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A particularly nice image of a polychaete larvae

From the SPC2 camera

A few videos of the system recorded during a weekly port cleaning. We see a lot of lobster and a lot of growth on the frame and cameras.

We seem to be in the midst of a nice diatom bloom with many images of helical chains appearing in both of the cameras. A few are shown below:

Screen grab from SPC2

Individual Images from SPCP2

It has now been just over one month since the cameras were first deployed and so far they are working very well. Paul did another port cleaning today in the colder water to remove some small amount of growth on the view ports. Aside from the view ports, the rest of the housings, cables, cage, etc. are covered in a thick layer of green-brown algal growth.

A rather nice example of an acantharian imaged with the SPCP2

A nice example of an appendicularian and its “house” imaged with the SPC2

A quick snorkel today to clean the optical ports and check that the pumps are still running well. There is a lot of growth on everything except for the optical ports and copper parts. The water is green and full of small kelp fragments from the recent swell. Again the SPC2 strobe port shows the most growth of the four ports, but it is miminal.

With the increased swell and wind early this week, we saw an increase in the amount of growth on cameras. The strobe view port of the SPC2 is facing upward and exposed to direct sunlight during the day. As a result the fouling was too much for the water cleaning system and some growth manged to take hold on the port. This caused some of the imaged objects to have a light background instead of the typical dark background. After a quick snorkel and manual cleaning today the port is free of growth and the image quality is back to normal. The water jet on this port was also adjusted to maximize fluid velocity over the port surface. We’ll wait and see if this help mitigate growth in the future.