All the tiny worms: part 2

Sarah's work station at WHOI, where she has sorted thousands
of animals so far. Here, she's neck-deep in local polychaetes. 

My technician, Sarah, is amazing. I lean on her heavily. Sarah can handle herself with very little direction when I assign her a project. She's highly detail-oriented, so I know she won't miss a single thing. Most of the time, I hand her a set of samples and walk away - she's got it. And I can trust that she will reach out when she needs help. 

This week, Sarah asked for help with some samples. She has been cranking away, sorting and identifying animals from Vineyard Sound for a project we're doing with a local consulting company. We touch base regularly to identify any tricky species together. But the tricky ones have piled up. Sarah was feeling behind. She asked for two focused days on the microscope with me, so I kept my schedule as clear as possible and joined her in the lab. 

One of the bivalves in our samples

Sarah came to our meeting armed with tubes. True to her organized character, she had them all labeled and arranged in a rack for easy reference. I looked at the tubes. I looked at Sarah. There were so many tubes. There were only two of us. 

We made it through, but man, was it an adventure. I'm pretty good at identifying invertebrates - after 13 years in this field, I have an extensive mental catalog of phyla and orders and species. Most of the time, I can tell you what something is by sight. Not to say I don't make mistakes. I have been way off before. But being wrong is sometimes the first step to finding the right answer. 

One by one, we worked our way through dichotomous keys to identify animals. Thankfully, we were given access to a list of species found in samples from the same stations 2 years ago, and the marvelous modern invention of the internet is chock-full of specimen photos from other researchers. A lot of times, we'll get close using the key, then scour online images of species in the list to see if we can find a match. Sometimes we find an exact match; sometimes we don't. If we're not confident in the species, we'll identify the specimens to genus or family - whichever level we're confident in. We've identified clams and worms and crustaceans. I had no idea the diversity in our local waters was so high. 

Sphaerodoropsis!

One particularly fun specimen was this one - shown in the photo at right. My first instinct was to call it a sea cucumber, but that didn't seem quite right. It was bumpy, but not in the way sea cucumbers typically are. I was confused. 

Sarah took a photo through the microscope, cropped it, and fed it into a reverse image search. The idea hadn't even occurred to me, but she had a result in just a few seconds. As it turns out, there's a group of segmented worms that are kinda bumpy and kinda famous for looking like sea cucumbers. They're called Sphaerodoropsis, and a species even occurs in our local waters here in New England. It was a super exciting result!

I'm grateful for a focused and organized technician, and I'm having fun identifying a diverse range of species!