Most ocean life remains to be discovered. Because fish and many other animals that live in the ocean often have larvae or other, microscopic life stages that drift freely in ocean water, counting species by genetic barcoding of plankton samples adds to counts of species recorded as adults and is a highly efficient way to understand what lives in the ocean and how biodiversity changes as we modify the ocean environment.
Picture this: What to do at a party when you try to carry on a conversation, but the music is too loud? A Panamanian doctoral student is trying to figure out how dolphins communicate underwater during heavy boat traffic in the Bocas del Toro Archipelago.
At the Smithsonian’s Bocas del Toro Research Station, in Panama, marine biologist Rachel Collin runs an educational program that recruits international experts to teach and create videos about how to collect, preserve and observe marine invertebrates, passing down their very specific knowledge to aspiring taxonomists.
As oceans warm and become more acidic and oxygen-poor, Smithsonian researchers asked how marine life on a Caribbean coral reef copes with changing conditions.
It always pays to think outside of the box. Rachel Collin decided to look further afield to find the adult form that matched a larvae from a plankton sample in Panama and was surprised by the result.
The novel ribbon worm was found as part of STRI’s Training in Tropical Taxonomy program and represents the first species of its genus from the Caribbean
