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Captain Stingbad's voyage to the Sea of Cortez, 2007

Avast me hearties!  The purpose of this venture was to sail into the Sea of Cortez, Mexico in search of new and interesting jellyfish from the deep sea.  We met the ship at the port in Guaymas, Mexico.  (See Figure 1 the ship ) and immediately set sail for the middle of the gulf.  On the way there I saw one of my old friends the Portuguese man o war (Figure 2 man o war ).  I scooped the man o war up into a bucket, just to say hello and give it a quick inspection.  The man o war being in fine condition I returned it to the sea with a hearty farewell shipmate!

The next day we rigged the ship for midwater trawling, which amounts to dragging a really big net through the middle of the water to see what you get.  In fact it’s a little bit like Christmas when the net comes aboard because you never know what gifts the sea will provide!  All of the contents of the net are dumped into a large bucket (Figure 3 cod end of net 1 ) where the animals are carefully sorted (Figure 4 cod end of net 2 ).  Similar animals are placed together in single buckets (Figure 5 Atolla in a bucket ) and unusual ones are kept by themselves.

On this trip we found three different kinds of rocket ship jellies (Figure 6,7 and 8 ) and some gem quality specimens of Chromatonema, deep sea gum drop jellies (Figure 9 Chromatonema ) which were kept alive in the laboratory for the duration of the trip.  Before returning to shore I preserved one representative jellyfish each in a jelly jar (Figure 10 ).