Scientists from the Sydney Institute of Marine Science will be examining the biological oceanography, including plankton, bioacoustics and whales, in the waters of NSW and out to 200 km offshore.

They will be based on the RV Investigator, a distinctive 94m-long, 6000-tonne vessel with a large round weather radar on its top mast.  It has a ship’s crew of around 20 and a science crew of nearly 40. 

The ship will be spending at least 10 days in southern NSW, and they will also conduct some nearshore surveys around Montague Island, and recording all the ship’s electronic sensors for plankton as well as mapping the seafloor.

Professor Iain Suthers, from the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the institute, said he and the other scientists were particularly interested in how the East Australian Current influences the currents around Montague Island, which affects the distribution of plankton, baitfish and fairy penguins. 

“The East Australian Current has strengthened in recent decades, such that the waters around Narooma are characteristic of what used to occur off Sydney decades ago,” he said. “In particular, large eddies of warm water affect the coastal waters, including driving upwelling of cold water onto the shelf.”

The transects that the ship will travel over align east-west from the coast to 20 km offshore. The surveys will be done during daylight in mid-September.

The work is being done thanks in part to an Australian Research Council linkage project to look at the biological oceanography and fairy penguins around Montague Island with Macquarie University.

The Batemans Marine Park authority has been notified and the vessel will only work close to the island during daylight hours for safety reasons and it could come in as shallow as 40 metres.

“We’d like to run some cross-shelf transects with the vessel and its instruments from around the 40 m isobath offshore, between Narooma and Bermagui,” Dr Suthers said. 

“We’d also like to let the fishing community know who we are and that we are only doing coastal research. The vessel is a big ship to come in so close to shore, so we’d like people to know who we are and we are only doing university based research.

“The vessel will measure currents, bathymetry, bioacoustics and zooplankton biomass, temperature salinity etc, while moving at 8 knots. If timing and weather is okay, we may collect zooplankton with a humble bongo net.”

Speaking from Garden Island in Sydney, Dr Suthers said the RV Investigator was departing tonight for the three-week voyage, It was heading around 40 nautical miles southeast to a particularly interesting, clockwise circling eddy.

The vessel should arrive at Montague Island anytime between September 10 and 18, depending on how the earlier planned research went, he said.

The research should take two days, with work being done close in at the island done in daylight hours and work further out at night.