Participants
David Stein
www.nefsc.noaa.gov/nefsc/systematics/
My interests are the taxonomy, evolution, and natural history of deep-sea fishes (1000 > 7000 m), in particular, the primarily benthic family Liparidae (snailfishes), of about 30 genera with around 350 known species. This family may have the broadest geographic distribution of all the fishes, having representatives from the intertidal zone to over 7000 m, and occurring in all oceans at cool to cold temperatures. For instance, there are tropical snailfishes, but they live at over 1000 meters depth. Because deep-water benthic liparids lack pelagic eggs and larvae, they are closely tied to the bottom, are not easily distributed, and are geographically isolated by bathymetric features such as sea mounts and canyons. The diversity within the family probably resulted from these isolating mechanisms, and provides a wonderful chance to study the evolution of deep-sea fishes, especially in relation to their shallow water origins.
The ICEFISH cruise is an exciting opportunity to collect rare and previously unknown deep-water fishes from the subantarctic. I expect that we will discover new fish species because we will be collecting in little-sampled waters, from the intertidal zone to the bottom of the South Sandwich Trench (8250 m). I am especially hopeful that we will find new liparids; there are now more than100 species in seven genera known from the region, and I am confident that more will be found in the areas where we are going. Because we will be able to obtain fresh tissue samples and perform genetic analyses at sea, we will collect unique information that we can use to study the relationships of many problematic species. All the specimens we collect (both new species and already known) will add to our understanding of the evolution of the subantarctic fauna and how its ecosystem functions.
David Stein's photo credit: I forgot to mention that the photo should be credited to Jana Goldman, NOAA. It was used in the on-line NOAA "paper", Access NOAA, March 7, 2002.