NSU Currents Fall 2014 Newsletter - Volume XXV, Issue 2

Fall 2014 Issue, Volume XXV, Number 2 Deep-water tropical rocky seafloors are among the least studied habitats in the ocean. This spring, Charles Messing , Ph.D., professor at the Oceanographic Center, completed his third trip to Roatan, Honduras, home of the Roatan Institute of Deep-Sea Exploration. During his trip, he made multiple dives to depths reaching 2,000 feet using the submersible Idabel to study the ecology of crinoids—sea lilies and feather stars. Although their common names may evoke botanical imagery, crinoids are, in fact, animals in the phylum Echinodermata, which also includes sea stars and sea urchins. The common name sea lily refers to crinoids, such as Cenocrinus asterius , which anchor to the seafloor via a stalk. Feather stars do not have a stalk. Crinoids have a vast and important fossil record. Only about 640 crinoid species exist in modern seas, but they were much more abundant and diverse in the past. Some vast deposits of Paleozoic limestones consist chiefly of crinoid skeletal fragments. Messing studies these “living fossils” to learn more about life and evolution in ancient seas. Deep Sea Researcher Studies Ancient Marine Animals Charles Messing, Ph.D., OC professor, boarding the submersible Idabel With annual access to the three-person submersible, Messing and his collaborators—Tom Baumiller, Ph.D., from the University of Michigan, and Forest Galn, Ph.D., from Brigham Young University—are able to revisit the same location and study the same individual crinoids on an annual basis. This allows the researchers to gain insight into crinoid growth and population dynamics. This research was funded, in part, by National Geographic and Nova Southeastern University. In July 2013, a production crew from public broadcasting station WPBT2 in Miami, led by producer Alexa Elliott, accompanied the researchers to Roatan. There, they shot an episode of their long-running series Changing Seas . The episode, “Living Fossils,” aired on WPBT2 in June 2014 and can be viewed online at http://video.wpbt 2 .org/video/ . Great West Indian sea lily Cenocrinus asterius at a depth of 152 meters (more photos on page 2)