Temporal and spatial benthic data collection via an internet operated Deep Sea Crawler

Environmental conditions within deep-sea ecosystems such as cold-seep provinces or deep-water coral reefs vary temporally and spatially over a range of scales. To date, short periods of intense ship-borne activity or low resolution, fixed location studies by Lander systems have been the main investigative methods used to investigate such sites.Cabled research infrastructures now enable sensor packages to receive power and transmit data from the deep-sea in real-time. By attaching mobile research platforms to these cabled networks, the investigation of spatial and temporal variability in environmental conditions and/or faunal behaviour across the deep sea seafloor is now a possibility.Here we describe one such mobile platform: a tracked Deep Sea Crawler, controlled in real-time via the Internet from any computer worldwide. The Crawler has been extensively used on the NEPTUNE Canada cabled observatory network at a cold-seep site at ∼890 m depth in the Barkley Canyon, NE Pacific. We present both the technical overview of the Crawler development and give examples of scientific results achieved.