The partnership will allow Canada to conduct the first spring survey of the Atlantic Monitoring Program in three years. Twice a year missions measure biological, chemical and physical conditions from the Gulf of Maine to the Labrador Sea – information that monitors climate change in the ocean and helps manage hundreds of millions of dollars in fish stocks.

The ship, the money, the deal

Woods Hole supplies the Atlantis research vessel and $ 1.5 million Cdn per crew, as well as instruments for offshore research work in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador. Canada takes Atlantis by the end of May and will pay $ 5.1 million Cdn at Woods Hole. DFO will collect and share data for scientists at Woods Hole. “This collaboration is based on decades of collaboration between American and Canadian scientists trying to understand the dramatic fluctuations we see in the oceanic environment off our coast,” said Dennis McGillicuddy, chief scientist at Woods Hole. Atlantis has been made available to Canadian scientists to monitor the climatic conditions of the oceans from the Gulf of Maine to the Labrador Sea. (Lindsay Beazley / Department of Fisheries and Oceans)
For Canada, the deal solves an immediate problem caused by the abrupt – if not surprising – withdrawal of the aging Canadian oceanographic research vessel CCGS Hudson in January. In recent years, 59-year-old Hudson has often been unavailable due to mechanical problems. A catastrophic engine failure last fall led the Canadian Coast Guard to decommission the Hudson instead of spending between $ 12 million and $ 20 million on repairs that could shut it down by the end of 2023.

Bells and whistles

“We were really fortunate to have this collaboration with Woods Hole in such a short time,” said Lindsay Beazley, an aquatic biologist with DFO at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Nova Scotia. Last week, Beazley completed one leg of his mission to Atlantis off the coast of Scotland. Atlantis has all the bells and whistles, including five labs and what is known as the Imaging FlowCytobot. The submarine captures very high resolution images of phytoplankton from streams of water samples that are continuously fed to the ship. The images are then fed back to the shore where the software recognizes the phytoplankton – doing in a matter of minutes what a person would need several hours. “That was a really exciting aspect of this mission,” Beazley said. “This system has opened up an avenue of automated surveillance that we have not used in DFO and in our research in the past.”

“It’s a big deal”

The fact that Canada took the ship was lucky. Atlantis was between a middle-aged renewal and its next mission. “It was a really big deal. This kind of opportunity does not come up so often. It was a great opportunity to work with Canadian scientists,” said McGillicuddy. Imaging FlowCytobot sends automated data back to the Woods Hole Center. DFO scientists are also collecting water samples that will be transported back to Massachusetts for analysis. “Of course we will share this data with our Canadian colleagues,” McGillicuddy said.

Next mission off New Earth

Atlantis arrived at St. John’s late last week for his next offshore mission to New Earth and Labrador. It will also monitor much deeper waters as part of the Maritimes Atlantic Offshore Supplementary Monitoring Program. The spring survey has not been conducted since 2019, leaving a hole in the records that measure changes in ocean conditions. “I think that’s what I want to convey,” Beazley said. “We have gaps in our time series and it is really important to be able to maintain our ability to go out to sea and collect this data in order to be aware of climate variability.” He hopes to see more of this kind of collaboration. “We have been working with them for a long time, but I think with this mission and the Imaging FlowCytobot on board, we are both coming back with ideas on how we can strengthen this relationship in the future,” he said. “So I feel really lucky and very excited about what this opportunity has brought to DFO.” The DFO said it was considering both domestic and international options to secure time on board for the remaining missions this year.