Before commencing her presentation, our speaker Dr Lisa Kirkendale, Head of Aquatic Zoology at the WA Museum, acknowledged that she now fills the shoes of one of the club’s former stalwarts, Shirley Slack-Smith.
Lisa explained that of the 70 per cent of the globe that is covered in ocean, more than 90 per cent is considered as deep ocean. i.e. greater than 200m deep.
Australia has over 750 submarine canyons. One super canyon system occurs off Albany on Western Australia’s south coast. Most canyons are not fully explored.
Since 2015, Australia has been able to obtain slots on the “Googleship”, RV Falkor owned by the Schmidt Ocean Institute, a non-profit operating foundation established in March 2009 by Eric Schmidt, former CEO and Executive chairman of Google, and his wife.
On its first visit, the Falkor’s submersible, ROV SuBastian, was used mainly to collect data on the water properties of the Perth Canyon where it reached a maximum depth of 1800m.
Among the biological discoveries were a new species of the bivalve Acesta whose shallow water relatives use flashes as a warning sign, and five new glass sponges, while the Venus flytrap anemone (left, at Perth Canyon, image by UWA) was recorded for the first time along the WA coast.
In 2020 the UWA-led research of the Bremer Canyon occurred where the submersible SuBastian reached a depth of 3,800m. While principally looking at corals the underwater cameras made a significant discovery when they filmed the isolated skulls of three species of beaked whale.
A sample of one of the skulls recovered from 1120m was found to be covered in chemosymbiotic mussels (right, image by UWA), the first such discovery in Australian waters.
The WA Museum led the Falkor’s next expedition, which focused on the benthic biodiversity of Cape Range and Cloates Canyons off the Ningaloo coast. SuBastian took two hours to reach the deepest parts of the canyons which were logged at 4,500m. Some of the greatest cephalopod diversity was recorded around 1500m where Cockeyed Squid, Bigfin Squid and Glass Squid were recorded. Some of the many exciting finds included an estimated 45 metre Siphonophore – seemingly the longest animal ever recorded – discovered at 2000m, which can be viewed at:
WAM’s Curator of Fish, Dr Glenn Moore was particularly excited by the discovery of the Faceless Cusk eel (below, at Ningaloo Canyons, image by Schmidt Ocean Institute) for the first time in WA.
The Falkor’s third expedition in 2020 was to Ashmore Reef where 600 specimens were collected.
The Falkor is not scheduled to return to Australia until 2030. While no expeditions are planned as yet, the museum hopes to be involved with cruises on the new vessel Falkor II.
This does not mean surveys will come to a standstill. Lisa said expedition planning underway now includes a marine diversity survey around the Abrolhos Islands using CSIRO’s research vessel RV Investigator in 2025. However this will be restricted to the shallows. Also, she hoped to once again work together with CSIRO and venture into the deep onboard the Investigator to explore the southwest and the super canyon off Albany, in years to come.
In the meantime, the Investigator has undertaken surveys in the Indian Ocean Territories in 2021-22, where large mounds of sharks’ teeth were found, and the Gascoyne Marine Park where water depth stretches from less than 100m to over 5000m.
(Above: Shark teeth collected from seafloor near Cocos (Keeling) Islands at depth 5400m; Credit: Museums Victoria-Ben Healley)
More than 6000 specimens were collected using mainly trawling nets. Among the catch were scampi, octopus, small crustaceans, Glass Squid and Golden Flying Squid as well as lots of carnivorous molluscs – to keep Lisa happy and occupied for the foreseeable future.
Don Poynton