But as he swept his flashlight through the dark waters, something unexpected emerged. Inching through the beam of light, an alien creature crawled across the surface of the sand, resembling an inch-long cluster of ghostly leaves fringed with silvery filigree and capped with a pair of antennae-like stalks. It immediately caught my eye, said Gosliner, Invertebrate Zoology Curator for the California Academy of Sciences. I've been diving there for 30 years and this one immediately struck me as different.
For the first time, we can get really detailed measurements of fine-scale movements of an animal body. The data that we've collected gives us information like the entire surface of the animal - how does the animal's whole body move and change and deform?
Dr. Hugh Carter hopes the preserved Antarctic urchins collected over a century ago will illuminate how modern environmental changes are impacting marine life.
A decade after the onset of a sea star wasting disease epidemic, researchers have identified Vibrio pectenicida as the microbial culprit responsible for the decline of sunflower sea stars.
Dr. Wozniak described his experience of witnessing a volcanic eruption on the seafloor, observing a stark transition from a rich ecosystem to a barren landscape of blackened rock.