The hydroid paper

A young Bouillonia cornucopia

I woke up to a nice surprise today: the paper I wrote about the Arctic deep-sea hydroid Bouillonia cornucopia has been published online! You can find it here in the journal Invertebrate Biology. 

This paper has taken shape over the past couple of years. I first started noticing B. cornucopia in the Arctic in 2017. After that, I collected samples opportunistically from moorings until I had a couple hundred individuals. Very little is published on B. cornucopia because it's so rare, so I was able to learn a lot from my samples - how the species reproduces, where it settles, how it grows. 

Perhaps our most important finding was that B. cornucopia is incredibly opportunistic. It's rarely found on natural substrata like rocks. Sometimes, it can settle on other animals, for example on the legs of a crab, but when an artificial habitat like a mooring shows up in the water, it goes nuts! It grows quickly and reproduces like mad. For decades, scientists have thought of deep-sea polar species as very slow-growing and static, but B. cornucopia proves that there are some opportunistic species in the Arctic deep sea. In fact, the fact that we found so many individuals on artificial substrata suggests that experiments using artificial substrata are a good way to collect opportunistic species that are otherwise rare. 

I'm excited to see this paper in print! Enjoy!