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.
Deep Sea News' Friday edition has a new mission - to "restore" small black and white figures from obscure scientific journals to their original color, hoping to give these images a new life and audience online. The paper's citation will be included. Please contact us if you have something to share.
The image of Phakellia sponge is from the Johnson Sea Link submersible surveys of a Florida bioherm at 171 m depth in the west Atlantic. The sponge is about 2 ft tall.
I like it because it's a good example of convergent evolution. You have to ask yourself, is Phakellia a sea-fan imposter? Or vice-versa? Two different phyla, porifera (sponges, pictured) and cnidaria (sea fan corals, pictured in link) independently evolved a fan-shaped morphology to acquire food in the benthic boundary layer.
The picture was originally published in an article by J Reed et al (2005) in the Bulletin of Marine Science, edited by Su Sponaugle, and published by Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science at the University of Miami. Special thanks to John Reed and Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute.
Citation:
JK Reed, SA Pomponi, D Weaver, CK Paull, & AE Wright. 2005. Deep water sinkholes and bioherms of South Florida and the Pourtales Terrace- Habitat and Fauna. Bulletin of Marine Science, 77(2): 267-296.
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