A Hydrobios Multinet Midi with an aperture of 0.25 m2 and 5 nets (mesh size 200 μm) was deployed for vertically stratified hauls on several cruises, mostly in paired day-night hauls to quantify diel vertical migration. Standard depths used for these deployments were 1000-600-300-200-100-0 m. On M93, a Multinet Maxi (9 nets, 333 μm mesh) was used instead. Samples were fixated in 4% formaldehyde in seawater solution, scanned at GEOMAR or at OSCM, and analyzed using automated imaging software (Gorsky et al., 2010) allowing taxonomical classification as well as the estimation of taxon-specific biomass (Lehette and Hernandez-Leon, 2006) and metabolic rates.