{"id":307,"date":"2014-02-07T21:07:45","date_gmt":"2014-02-07T21:07:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.oceanblogs.org\/kosmos2014gc\/?p=307"},"modified":"2014-05-07T13:12:48","modified_gmt":"2014-05-07T12:12:48","slug":"blue-bottles-sharks-and-other-challenges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oceanblogs.org\/kosmos2014gc\/2014\/02\/07\/blue-bottles-sharks-and-other-challenges\/","title":{"rendered":"Blue bottles, sharks and other challenges"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201eDid you see sharks\u201c or \u201eCan I join you next time\u201c are usually the first reactions, you get to hear, when people realise you are one of the scientific divers for the KOSMOS team.<\/p>\n

We have to admit that first of all the nicest thing is the water temperature, around 1\u00b0C when we started last year in Sweden, 18\u00b0C now at the beginning in Gran Canaria, so no dry suits anymore.<\/p>\n

But still you need to wear a wetsuit, thanks to the thermal conductivity of water, even 18\u00b0C are cold after 1 hour with a 7mm neoprene.<\/p>\n

The second issue is the protection of the skin, on board against the sun, in the water against the Portuguese man o\u00b4 war, also called \u201cblue bottle\u201d , see in the lower left corner of the picture below.<\/p>\n

\"MS4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The last looks like a jelly but is really a siphonophore, a colony of highly specialised individuals (polyps) that are connected to such a degree that they cannot survive on their own.\u00a0 It has four kinds of polyps, one of them creates the \u201csail\u201d making it float and drifting with the wind, the others are for catching food, reproduction and defence. Unfortunately everybody gets stung when touching the defence tentacles, which seems to be really painful, though none of us divers had to experience this yet.<\/p>\n

Against sharks the wetsuit does not really help, or as far as we know we do not taste better without neoprene. But nevertheless so far sharks were only seen from boat and not under water (no picture), which is a pity, because most of the times meeting a shark under water is an amazing and exceptional occasion that no diver wants to miss and they are anyhow not as dangerous as the media wants to tell.<\/p>\n

Apart from this you cannot see a lot out there, visibility is better than in the Baltic sea, usually around 15m, you can almost see one mesocosm from the other.<\/p>\n

\"MS2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Every now and then you meet a school of small fishes and you see many translucent jelly like species of all kinds: salps, larvaceans, arrow worms and true jellies.<\/p>\n

But still most important is to watch out for the blue bottle before sticking your head above the surface even in the evening.<\/p>\n

\"MS3\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201eDid you see sharks\u201c or \u201eCan I join you next time\u201c are usually the first reactions, you get to hear, when people realise you are one of the scientific divers for the KOSMOS team. We have to admit that first of all the nicest thing is the water temperature, around 1\u00b0C when we started last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":68,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-experiment","category-ocean-acidification"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oceanblogs.org\/kosmos2014gc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oceanblogs.org\/kosmos2014gc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oceanblogs.org\/kosmos2014gc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oceanblogs.org\/kosmos2014gc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/68"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oceanblogs.org\/kosmos2014gc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.oceanblogs.org\/kosmos2014gc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":500,"href":"https:\/\/www.oceanblogs.org\/kosmos2014gc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307\/revisions\/500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oceanblogs.org\/kosmos2014gc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oceanblogs.org\/kosmos2014gc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oceanblogs.org\/kosmos2014gc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}