March 15, 2021: Cutthroat Eel
Image courtesy of the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, Deep Connections 2019. Download larger version (jpg, 1.1 MB).
Cutthroat eel (Synaphobranchus affinis) feeding on a piece of fish during the final dive of the Deep Connections 2019: Exploring Atlantic Canyons and Seamounts of the United States and Canada expedition.
The dive took place in a minor box canyon located between Block Canyon and Alvin Canyon, off the coast of Rhode Island. The dive site was selected due to models predicting that it would contain suitable habitat for deep-sea corals and sponges. This dive site was also located in close proximity to the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) Pioneer Array, so benthic data collected during the dive can be tied to long-term oceanographic datasets collected at the array.