with some of the larger animals that he found – mostly sea stars (star fish):

But Woody’s favourite animal that he’s found is an anemone (like the animals that the clownfish Nemo lives in) – he doesn’t know what type of anemone this one is, but he’s calling it the nobbly nose anemone:

Yes, that’s a very creepy looking deep sea animal! Most of the animals on the bottom of the sea eat dead things that sink down from the surface, but this anemone is predatory and eats other deep sea animals. 

Meg & Woody say a muddy goodbye until the next update!

* and lots of forams (single celled animals with a hard 'shell' - I'll get our friend Jodie to do a guest post about forams sometime!!)