Ty Colvin, Lakehead University Undergraduate student, showing off our cool new ROV.

Well, we finally got our new Trident ROV to help us with doing sculpin and crayfish counts as part of our Mysis recolonization experiment (SHRRIMP). Our main pilot for the project this year has been Ty Colvin,  superstar undergraduate student at Lakehead University. Collecting the data meant driving out for 2 weekends in a row to ELA in order to get information that would line up with historical dive surveys (Ty is looking to compare the benthic communities now, which don’t have Mysis, to those when Mysis were still in the lake). Ty spent a good chink of the summer this year putting out transects on the bottom of the lake so we could sample in the right areas when we came out at night with the ROV. If you’d like a sample of what the video we get back looks like, Ty has put together a small sampler below.

Also, the folks at Open ROV deserve a big huge thanks for getting us the unit in time in order to make sure we could get this research done.