1-10-06 Tuesday, Fishing

There are some things that I shouldn't be put in charge of, and we've now learned that setting fish traps is one of those things. We wanted to catch some notothenioid fishes and amphipods using a big mesh fish trap. The trap was set in the same hole that we've been doing all our other work in so far. We left the trap out for roughly 28 hours, and came back this afternoon to find out what we had caught.

The suspense built as we hauled up the 90 feet of line and flopped the trap up onto the ice. Inside was a major haul...of worms.


Hundreds of nemertean worms had found their way into our trap over the course of the day that it was sitting outside. This hadn't been a problem with our earlier, smaller traps baited with other dead notothenioid fish. But this trap was different, and the reason probably had to do with the bait we used this time.


It seems that nemerteans love sardines. We punched some holes in this can and tossed it in the trap for the trip down. The nemertean above hadits front end completely buried in one of the punched holes. We tossed it and the sardines back in the trap and sent them back down to sit for another night. Our total haul for this trap set was one fish and six amphipods. The stories we hear of fish traps coming up covered in amphipods are turning out to be tall tales.