Journey to the Hydrothermal Vents

Tamara received her Ph.D. degree in Aquatic Biology from University of California, Santa Barbara, working on the visual ecology of deep-sea crustaceans (shrimps and crabs) as well as bioluminescence in marine animals and fireflies. She completed post-doctoral fellowships in neurophysiology at the University of Connecticut Medical School and Hatfield Marine Science Center in Oregon, before returning to the deep-sea world on a post-doctoral fellowship at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution in 1992. Discovering that Florida is the only state in the continental U.S. that met her temperature requirements, she has lived in Florida ever since. Much of her research has been on the visual ecology of deep-sea animals, studying adaptations to both downwelling light and bioluminescence. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, NOAA NURP, NOAA NRDA, NOAA CIOERT, and the NOAA Ocean Exploration program. She has been chief scientist on 70 research cruises, and participated on 50 more as a lucky hitchhiker, conducting work in the Gulf of Maine, the Gulf of Mexico, the Indian Ocean and off the coasts of Florida, Hawaii, California, the Bahamas, the Canary Islands, Cuba, Costa Rica, Cabo Verde, and Samoa.  As a professor in the Halmos College of Arts and Sciences at Nova Southeastern University, in addition to her research, she mentors graduate students and teaches Human Anatomy and Physiology to undergraduates, and marine physiology and deep-sea biology to graduates. She is the chief scientist on this cruise, and will be carrying out studies on the vision of vent shrimp using electrophysiological techniques. 

Ruchao earned his bachelor’s degree in Biology from Indiana University Bloomington and his master’s degree in Marine Science from Nova Southeastern University, where he worked with Dr. Tamara Frank and studied the visual physiology of marine crustaceans. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Biology at Florida International University, where his research focuses on the visual ecology and sensory biology of insects. His work combines electrophysiological, neurophysiological, and imaging approaches to investigate how insect visual systems function and adapt to different ecological environments. The training he received from Tamara Frank in compound eye visual physiology provided a strong foundation for his transition from studying crustaceans to studying insects, and he is excited to return to sea and work with Tammy again. This will be his second research cruise, but his first opportunity to conduct research in a hydrothermal vent environment. During the cruise, Ruchao will assist with the collection and experimental study of hydrothermal vent shrimp, help record their visual responses using electroretinography, and use micro-CT imaging to investigate the structure of their compound eyes. Through this work, he hopes to better understand how vent shrimp are visually adapted to one of the most unusual environments in the deep sea.

Haley Glasmann is a PhD Candidate in Dr. Kevin Boswell’s Marine Ecology and Acoustics Lab at Florida International University. She grew up in San Diego and attended UC Santa Barbara, where she earned her B.S. in Aquatic Biology. The culmination of her research experiences across working in Costa Rica with the BIOMA turtle program, spending a summer in Moorea, French Polynesia as an NSF REU student, and interning for theUS Navy Marine Mammal Program in San Diego, inspired her to pursue a graduate education in the marine sciences.

Haley utilizes SONAR (Sound Navigation and Ranging) technology or scientific echosounders to study the deep sea. Her research is primarily focused in the Northern Gulf of Mexico where she uses acoustics to investigate the Diel Vertical Migration (DVM), which is the largest daily migration of animals on earth! This movement happens every day across the global ocean, yet is variable across ocean basins. Haley hopes to add to the realm of knowledge for mesopelagic communities to be used in deep pelagic conservation and management efforts.

In addition to her research, Haley has a passion for teaching. She has led the marine biology and oceanography class at FIU and teaches indoor cycling at her campus recreation center. She also manages the social media for her lab @boswelllab and the FIU Marine Biology Program @fiumarinebio. To follow along with Haley’s PhD journey, check out her account: @scubahaleykat!

Originally trained in math, dance, and art, Sönke Johnsen has studied optics in biology for the last 36 years, the last 25 of which have been at Duke University. He is particularly interested in vision, signaling, and camouflage in the open ocean, but has also worked on coastal, freshwater, and terrestrial species, animal navigation, nocturnal vision, and human cataracts.  His research combines mathematical modeling with behavioral and morphological studies and in situ measurements and imagery. His field work primarily involves open-ocean 

research cruises that use SCUBA and deep-sea manned and robotic submersibles, and other imaging and collecting platforms.  In addition to exploring the optical and visual tricks that animals perform, Johnsen isinterested in improving communication between theoretical and experimental scientists, biologists and physicists, and scientists and artists. Outreach is a strong focus, and Johnsen’s research has been featured in many traditional media outlets, but also in Radiolab, Finding Nemo, The Magic Treehouse book series, the poetry of John Updike, the humor of Dave Barry, and 

most recently in Ed Yong’s An Immense World. Professor Johnsen has also written five books; The Optics of Life, Visual Ecology, Color in Nature, Into the Great Wide Ocean, and The Radiant Sea. and is currently completing a sixth on animal camouflage and signals. In his spare time, he is an avid nature photographer and tractor enthusiast.

Bruna’s academic career began at the University of York (UK), where she received her PhD, working on hybrid speciation and the role of pheromones in species diversification in Heliconius butterflies. This work included long field seasons at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, and it was this experience that turned her into a fieldwork creature. Her first postdoc at the University of Edinburgh focused on the genetic structure of locally adapted traits in a hybrid zone between different color morphs of the African queen butterfly Danaus chrysippus. Her work was enabled by a collaboration with the University of Rwanda Center of Excellence for Biodiversity (CoEB) via 7 months of on-site fieldwork including training of local researchers. Feeling ready to switch things up and having felt an affinity for the sea since childhood, she then began her current postdoc at the UCB Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, on recent adaptation to climate change in deep-sea lanternfish.

 The genomics of speciation and adaptation remain a running theme in her research, a toolbox that can be put to use on any organism. Still an invertebrate lover at heart, she will return to pheromones and chemical ecology in her upcoming 2027-2030 Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA-GF) Fellowship, a highly collaborative project that will involve multiple institutions across Africa and South America. This cruise will be her first time working at sea, with the aim to collect deep-sea fish for downstream analyses of gut microbiomes and recent adaptation, and hopefully a few cool specimens for the MVZ Ichthyological collections.