Craig is temporarily a post-doctoral fellow at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute who is looking for a permanent position. He spends most of his time balancing his overwhelming geekdom with normalcy so he can function in the real world. Luckily his wife likes his geekiness.
Peter Etnoyer is a Graduate Research Associate at the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. He studies deep corals and ocean fronts, and he loves to be on the water.
Kevin Zelnio is a Graduate Student Researcher at Penn State studying the ecology of hydrothermal vent and methane seep communities. He raises awareness of the plight of the spineless through folk music.
The new squid diva is 24ft long. How does she measure up? I just happend to have data setting on my computer to address that issue. Don't ask...I lay awake a night thinking about the body size of marine organisms. Below is a histogram of every documented Architeuthis capture before 1997 (data are from The Search for the Giant Squid).
As noted by Barnes et al. (1993) "Their success is probably not so much attributable to any particular special anatomical or ecological features of the group as to the extreme plasticity and adaptability of the basic molluscan body plan." As an example to this consider, the radiation of the mollusca includes the obvious addition of an exoskeleton but also subsequent major modifications by coiling, reduction, duplication, segmentation, and in multiple independent events the ultimate loss of the shell. The phylum possesses groups with specialized neural systems and two fundamentally different respiratory systems. Most feeding styles are known from within the group, including parasitism and symbiotic mutualisms (including coral reef zooxanthellae and hydrothermal vent chemosynthetic bacteria). Reproductive biology varies from sexual dimorphism to hermaphrodism, with uniparental mating being common in some species.text from McClain and Nekola in press
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