PUERTO RICO TRENCH

In order to explore the deepest parts of the world’s oceans on a small budget, ProMare began development of a low-cost, full-ocean-depth drone.

The ProMare drone descends to the bottom on a pre-programmed survey to collect video and other data.

In the Puerto Rico Trench, the system carried out a three-hour dive to an unseen and unexplored part of the Atlantic Ocean and recorded depth and temperature profiles as well as deep-water species.   Though no animals appeared at the beginning of the dive, light and bait soon attracted several animals.  Most notable are swarms of amphipods and bottom-crawling creatures.   Of the two invertebrate creatures, Dr. Stace E. Beaulieu of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute has identified a sea cucumber.  It has been tentatively assigned to the genus Peniagone.  The other species, which walked and jumped across the sediment, is possibly a munnopsid isopod.  These sightings likely exceed the deepest known depth records for genus Peniagone and family Munnopsidae. Though it was impossible to recover a sample of the two invertebrate creatures, numerous amphipods were captured and brought to the surface for further study.