Recovering Wally the Benthic Crawler

ROVs Hercules and Argus were recently deployed to bring recover one of their own! After a year on the seafloor, Wally the benthic crawler was recovered by our team at 890m/2900ft in the Barkley Canyon methane hydrate fields, deep off the west coast of Vancouver Island. This roaming rover is controlled via the internet by Ocean Networks Canada's research partners at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany, and will be taking some time off for annual maintenance.

This recovery was part of our June 2017 expedition in Pacific Ocean exploring Canadian waters with Ocean Networks Canada (ONC). ONC operates world-leading cabled ocean observatories that supply continuous power and Internet connectivity to a broad suite of subsea instruments. The ONC NEPTUNE observatory installation, off Vancouver Island’s west coast, allow scientists to operate instruments remotely and receive data at their home laboratories anywhere on the globe in real time. This expedition launched numerous dives with ROV Hercules and ROV Argus to nodes along the NEPTUNE cabled observatory to install, test, and maintain instrument platforms and sensors. Learn more about some of the science instruments installed during this expedition.