IMIS

In January 2004, investigators from CUNY-Staten Island (Richard Veit, Marie Caroline Martin) and Duke Marine Lab (David Hyrenbach) embarked on a research cruise spanning through the Madagascar Channel and across the Southern Indian Ocean. The cruise departed from La Reunion Island, and visited Madagascar, the French territories of Mayotte, Crozet, and Kerguelen, and returned to La Reunion. During this cruise, we surveyed marine birds and mammals across a large-scale gradient of ocean productivity and water mass characteristics, spanning from tropical to Antarctic waters (from 12 to 60 degrees S). Purpose This cruise is part of an interdisciplinary project, in collaboration with George Hunt (University of California at Irvine), Henri Weimerskirch (CNRS-CEBC), and Nicolas Metzl (Institut Pierre Simon Laplace), to understand the way oceanographic variability influences the dispersion and community structure of upper-trophic marine predators in the Southern Indian Ocean.