My first research cruise of the summer has come to an end and it feels great to stretch my legs on land! While the R/V Norseman II had awesome accommodations, it’s still only 110 ft long, so I started to go a little stir crazy at the end of 2 weeks.

My team’s main objective on board was to collect as many clams as possible from the Chukchi Sea, and I think we met that goal! Our modified trawl net did its job and we had over 30 successful trawls. Since clams live on top of the seafloor or buried in seafloor sediments, we also hauled a ton of mud on board in our net. Before we could sort out catch, we sieved the contents to remove the mud.

Overall, we sorted, identified, and bagged over 5,000 individual clams!

While we were only collecting the clams, our net captured any critters that live on (epifauna) or in (infauna) the seafloor sediments. As a lover of marine invertebrates, I was super excited to see the strange new creatures we hauled on deck! Many of our trawls were full of hundreds of sand dollars to thousands of brittle stars, which are aptly named and littered their broken leg bits over everythings! I recognized many invert species from my work in the Beaufort Sea, though the individuals from the Chukchi seem to be quite a bit larger.

My favorite critters we saw were basket stars (Gorgoncephalus arcticus), Serripes clams with their distinctive zigzag shell (Serripes groenlandicus), and a baby octopus!

If invertebrates aren’t your thing, we also saw bearded seals, fin and humpback whales, and TONS AND TONS of walruses!