ACE is an international voyage organized by the Swiss Polar Institute at EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland) and the ACE Foundation established by Dr Frederik Paulsen. It is intended to investigate a range of aspects of the Southern Ocean and the sub-Antarctic islands. There are 22 projects on board the ‘Akademik Tryoshnikov’, involving around 150 people from 18 different countries. This circumpolar expedition is divided in 3 distinct legs, starting on the 20th of December from Cape Town (South Africa) and planned to end on the 18th of March also in Cape Town.
Concerning our ACE project entitled “Uncovering the mystery of the ocean false bottom”, the objective on ACE is to map the depth and echo intensity of DSLs using echosounders, and to relate that data to predator information collected from islands along the voyage track. Deep Scattering Layers (DSLs) are acoustic representations of the biological layers within the mesopelagic zone. They are ubiquitous features of the global ocean, but little is known about their composition or depth-distribution variability in the Southern Ocean. DSLs comprise communities of zooplankton and fish (mainly myctophids). Myctophids are hunted by diving predators such as Southern elephant seals and King penguins but are also potentially of commercial interest.
