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.
Living polyp of a Swiftia sp. sea fan. Photo credit: Peter Etnoyer, HRI.
Many deep-water animals have never been photographed alive in their natural habitat, they're known only from their pickled state. Dried, dusty, and broken specimens fill museum drawers. "Living specimen photography" captures vital information before a specimen is collected. Remember to "snap" before you snip. It brings those dusty drawers to life!
Swiftia sp. is a dark loving, azooxanthellate sea fan, one of many 'asymbiotes' in the twilight zone of the West Atlantic. The living colony's color and morphology is seen below in a series of images through the microscope, and in-situ through the lens of the Sonsub Innovator ROV aboard NOAA's RV Ron Brown on the 2003 Gulf of Mexico Deep Sea Habitats Expedition.
Life Science
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Comments
It gets EVEN better...there's some microbial ecology data for this coral:
Bruck, T. B., W. M. Bruck, L. Z. Santiago-Vazquez, P. J. McCarthy, and R. Kerr, G. 2007. Diversity of the bacterial communities associated with the azooxanthellate deep water octocorals Leptogorgia minimata, Iciligorgia schrammi, and Swiftia exertia. Marine Biotechnology 9:561-576.
Note that both "Bruck"s have an umlaut over the "u" but the HTML kept interpreting it as a weird character so I took it out.
Posted by: CK | August 29, 2008 10:47 AM
Awesome! I guess "zooming in" is not as hard as "zooming out" to show the landscape scale.
Posted by: Peter | August 29, 2008 11:17 AM
You can write ü as ue as well.
What are the characters that make Swiftia Swiftia?
And a random thought. If a boat runs over this gorgonian, is it swift boated? :D
Posted by: romunov | August 29, 2008 11:17 AM
Mostly the shape and texture of some tiny microscopic bones inside the polyp called sclerites. This would be an order of magnitude finer scale than the polyp, and larger than the bacteria. The continuum is growing!
Posted by: Peter | August 29, 2008 11:23 AM
Thanks!
Posted by: romunov | August 30, 2008 10:38 PM