Serpent Project Enfield 6 - measuring megafaunal abundance, diversity and distribution.

SERPENT - Scientific and Environmental remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Partnership using Existing iNdustrial Technology. A highly successful mission resulted after 5 days of ROV operations. Eight video transects were completed, for megafaunal abundance, diversity and distribution in the area. Transects were conducted every 450m and extend to 100m from the drill site. Videos will be analysed for megafaunal diversity and habitat mapping during 2006. There is only one habitat type at END01 which is soft bottom. There is no evidence of any rock formations or hard bottom of any type. This will be accounted for when analysing video transects. Preliminary analysis indicates a high density and diversity of megafauna. The main component of the megafaunal community is consistent with soft bottom communities and includes echinoderms (asteroids, echinoids) a host of crustaceans (prawns and large isopods), eels that live in the sediment and some bottom dwelling fish. Unlike at ENC03, there were no large sponge beds only sparsely scattered sponges. A variety of prawns, crabs, hagfish, amphipods, isopods and fish were attracted to the bait traps (first experiment). Initial examination of the data suggests that there is a difference in the diversity of organisms that visit the traps (inside vs outside the drill spoil). Isopods and hagfish only appeared to visit traps outside of the drill spoil. Further analysis will validate any trends in the data.Species collected for determining the level of heat shock protein expression (second experiment):*    5 isopods outside of the drill spoil *    5 isopods outside of the drill spoil re-deployed within the drill spoil *    5 isopods outside of the drill spoil re-deployed outside of the drill spoil*    5 isopods outside of the drill spoil caged and attached to ROV garage, immersed to seabed and brought to surface again*    23 isopods outside of the drill spoil*    20 isopods outside of the spoil used for re-deployment experiment *    40 shrimp outside of the drill spoil*    57 amphipods outside of the drill spoil*    3 hagfish outside of the drill spoil*    20 shrimp within the drill spoil*    8 amphipods within the drill spoil*    1 sea cucumber within the drill spoil