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welcome to another edition of 'this is cool but i have no idea what it is.' i found this little guy on the wall above our fishtank last week.  from a distance, it looked a little like Trite planiceps - similar size; vaguely similar shape; large, dark front legs.  but on closer inspection the abdomen, which is relatively larger and a different shape, looks flufflier and has a beautiful grass-green stripe running down the middle.  the front legs also appear a bit different and the jaws are shorter and more bulbous.  so for now, i will tentatively say 'Trite sp.' ... i have sent a few draglines out into the nz spider world to see if anyone can name this beastie for me, and if they do, i'll update it here. 
in the meantime, hope you enjoy the pics - s/he was very friendly and even came in for a much closer look at me a few times (see videos at the end - sorry for the low quality, i've misplaced my better video camera for the moment).

 

i've been back for two weeks, so this is getting slightly ridiculous, but here are the next photo installments from the cruise:

sealog 5 (equator party)
sealog 6 (more cool squid)
more sea & sky
adopted by a gannet
sealog 7 (Vampyroteuthis infernalis!)
the first green flash

i've been saving this one since september, partly waiting for the right moment and partly because i find i still have mixed feelings about it...
i bought a dead spider.
i normally give dead arthropod curios a wide berth, because i don't know where they came from, and i don't like the idea of collecting bugs just to stick in resin so someone can look at them on a shelf and go 'oooooh.'  (or 'eeeew.')  but in a moment of weakness at the camden markets (induced by hunger and the unbelievable throng of other people milling around), i ducked into a stall full of many-leggers encased in all manner of resins.  there were tiny scorpion cell-phone charms, large hairy spiders flattened and framed, curled centipedes inside necklace pendants, brilliant iridescent beetles inside heavy paperweights.  part of me couldn't help going 'oooooh' (and yes, i appreciate the irony), but i planned to get out empty-handed as i edged along a row of necklaces toward the shop entrance.  the shop assistant approached me and asked if i were looking for anything in particular, and i mumbled in what i hoped were fairly unintelligible tones that i didn't see any spider necklaces, so i'd just be on my way...
semi-unfortunately, the guy had eagle ears and brightened immediately.  'wait right there,' he said.  thinking myself immune to the (snort) charms of encapsulated spiders, but a little curious, i did wait to see what he had in mind.
and there she was.

i had never seen anything like her.  and i was smitten.
luckily for my conscience, it appears that Gasteracantha cancriformis is a common enough beastie and rather widely distributed, although it is not, in fact, found in china (where he thought it came from).  i know it could easily have turned out that this was something rare, and i certainly don't intend to make a habit of it.  but... look at the amazing spines (hence the common name 'thorny orb-weaver' or 'spiny-backed orb-weaver').  she's so beautiful.  and i promise to take good care of her and use her to further the cause of spider-kind whenever she attracts attention.
swoon.
 

just to ease back into this (especially considering it's not even the right day... is there such a thing as 'ship-lag'?), i'll kick off with some new photos of an old friend, Trite planiceps.  i know we've had this one before, most recently in august, but (a) it's a jumping spider and you can never have too many of those; (b) this one just walked right up to me a few minutes ago and begged to be photographed, and (c) the results were good.  voila!

i'm back on dry land!  there will be news from cape town shortly, but in the meantime i can also start uploading photos.  i'll add them to and between the sealogs over the next few days and add the links below for easy access.  here are the first ones:

sealog 1
water & air
sealog 2 (sea owl!)
flying fish
sealog 3 (mid-air predatory action!)

new as of 7 december:

the ship
sealog 4 (weird squid!)

looking back, i see that i haven't really described where i've been living for the past month.  since i have ample time for meditating on my surroundings now that the sampling is finished (actually, with a week to go before we arrive at port, 'excessive' time might be more truthful), here's a bit of info about our digs.
i share a cabin, about 3x6m, with a benthic biologist from uruguay.  we get along famously, having startlingly similar senses of humor and each eagerly studying the other's language.  i can't actually imagine being randomly thrown into co-habitation with someone more compatible, and i'm well aware that not everyone on the ship has been quite so lucky.  one of the other biologists, who has his own room, shares a bathroom with a russian guy we have informally christened 'senor enojado' (mr. angry) - among ourselves only, of course, so shh - because he never smiles, and in fact meets any attempt at pleasantries with a heavy scowl.  apparently, he also mutters to himself constantly in a low, semi-threatening tone, when using the shared bathroom.  did i mention that i love my roommate?
but i digress.  the cabin is a little like a shared twin college dorm room, with furnishings in shades of blond wood and a nice dusty blue.  there are two twin berths, each at normal height but with raised sides (for sleeping security during heavy swell), and drawers underneath.  there's a desk under the porthole and a dangerously comfy sofa (site of many a siesta, some unintentional).  there are several small bookshelves affixed to the walls, each with a bar across the front to prevent sudden avalanches, and the three tall cupboards all have similar bars across their shelves, plus locking doors.   one corner of the room is cut out by our 1.5x2m bathroom, a true 'water closet,' which contains a compact sink, toilet and shower.  the floor is recessed a little so that the water from the shower runs freely over it but not into the main part of the room; the ship's movement eventually herds the slosh into the corner with the drain.  mercifully, the bathroom is also well ventilated - the floor is dry within about two hours after a shower and laundry hung in there also dries quickly.
this ship, designed in part for acoustic work, is unusually stable and quiet - we can't always tell without looking outside whether we're moving forward or not.  its normally gentle roll, perpendicular to the beds, is actually rather soothing, and apart from the occasionally noisy maintenance work during daylight hours, peaceful sleep is possible at any time of day (and believe me, i've tried them all.  the only time i couldn't sleep was when a strange, rhythmic thumping started up nearly exactly above my head - i figured it was some kind of maintenance thing, as usual, but in fact senor enojado was on the top deck jumping rope.  go figure).  we've had to address a couple of small creaking issues in our room - carpentry, right-angle corners and constant swaying don't seem to go together very well - but through the cunning use of paper wads, bandanas and occasional blunt force, we've won nearly every time.
and so we've spent four weeks in our little cubby in the sixth deck, about 9m above the sea surface (on average).  in our gently rocking sleep, i think we've traveled about 2000km, which is kind of a strange thought (plus another ~5000 during waking hours).  we have floated anywhere from a dozen meters to five kilometers above the seafloor and doubtless passed by many unseen strange creatures, and we've traveled over about 45° of latitude. (the chilly weather now certainly drives home how far we've come from the tropics.)  it's also odd to realize that for four weeks, we've lived entirely within a 110m-long steel box, and haven't seen trees, or cars, or dogs, or a newspaper.  (our newsless bubble was burst  briefly when the pebbles slyly fed me a rumor about michael jackson's death being a publicity stunt... my credibility on board was shot for a few days after that.)  it's odder to realize that we haven't actively missed most of these things, apart from our respective important people onshore (news hoaxes notwithstanding).
i remember the culture shock of returning from my previous voyage in 2004 - suddenly on land, there were street lights, shoe shops, tall buildings.  we had just lived for three weeks without any of this; was it really necessary? gradually we got used to city life again, and bought cups of coffee and high-heeled boots and electronic gadgets, but i think one of the things i like the most about time at sea is the stepping back from these things for a while.  for a few weeks, i don't need any of them (well, ok, i confess, my music player has been extremely useful during whale-watches); on future trips (if any), i think i would only extend my packing list to include many more books and several kilos of chocolate.  it's a good life out here, and while i will be very ready to be home by the end of six more days without any work to speak of, i know that i will also look back on the weeks spent in our little floating world as happy ones.

well, we've come a long way since the first squid report i made after we completed superstation 1.  now we're up to station number 9, and we have just one left to go (although we've been collecting some extra samples as the chance arises).  we've found 40 species from 21 families, and a good mix of things from the surface waters and things that live much deeper.  our little friend Pterygioteuthis gemmata (with the lovely photophores) has been present in nearly every sample, while some other things we have only seen once on the whole trip.  and nearly every catch has brought in at least one thing we haven't seen previously, so it's still exciting whenever a sample comes in.
our favorites so far, in addition to Vampyroteuthis and the silly-looking cranchiids, have included some more cranchiids (one in particular, Egea inermis, is just a beautifully clear sac of fluid, but with huge golden googly eyes); a tiny, bright-red deep sea squid called Bathyteuthis; several onychoteuthids in perfect condition (but i'm a little biased); and a few different species of Histioteuthis, a genus of particularly spectacular squids that are covered in blue-green photophores, and have one huge eye and one 'normal-sized' eye.
and yesterday's trawls brought in some more bizarre and wonderful things. the benthic sample contained two specimens of a small, round squid called Heteroteuthis dagamensis, endemic to this region and not previously encountered on this cruise;  two other new records for the cruise followed in the nekton samples.  the first was a small squid whose family we couldn't even decide on at first, but after some research we think it may be Alluroteuthis antarctica (since we are in a region where antarctic species occasionally turn up, especially in deep water).  the whole second trawl contained one single, lonely squidlet (among the fish, crustaceans, jellies and pyrosomes) - but a very interesting one.  it's a strange-looking thing, with almost perfectly circular fins and a gladius (or 'pen') that extends in a thin spike so far beyond the fins that it nearly doubles the animal's mantle length.  this seems to be a paralarva first described in 1920 (from the sargasso sea) by s. stillman berry, who poetically called it Enoptroteuthis spinicauda; more recent authors suggest that it's a junior synonym of Lepidoteuthis grimaldii, so we'll have to look at it closely and see what we can find out.
one thing i had hoped to encounter, especially in this particular area, has not turned up yet.  it's a species or group of species with a lot of associated systematic confusion (their family status isn't even certain), and it was first reported from here (the walvis ridge), so chances of finding it here should be reasonably high.  there's still one station to go and i'm keeping my tentacles crossed, but even if it doesn't turn up this time, there's plenty to keep me busy and i certainly won't complain.  i just wanted to officially let the squid gods (or cthulhu, or whoever's listening on the cosmic ceph frequency) know that if they feel like rewarding me for being a good little teuthologist this year, a few specimens of Walvisteuthis in the next net would really make my day.

i spent many blissful summers at a set of camps in northern minnesota that teach foreign languages to kids through immersion.  the kids come for one, two or four weeks, and do all the usual fun summer camp stuff (swim, play outside, get poison ivy, push food they don't like around their plates three times a day), but while they're there, they only hear the target language spoken by the staff.  they are free to speak english among themselves of course, but at the table, and when interacting directly with staff, they are encouraged to use words and phrases in the foreign language, and it works amazingly well.  i learned norwegian this way, two weeks at a time, for six years.  later, when i learned (much more) german, i went back and taught for five years, and that too was incredibly good for my language skills - speaking only german for six weeks a summer was like a mini living-abroad experience, and i loved it.
but it's been a long time - 21 years, actually - since i had the 'new villager' experience and tried to learn a language from absolute zero, just by being immersed in it.  yet here i find myself, listening hard to the ship's announcements (all in russian), to see whether i can catch anything at all.  by studying a detailed wall chart of the ship with labels in both languages, i refreshed my memory on the cyrillic alphabet, by sounding out words that were similar and extrapolating the letter sounds i didn't know ('tweendeck' is твеендек, 'tveendek;' 'elevator' is лифт, 'lift' (i mean, er... what elevator?  this isn't a luxury outfit, you know), 'meteorological laboratory' is, well, 'meteorologiski laboratoria' or something like that).  apart from the really alien characters, like the letters for 'zh' (ж), 'ts' (ц), and 'ui' (ы), i managed to get most of them on my own.  for the rest i entreated help from a friendly kitchen guy, who has also been trading us some informal russian lessons for some english and spanish ones.  embarassingly, while we learn to say 'good morning' and 'thank you,' he (an avid reader of english detective and crime fiction) is perfecting phrases like 'i won't answer your questions until i consult my lawyer.'  (we do wonder what his life on land involves.)  he also used the word 'insalubrious' in casual conversation the other day.  but lessons in humility are always good for the soul, so i can grit my teeth and soldier on with 'a little, and very badly' (my hypothetical answer to the question 'do you speak russian?', probably doubly useless in that (1) no in their right mind will ever, EVER think i can speak enough russian to even comprehend that question, and (2) a much safer answer would just be 'no'). and as my understanding of the letters and sounds improves, he has less and less occasion to laugh at my attempts to render the phrases i learn into intelligible written form, although i think my handwriting will be like a russian five-year-old's for a good long while yet.
with my newfound skills, i can have such meaningful exchanges as 'hello / goodbye' (at any time of day, i hasten to add), 'thanks / you're welcome,' 'how are you? / well, thanks, and you?' (this last actually occurred unprompted yesterday with one of the mates in the bridge - apart from the ridiculous look of concentration and 10-second delay between question and answer while i dredged the words out of my brain, i was very proud.  we won't talk about the fact that my russian experiences must always be cheerful because i can only say that i'm doing well), and i can ask how to say something in russian, probably the phrase i use the most often but with the least effect, since i have to hear the word/phrase at least five times before i can remember it.
yesterday's other big accomplishment was reading the names of the countries whose flags are stored in wooden cubbies in the bridge, for when the ship is in foreign ports - 'iapano,' 'nova zelandya,' 'avstralia,' 'urugvaya,' 'egyepto.'  look out, next i might actually be able to read the menu in the dining hall!  ... although then i would have to decide whether the joyful anticipation of, say, pizza, would cancel out the dread of knowing in advance that we were having liverwurst for breakfast (like this morning).
i don't think i'll be turning spy any time soon, or passing myself off as a local if i ever make it to russia, but i've always loved foreign languages, and i have to say i'm having fun with this one.  the pleasantly camp-like atmosphere probably helps, although the drawback of being on a shipful of adults is that they dare to serve things like aspic and tongue.  luckily, i can now say, 'no, thank you' ... assuming our friendly russian teacher hasn't taught us to unknowingly say 'my buttocks are on fire' instead.

every morning (well, those when we aren't still in the lab at daybreak), we are awakened by an announcement at 7am.  today, it went like this: 'good morning, everybody.  ship's time is seven o'clock.  today is friday, the 13th of november.  we are still drifting at the station.'
two things about this announcement struck me, although i didn't think them related at the time.  first, it's friday the 13th.  second, we should have had two nekton samples, starting around 4am, and the station should have been finished by now.  yet here i was, still happily in bed.
it turned out there may have been a connection after all, at least to anyone of a superstitious nature.  while reeling in the first nekton trawl, just as the catch was being lifted from the water, the cable holding the net snapped - literally, twang, ends flying and crew on deck ducking for cover. this could have been completely disastrous, but by extreme luck, it wasn't - no one was injured, and what's more, the net wasn't lost.  the seaward end of the snapped cable wrapped itself twice around the top of the gantry used to deploy and retrieve the net, securing itself in place in just about the most unlikely way possible.  so the net dangled, but in relative security, until an additional cable could be secured to reel it in.  (this was all related to me over breakfast, just before i spilled my cup of tea over most of the table - i'd like to say that that was also abnormal bad luck, but i should probably just confess that i'm not the most coordinated person in the morning.)
when the catch was finally brought in, we weren't sure what it would hold, and what condition it would be in after all the morning's drama and delay. but we should have predicted that if there was one day of this cruise destined to bring in Vampyroteuthis infernalis, the vampire squid, friday the 13th would be it.  and not one, but two specimens - both small (mantles about the size of a walnut and an almond), but in quite good condition, relatively.  Vampyroteuthis is an ancient order of cephalopods, with a very gelatinous body and thin, delicate skin that ranges in color from brick red to deep purple-black.  it looks like a small octopus, with eight shortish arms and a deep web, but it also has paddle-shaped fins and two photophores (light organs) at the end of the mantle, and two tentacle-like sensory filaments that retract into pouches near the first (dorsal) pair of arms. our larger specimen was in better shape, although its mantle was inside out (we gently rectified this before fixing it in formalin).  the oral face of its arms and web were deep, solid, inky black and the tiny finger-like cirri on the arms could still be seen.  the eyes were perfect and some shreds of delicate skin still clung to the mantle and fins, and both photophores were present.  although Vampyroteuthis is not terribly rare in the oceans, specimens of it are rare, especially in decent condition, so today we consider ourselves lucky indeed.