GEORGE I. MATSUMOTO: "GELATINOUS ZOOPLANKTON"

There are a number of reasons that I study gelatinous zooplankton or jellies. One is because when I was starting off my graduate work, my advisor Bill Hamner told me to look around and see what I wanted to work on and the only thing we saw in the water during that three months off of Catalina Island was this ctenophore. I actually looked back in my invertebrate notes at UC Berkeley where I was taught by Ralph Smith, one of the premier invertebrate zoologists, and I found to my surprise that he actually did spend 20 minutes on ctenophores. I didn't actually remember this, but when I looked back at my notes, I know why. It appears that for some reason during Ralph's lecture on ctenophores, I was drowsing—much to my regret because I have spent most of my life since then studying ctenophores.

One of the reasons I found them so fascinating was the first thing that my advisor told me to do before I could study them for my Ph.D was that I had to do a very thorough literature search. I did that, I did a very thorough literature search and I went back for the past 25 years and what I found out was that there were a total of some 200 papers on ctenophores. This was great because I could actually read them all in a couple of weeks. Much to my surprise and enjoyment, I found myself one of the experts on ctenophores when I was in my first year of graduate school. As Bruce said, some of the opportunities that this gave me were the chances to go down in submersibles like the Johnson Sea Link and the chance to get involved in organizations like the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute where ctenophores, it turns out, are incredibly abundant.

What I'd like to do today is talk about some of the gelatinous zooplankton that we not only have in Monterey Bay but exist in the oceans around the world. There are a number of reasons why we study gelatinous zooplankton. Listening to Bruce's talk this morning, I was amused by the fact that in the past, in historical methods, we never studied gelatinous zooplankton because you could never collect it with a net. It gets through the net or there would be this mucous clump at the bottom of the cod end [a cod end is a term used to describe the collection portion of the net. It is usually a length of tubing with a mesh covered window] that scientists would hate because it gummed up everything else. The only thing people used to study in the nets were the hard bodied organisms and some of the fish that were unfortunate enough to get caught in the nets. Now that we're going down there and actually looking with submersibles and remotely operated vehicles, we're now starting to focus in on the jellies. Not necessarily by choice, as Bruce said. He would prefer to work on some "righteous animals with backbones". But jellies turn out to be relatively slow animals that can't get away from us. Most other things with backbones and good eyesight and a good sense of what's going on around them probably get out of the area as soon as we put the vehicle into the water. These vehicles are very loud, very noisy things with lots of bright lights. Any sort of organism with the ability to move probably moves.

So what we do see down there is probably biased heavily towards the gelatinous zooplankton, towards the jellies, towards the animals that maybe can't see us coming, can't hear us coming, and definitely can't swim fast enough to get away from us once we're there. So those are the organisms I'd like to talk to you about today, the slow ones. To me, these are the fascinating ones. So if I could start off with the slides, what I'd like to do today is show you a few slides, then we will show a half hour video and I'll apologize in advance because some of the video that Bruce has already shown you, I'm going to show you again. That's what happens when you get two speakers from the same institution. We find things that we find fascinating and we will keep talking about them.

Bruce and I work at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. This is not what it looked like this week. I picked a very unusual day, I guess, because I got a nice, blue sky. We're based in Moss Landing which is between Santa Cruz and Monterey down in the Peninsula area. We currently have a staff of about 160 people, and that is a combination of scientists, engineers, administrative staff. We have two research vehicles, the Point Lobos and the Western Flyer and two remotely operated vehicles: the Ventana which is the one that Bruce showed you a slide of and I'll show you some video of; and our newest one, the Tiburon. The Tiburon is capable of going down to 4,000 meters. So we're looking forward to using that in the next year.

David Packard had a motto that I think a lot of us have taken to heart: "Go deep, stay long, take risks, ask big questions and most importantly, do not be afraid to make mistakes, because if you do not make mistakes, you're not reaching far enough". That, I think, is the part that we really like because in this area where, as Bruce mentioned, we're pushing back the frontiers of ignorance, we're going to make mistakes. I do not think there is any doubt about that. It might be that some of the theories that Bruce has talked about today, for instance, animals curling up into a circle and looking like jelly, we might find out that we were wrong. But that is OK, we're learning and we're getting down there and we're trying to understand what's going on.

The mission of MBARI is a fairly lengthy mission statement but it is fairly general. The idea is to achieve and maintain a position as a world center for advanced research. My favorite word is this one: "education" in ocean science and technologies. Education is a relatively recent addition to the MBARI agenda. Although scientists such as Bruce Robison, Peter Brewer, Dan Orange, and Deborah Stakes, and many others at the Research Institute have involved themselves with education, it hasn't been until the last couple of years that MBARI has decided to really make a concerted effort in education. I'm pleased that they did so because that meant that I got to leave sunny, warm Australia and come back to rain-soaked Monterey. But I'm very glad to be back here.

I am currently the education department, as Bruce said, at the research institute. I hope that will change in the next few years. We primarily focus not on K-12 education but mostly on college level and post-graduate education. Our K-12 involvement is extensive but it is all done in collaboration with our sister institution, the Monterey Bay Aquarium. We all like to think that the last sentence in our mission statement has been and always will be true. That "everything we do is characterized with excellence, innovation, and vision".

With that, I think the time has come now to start talking about other things. This is one of my favorite quotes from Lewis Carroll. This, to me, is particularly appropriate because what we find out as we start getting into the deep sea is that some of the most unusual things that we might have ever have thought of, we're finding out actually exist. We haven't found any pigs with wings yet but what we have found are some of the organisms that William Beebe described, animals like fish with the transparent heads and eyes that go straight upwards, things that nobody really believed existed until we actually got down there and started to explore.

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