It has been a long year waiting to announce this. Last year Dr. Adrian Glover, long time DSN fan from the Natural History Museum in London, showed me a live feed of camera mounted on a dead harbor porpoise from 30m in a fjord on the west coast of Sweden. As we set there in a cafe, I watched invertebrates mounting an ongoing attack with intermittent flashes of seals blasting into view. I asked if I could share it with our readers but it was sealed lips until the launch of the Darwin Centre.
Finally, that day has arrived and the Darwin Centre realized as a new state-of-the-art gallery, science and collections facility. At the official opening on the 14th September, guests including His Royal Highness Prince William of Wales and Sir David Attenborough were shown the live link. I am not sure why we needed to wait for a prince and knight.
The observatory is collaboration between Dr. Glover and University of Gothenburg Researcher Dr. Thomas Dahlgren and adds another link our ongoing endeavors to acquire continuous data from oceans, and our crucial to understanding how marine ecosystems function. Already Glover and Dahlgreen have deployed the system to study the scavenging community behaviour on the remains of a dead whale, lobster-crab interactions in a lobster pot and fish behaviour (these can be seen on the projects Youtube Channel). As Adrian states, “Even something simple like the decomposition of a small whale in shallow water is very poorly known. Until now we had to make do with ‘one-off’ visits using submersibles, remotely operated-vehicles or scuba divers.”