Benthic brotherhood

I was full from a delicious and adventurous lunch, and once again, I found myself following Ji into a conference room. This meeting used the same general format - researchers briefly presenting their work, followed by an open discussion - except this time, everyone spoke my language. Not Mandarin (I can still only say "hello" and "thank you") - they spoke Benthos. There's a benthic research group at the Institute of Oceanology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Qingdao, and I felt right at home with them. We spent a whole afternoon discussing our work. 

I deeply enjoyed speaking with the IOCAS group because we have so many research interests in common. They specialize in macrobenthos - animals that live in the seafloor and are big enough to see with the naked eye - just like me. They work on ecology (ooh) and taxonomy (aah) of animals in the Chinese marginal seas. They have this amazing collection of samples from all over the Yellow Sea shelf and even the continental slope (yes!), and they're using it to figure out how environmental factors (my tribe!) control the benthic communities (oh, sing to me the song of my people!). 

I was fascinated by one woman's work on deep-glass sponges and succession on coral reefs. I advised a crustacean biologist to consider the larval biology of his species when studying how their populations are connected. I was deeply impressed by the harpacticoid copepod taxonomist. (For those of you who don't know, harpacticoid copepods are small shrimp-like creatures that live on the seafloor. They're difficult to find and almost impossible to tell apart - and this woman identifies them for a living.) It was a wonderful, invigorating afternoon.

As the conversation wound down, the leader of the group and I exchanged e-mail addresses and agreed to keep in touch. There are funding opportunities coming up in the next few months, so we'll have to choose a scientific question and design a plan to answer it. The possibilities are almost endless, and I can't wait to put together a proposal with the IOCAS group. 

We had a bit of time before dinner, so two of the men gave me a tour of the IOCAS taxonomic collection. There were three rooms organized by region: samples from Chinese seas, polar seas, and the deep sea. Each room had large, attractive specimens out for public display and then shelf after shelf of dead things in jars. I spent my undergraduate years describing species of freshwater crabs from the collections in European and American museums, and the smell of alcohol-preserved animals still makes me feel like I'm 18 (yes, I'm a nerd). Some jars had red ribbons tied around the neck, and when I asked one of the men what the ribbons meant, he said they designated holotypes - the specimen was a new species that someone at IOCAS had described.

I came away from our afternoon at IOCAS enthralled and optimistic. I'm glad to have found such a like-minded group of Chinese benthic ecologists.