Happy early July 4th from the Christmas tree worm, which comes in red, white, and blue, among many other colors. It fans these feathery spirals out to breathe and feed, then yanks them into the coral the instant anything comes near. All the colors, none of the risk-taking. #marinelife

Why were prehistoric arthropods so huge, sea scorpions over 2 m, dragonflies with hawk-sized wingspans? One leading answer is oxygen. Higher atmospheric oxygen in the Paleozoic may have lifted the ceiling on how big a body running on that system could get. #FossilFriday #marinelife

The largest arthropod that ever lived was a sea scorpion (Eurypterids). Jaekelopterus reached about 2.5 meters, longer than a person is tall, hunting the seas 400 million years ago before fish took over as top predators. #FossilFriday #marinelife

Who is in favor of naming this the Prince Urchin? Ƭ̵̬̊

The Ocean Exploration Trust just put out a series of Field Guides to deep-sea animals on YouTube, short and genuinely great. A perfect rabbit hole if you want to meet the strange things living down there. Their footage is some of the best out there. #marinelife www.youtube.com/@EVNautilus/...

A decade of watching Arctic deep-sea life found the deepest communities, past 4,000 m, are the most fragile. They run on so little food that a single warm-water anomaly reshapes them. Depth and food set the rules down there, same as always. #marinelife www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New Arctic work finds the edges of a methane seep are up to ten times more species-rich than the seep center. The rich zone gets the chemosynthetic food without the harsh chemistry of the seep itself. An ecotone doing what ecotones do. #marinelife link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Happy International Polychaete Day! These plankton grow up into the whole ridiculous range: sea mice, bloodworms, giant tube worms. Epic phylum!

The sea mouse is not a mouse. It's a chunky marine worm covered in felt-like hair that diffracts light into shifting reds, blues, and golds, some of the best natural photonics we know of. A brown lump on the seafloor that turns into a rainbow when the light hits right. #WormWednesday #marinelife

The radioactivity part is wild because it wasn't even on anyone's risk list until now. We're this far into the debate and still finding whole new ways this could go wrong.

#sciart for the win

Feather stars ditched the stalk and took up swimming a long time ago, by the Triassic at least. "Living fossil" undersells them. The sessile stalked crinoid is one option this group has been riffing on for hundreds of millions of years.

Drift into the deep with these living fossils. 🌊 MBARI's remotely operated vehicles have captured sea lilies swaying in the currents and feather stars paddling across the seafloor. Every observation helps reveal the incredible diversity of life in the deep sea. Dive in: youtu.be/GoQ-yGKrRgo?...

A giant isopod hauling its own bodyweight in sargassum four miles down is a good reminder that in a food-poor abyss, you take the meal you find and you do not let go. Energy is the whole story down there.

The metal-rich nodules that deep-sea mining wants to strip off the seafloor also concentrate naturally radioactive material. Disturb them and you mobilize that radioactivity into the food web. #marinelife

Deep-sea anglerfish blur sex so thoroughly that the male fuses into the female and shares her bloodstream. If the Court wants to legislate based on "biological sex," the ocean would like a word about how messy that actually is. #marinelife

Green sea turtles have their sex set by the temperature of the sand, not chromosomes. Six justices just built a legal system on a definition of sex that a turtle egg can casually violate. #marinelife

The deep sea's most graceful commuter 💫⁠ ⁠ This Grimpoteuthis octopus moves through the water using large fins and webbed arms. Those ear-like fins have earned this group the nickname "dumbo octopuses." They use finger-like cirri lining their arms to help detect and capture small prey.

Going to see #Journey tonight, so here's your reminder that some deep-sea snailfish live below 8,000 m, in darkness and crushing pressure, just holding on to that feeling. Don't stop believin', even at the bottom of a trench. #marinelife

A new survey of the Japan and Izu-Ogasawara trenches filmed a slow-gliding animal at 9,137 m that taxonomists still can’t place in any known phylum. It vaguely seems a sea slug or a sea cucumber. For now it’s logged simply as “animal, position uncertain.” #marinelife doi.org/10.3897/BDJ....

This is probably one of the coolest figures I have ever generated.

Spent today staring at 300+ deep-sea family lineages and how their body size shifts with depth. Some shrink. Some balloon. Most do... nothing dramatic. Turns out the chaos lives almost entirely at the family level, order and phylum barely matter. Science is messy and I love it. #science

Tullimonstrum gregarium. The Tully Monster. A 300-million-year-old animal from Illinois so strange that scientists still can't agree what it even is. Eyes on stalks like a hammerhead, a long claw-tipped proboscis where a mouth should be. Decades of debate, no consensus. #FossilFriday #marinelife

Storms building on the horizon, but we’re keeping a close eye on it and staying safe out here. Fieldwork is half science, half weather app.

Up before the sun for a day of benthic sampling in the bay. Long-term monitoring means you show up no matter what the clock says. The mud doesn’t care that it’s 4am. #marinelife

There's no party like a market squid party! 🦑🙌⁠ ⁠ Market squid (Doryteuthis opalescens) are common along the central coast of California, especially in the spring and fall when they migrate into the shallow waters of Monterey Bay to spawn. They grow quickly and can reach up to 28 centimeters long.

The bigfin squid is one of the strangest animals ever filmed. It hangs in the deep with impossibly long, elbowed arms trailing up to 20 times its body length. It's been seen only a handful of times, almost always below 2,000 m. We still know almost nothing about it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpSY...

Ramisyllis multicaudata has one head and up to a thousand rear ends. It lives inside a sponge, and every time its body branches into a new channel, all the organs branch too. One worm, shaped like a tree, threaded through its host. #WormWednesday Image from onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

The squidworm (Teuthidodrilus samae) isn't a squid. It's a swimming polychaete from ~3,000 m down in the Celebes Sea. The ten "tentacles" off its head are sensory appendages as long as its body, used to smell and feel through the dark. #WormWednesday #marinelife Images from doi.org/10.1098/rsbl...

At my parents’ grave this morning. My dad served in the Army; my mom taught in public schools for years. One protected the country, the other shaped it, classroom by classroom. They’re buried side by side, and I visited them both today. Love you, miss you.

The shells of deep-sea snails are often paper-thin, and not by accident. Building a thick shell takes calcium carbonate, calcium carbonate takes energy, and at depth there’s barely enough food to run a body, let alone armor it. The deep sea is full of animals that simply can’t afford to be sturdy.

Imagine being filmed alive in your own home for the first time in scientific history and the headline is “very ugly.” The goblin shark survives a kilometer down, ambushes prey with a jaw that fires like a slingshot, and predates most “cute” animals. Thankfully, it can’t hear you down there.

Someone asked what I “do all day” as a deep-sea biologist. The honest answer involves a lot more spreadsheet than submarine.

BTW most trenches are barely mapped and this worm doesn’t care. Neither does it know what a map is. Carry on

This scale worm, Macellicephaloides grandicirra, lives almost entirely below 7,000 metres in deep ocean trenches and unlike most of its relatives at that depth, it never gave up the hunt to hide in a burrow. #marinelife

#SpongeThursday: Monorhaphis chuni grows a single basal spicule that can exceed two meters. Growth-ring analysis puts age estimates for some specimens in the thousands of years, among the longest-lived skeletal structures known in any animal. Image from www.researchgate.net/publication/...

UL Lafayette biologist’s research hooks a whale of a story louisiana.edu/news/ul-lafa... My university's coverage of the work.

Nice write up over at Popular Science about some of my work lead by @willgearty.bsky.social. Got a nice quote or two in there! #marinelife

Over 60,000 public comments opposed federal seabed mining leases near the Marianas. In response to the federal push, Guam just enacted a law deep-sea mining locally and restricting port access. Read more on how the community is fighting back: tinyurl.com/yckcrrca

The Skeleton Panda Sea Squirt (Clavelina Ossipandae) is a translucent reef-dwelling creature whose rib-like structures and panda-like markings give it a spooky look. Found in Southeast Asia, it filters seawater and helps keep coral ecosystems healthy. Original post

Announcement for @nationalacademies.org "State of the Science" address on 6/2 declares: "Since McNutt delivered her 2025 address, federal funding for science has held steady, but significant cuts are still being considered." Really? On what planet is funding steady & cuts being *considered*? a 🧵

The 100th anniversary of William Beebe's half-mile deep bathysphere dive is 2034. @katycroffbell.bsky.social we have 9 years to coordinate every deep-submergence vehicle on the planet to simultaneously dive to 800 meters on August 15, 2034.

Welp. This is a hell of a story. Canadian Mining Journal published what appeared to be an entirely fabricated deep-sea mining paper, with quotes from fictional people and a source paper that does not exist.

So this happened today. My office, lab, husbands office, lab… students offices… not great. Tough times ahead

Horrible, horrible news out of USF marine lab. Thankfully, no one is believed to be injured. But the fire today likely "total loss" -- thinking of all our colleagues who are grappling with the loss of their labs, gear, samples, and their research "home" 🐟🌍🌊🐙 www.tampabay.com/news/educati...

Bonus content! A tale of two slugs. Cute little size comparison between a couple of the slugs in this thread. A behemoth of a Jorunna nudibranch (it was probably 1.5cm at most 😅) dwarfing an even tinier Elysia sea slug. #InverteFest #invertebrates #MarineLife 🐙🦑🧪

@drandrewthaler.bsky.social correct me if I am wrong but wasn't its name the Aluminaut? Or was that another of their proposed submersibles?

So chonky...

The original configuration for the DSV-2 Alvin was absolutely adorable.

Here it is, your Monday moment of zen. 〰️⁠ ⁠ Big red jellies (Tiburonia granrojo) are found between 600–2,100 meters (2,000–7,000 feet), and their bells can reach up to one meter (3.3 feet) across. They are covered in tiny harpoon-like cells that stun prey.