In 1991, I made an amazing discovery with a two-person submarine called the Delta. In a small area of Chiniak Bay, near Kodiak, Alaska, over 100,000 female Tanner Crabs had aggregated in 600 feet of water, where they climbed up on top of each other forming meter-high mounds containing hundreds of crabs. Hundreds of such piles formed in an area the size of a football stadium, while a few thousand males held a tailgate party in the surrounding seafloor. After diving on them every day for two weeks, I still didn’t know what it was about.

Males are Mostly Superfluous (ask any female)

The discovery of crab aggregation was an important breakthrough in our understanding of Tanner Crab biology and led to two publications 1 2 .The most important result was that 97% of the male crabs found in mating pairs were old-shell crabs, at least a year past their terminal molt. But the crab fishery targeted primarily recently molted new-shell males, meaning they were removing them before they ever had a chance to mate. Another implication was that reproduction was geographically isolated; it depended on female crabs that were concentrated in a very small area, and a few nearby males, whereas most of the remaining males were scattered over many miles of seafloor too far away from females to participate in mating. That meant that most of the males were surplus to requirements.

My success in 1991 gave me “scientific capital” that helped me continue to obtain grant money. For the next five years I returned to Chiniak Bay to study Tanner crab aggregation with the Delta submarine and a leased remotely operated vehicle (ROV). Every year led to different levels of discovery and disappointment, because we kept missing the main event, seeing mound formation on only one or two dates. And though each year was a fascinating story by itself, telling them would require more verbiage on my part, and more patience on yours, than space allows, so I must condense.

What we learned was that the center of crab aggregation moved up to 1 km each year, so that 4-5 days were required each year just to find them again, which was an expensive use of submarine time. In one year, we were too late, and the crabs had already mated and produced new eggs. In another we were too early and the crabs stayed buried in the mud. In 1995 I began leasing a Phantom HD-2 ROV which was much cheaper than the Delta submersible and allowed us to spread our observations over a six-week period, but we still did not catch the aggregation event. It was time to regroup.

After 1995, I was frustrated, out of funding, and ready to do something completely different. In January 1996, I took my wife and six-year-old daughter to Japan, where I would spend the next year learning how to cultivate king crabs in a marine lab. That was an amazing experience and adventure and deserves much more time in later posts, but for now, it was a good way to get my head out of the ocean for a while. In Japan I had learned a new term for my crab mounds, Kani-yama, or Crab Mountains. We returned to Kodiak in January of 1997, and by the following year, I was out chasing crabs again.

When the Moon is in the Seventh House

In 1998, I returned to the Tanner Crab project with new eyes. My plan was to have a fresh look at all of the data we had collected over five years of research. On a large piece of graph paper that covered most of my desk (old school, but effective), I laid out all of the relevant data; the dates we dove in the Delta, the dates we observed crab aggregations, the dates we did not see aggregations. Superimposed on that, I laid out tide schedules, dates of the full and new moons, and the dates of the highest and lowest tides. On top of that, I plotted wind speed, cloud cover, and storm days. And finally, from the Delta’s data logger, I added water temperature and salinity. Each type of information was marked with a different symbol and color.

To the casual observer, it might have looked like a piece of cross-stitch work. Five lines snaked across the page, one for each year, dotted with occasional squares, triangles, and circles. For days, I did little more than stare at it, seeing nothing but chaos. What did it mean? Somewhere in that arrangement of symbols was the answer, I knew, and I willed it to reveal its hidden secrets to me.

Slowly, the intricate lacework of lines and dots began to form a pattern. As I looked at the symbols representing the full moon, I realized they made a diagonal line across the page. Paralleling that line was another line representing the highest monthly tide. Each full moon appeared 11 days earlier (to the left) in the subsequent year. It seemed odd, until I realized that a 365-day year included twelve lunar cycles of 29.5 days, with 11 days left over. Of course. Que stupido! It now made perfect sense. Eureka! I had found it.

We had first seen crab mounds during the high spring tide in April 1991. In all subsequent years, our observations of crab mounds occurred within 2 days of the highest monthly tide of April or May. The cue for mound formation must be the tide, I thought, which was 11 days earlier each year. That was the only logical explanation.

In several years, we had retrieved female crabs from the mounds, and some crabs had released larvae in buckets aboard ship. At the time, I had thought it accidental, but maybe it wasn’t. Were the crabs aggregating in order to hatch their larvae? Was that their secret purpose?

Larval Launch Pads

Based on these clues, Bill Donaldson and I hypothesized that the crab mounds were serving as “larval launch pads” and the timing of launch was signaled by the tides. Our hypothesis went like this: When female crabs were ready to release their larvae, they climbed up onto the nearest object, which was another crab, eventually accumulating into a large pile, up to a meter high; Upon some tide-related cue, female crabs began releasing larvae from their location high above the silty bottom layer, where the larvae could more easily escape; and millions of larvae hatching during a small window of time and space would overwhelm any larval predators and have a better chance of survival.

The “larval launch pad” hypothesis seemed to fit all the observed data, and later that year I presented it at a conference in Amsterdam, where it generated lots of discussion among my fellow carcinologists, i.e. crab scientists (whom, as we know, are some of the brightest minds in science!)3. But we needed a way to test it, and to answer specific questions that would support or refute it. Did mound formation coincide with high spring tides? Did crabs hatch larvae from the mounds? And was there a detectable tidal signal at the location and depth where the aggregation occurred?

All of our previous observations had been haphazard. In some years we saw the beginning of aggregation, in others, the middle or end, and in some years we didn’t see it at all. We needed to make observations over the entire period of mound formation, from early April to late May. How was I going to accomplish that? Leasing either the Delta or an ROV for that length of time would be too expensive.

A Sledding We Shall Go

What I needed was a cheap, simple alternative for finding and observing crab mounds on the seafloor. A camera sled. Most of the ones I had seen were huge beasts with complicated cameras and electronics on them, all of which would be too expensive for my budget, which was basically nonexistent. But down in Seattle, NOAA scientist Dr. Craig Rose was building small, self-contained camera systems to study how fish behaved in trawl nets. I soon arranged to borrow a camera and lighting system from him. Now all I needed was a platform that could be towed along the seafloor, on which to put the camera system.

Over the next three years, I designed and built four different camera sleds. Each one consisted of an aluminum frame with skis on the bottom and crossbars for bracing, and a tray to support the camera equipment. I even learned how to use a CAD drawing program so I could design and modify them. And each one was bigger than the previous one.

The first was only 3 feet long, and could be towed from a small boat. I called it the Benthic Resource Assessment Device, Model 1, i.e. the BRAD-1 (Ingenious, I know). But it was too light and would not stay on the bottom, and we almost lost it when it became entangled with a derelict crab pot. The next model (BRAD-2) was five feet long, and paid for by the NOAA Auke Bay Lab in Juneau, who wanted it for their research. The following year, I built another (BRAD-3) for Auke Bay, and a fourth (BRAD-4) for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G), who allowed me use of their 100-foot research vessel, the Resolution, to test out the new sleds. Each of those sleds improved on the previous one, and each year we learned more about how to operate them and made a few observations of our crabs. But I didn’t own any of them.

Twin Peaks

Finally in 1999, I got funding to build my own sled (the BRAD-5) that would incorporate all the modifications of previous sleds, and to purchase the camera equipment that would go on it. It was eight feet long and built like a tank so it would go up and over any crab pots. That year, I chartered the 92-foot crabber Big Valley and also leased another Phantom ROV from Mark Blakeslee. I also arranged for the NOAA research vessel Miller Freeman to drop a large current meter in the middle of Chiniak Bay in March and retrieve it in October.

After a week of searching with the sled, we located the crab aggregation. The following week, we put down the ROV and flew it slowly around. With a small sector-scanning sonar we could see the crab aggregation from 50-100 yards away, then fly the ROV over to it. At one point we saw a large aggregation with two separate towers at each end, which we called Twin Peaks. As we watched, one of the towers became unstable and fell over.

We also collected some female crabs by tying a small net beneath the ROV. Like a crazy video game, Mark flew the ROV directly into a mound, scooping up a few crabs and scattering the rest all over. It was hella fun! The crabs were taken back to the lab and placed in individual aquaria. After a few days, larvae began hatching in bits and spurts, for a few hours after dark each evening. Each crab needed 6 or 7 days to hatch all her larvae, which we counted every morning. First only a few, then a hundred, then a thousand, ten thousand; some crabs released over a hundred thousand larvae in one night. By late May the crabs in the lab had finished hatching, and the aggregation in Chiniak Bay had started to disperse.

Putting the puzzle together

After retrieving the current meter data In October, I had all the pieces I needed to put the puzzle together. And the picture it made was finally complete. Crabs that had been brought into the lab had hatched their larvae within a two-week period in early May. And though mound formation had lasted about 6 weeks, longer than I expected, the peak period coincided with larval hatching in the lab. But the current meter data was the real kicker.

In March and early April, currents on the bottom of Chiniak Bay flowed in with the flood tide, and out with the ebb, but a little further each time, for a net flow of 1 inch per hour to the southeast, away from shore (negative, in the figure below). But then in late April it changed dramatically. During the spring tide in April, the net flow changed direction to the northwest for 3-4 days, i.e. towards shore (positive direction). After a few days, the normal pattern reasserted itself, but then during the spring tide in May, currents reversed again. This second period of current reversal was longer and stronger than the first and coincided exactly with the mid-point of both mound formation and hatching of larval crabs.

That was the answer I had been looking for. Female crabs started forming mounds in April and released their larvae during the spring tide in May, cueing their behavior to the tides. Larvae released during the period of current reversal would be carried toward shore, where they could settle in shallow water where juvenile crabs were most abundant. This was an evolutionary adaptation that kept the larvae from being washed out to sea, where they would die.

By now, I was convinced that the “Larval Launch Pad” hypothesis was basically correct. But there was one nagging detail I had not addressed; a Canadian scientist had shown that Snow Crabs hatched their larvae when placed into water containing phytoplankton. He believed that plankton falling to the ocean floor was a signal to the crabs that food was abundant and it was time to hatch. But when I examined his data closely, I realized that his crabs had hatched larvae during the spring tide, just like mine. Their biological clock was still ticking away in the lab, and they instinctively knew when the tides would change, and hatched accordingly.

However, to cover my bases, I conducted another experiment the following year, by placing two dozen female Tanner Crabs into individual aquaria. Half of them received flowing raw seawater (with plankton) directly from the ocean. The other twelve received filtered seawater from which all plankton had been removed. For a month, we collected and counted crab larvae daily, until all the crab larvae had hatched. The result showed that there was no difference in hatch timing between the two groups; the presence of plankton in the water made no difference to the crabs. For me, that was the clincher.

The mystery of Kani-Yama was finally solved.

The next two years were spent assembling and error-checking all the data before publishing my final paper on the subject in 2003 in which I laid out three years of sled and ROV observations, larval hatching, and current meter data4. By then, my interest in the project was flagging, even though I still had many unanswered questions and hypotheses. Could we monitor crab aggregations with some other technology like sonar, or laser scanning? Could we find other aggregations of female Tanner Crabs? Could we track larvae to determine if they were swept towards shore or out to sea? But those questions did not have the urgency, or the mystery, or the excitement attached to them as did the discovery of crab aggregations. And I had lost my passion for the subject.

It was time to move on to some other project, one that would tweak my scientific curiosity, engage my intellectual neurons, and subsume me in obsessive pursuit of scientific knowledge for its own sake. But what would it be?

The answer was another kind of mountain in the sea.

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Dear Reader: With this post, I am inaugurating a new section in my Substack Website, called “Under Alaskan Seas”. My goal is to share stories and adventures from my time living and working in Alaska. Most of these will be related to marine science, though some may just be stories that need to be told. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I did.

The Emerald Isle

All I could see out of the plane window were clouds, which thinned as we descended, gradually revealing blue ocean waters, topped by a few whitecaps. Small islands appeared as the plane turned for its lineup. As we dropped down towards the airstrip, I could see green mountains climbing upward into the cloud layer. We hit the tarmac suddenly and bounced to a stop. It was July 2, 1984. I had just arrived in Kodiak, Alaska, which was to be my new home.

Since receiving my PhD from the University of Washington in 1982, I had spent most of the last two years teaching classes, writing grant proposals, and applying for jobs in my field of fisheries science. I had learned about a job opening in Kodiak and I had applied for it. For the next few months, I sat on pins and needles while trying to learn everything I could about king crabs, the species I would be working with, but there was very little useful information in the published literature.

One day in May, I received a phone call from Dr. Bob Otto, director of the Kodiak Fisheries Laboratory. I was prepared to answer a bunch of questions about crabs and statistics, but all he asked me was “What do you know about Kodiak?”

“Umm, I know it’s an island; it has lots of bears, and not many trees.” That was all he needed to know.

“You’ve got the job”, he said, “Get up here as soon as you can. You’re going to sea in July.” I was ecstatic. That was the music I had been waiting to hear. For the next month, I was walking on air.

I couldn’t believe how beautiful Kodiak was; green mountains, blue sky and blue-green ocean. For the first two weeks I lived in the barracks at the US Coast Guard Base. Going to sleep was difficult because it didn’t get dark until midnight. Overlooking the base was tall, triangular Barometer Mountain. A few days after arriving, I climbed to the top, 2500 feet above sea level. From there I had a panoramic view of Kodiak, all of the shoreline out to Chiniak 20 miles away, and mountain peaks crowning the backbone of Kodiak Island. Surrounded by that breathtaking view, I knew I had found my place. My employer, the NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), had offices in an old Army barracks on the USCG base, where I settled into a corner office with a spectacular view overlooking the ocean. Two weeks later, I flew out to Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands, and boarded a ship headed out to the Bering Sea.

The Wild West

Dutch Harbor is the farthest west town in the United States with regularly scheduled airline service. Landing in Dutch Harbor is an experience. The runway is short, surrounded by water at each end and on one side, and the fourth side is a steep, 1000 foot cliff. Sometimes it takes multiple attempts to land the plane, giving all the passengers either great entertainment or heart palpitations.

In early November, over 200 fishing boats would converge on the community of Dutch Harbor. For a week, it would became a seething pot of men, steel, diesel fumes, testosterone, and beer. Twenty-four hours before the opening of the crab fishery, all the boats leave town and steam north for the Bristol Bay fishing grounds. There, they would drop thousands of pots to the ocean floor, baited with herring or squid, to capture the giant crustaceans. The quota that year was about 20 million pounds of king crab. At 7 pounds each, and prices of about $5 per pound, each crab was worth about $35, and the fishery as a whole could bring $100 million at the dock. An average boat would bring in half a million dollars to be shared among the crew, most of whom would only get a few percent of that. Even so, a seasoned crewman could earn $25-50,000 for two weeks of fishing.

Five years earlier, it had been much different. In 1980, over 130 million pounds of king crab had been taken from the Bering Sea. Fishermen made unbelievable amounts of money and transmuted much of into gold jewelry. Crewmen just back from sea would spend mortgage money in the bars, buying drinks for everyone in sight. A few put their money away, into homes, property, or new boats, but most just spent it as fast as they made it. King crabs were like gold, and everyone wanted in on the rush. Banks fell over themselves offering loans to fishermen for new and improved crab boats and many people went into great debt.

But by 1981, the king crab population had crashed, the fishery was closed, and the party was over. Some said it was due to overfishing, and the extravagance of the previous few years was hard to overlook. But there were other, more subtle signs that something else was amiss. As early as 1977, the NMFS crab survey had found a scarcity of juvenile king crabs, and had predicted a decline in the adults. Nonetheless, their warnings went unheeded, and the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game, the agency responsible for regulating the fishery, had instead ratcheted up the quotas.

The Boring Sea

I had been to the Bering Sea twice before on large, 300-foot NOAA research vessels. But nothing had prepared me for this version of the Bering Sea. My previous trips had been a pleasure cruise compared to what lay in store for me.

In Dutch Harbor, I climbed aboard the R/V Alaska, a 100-foot fishing vessel owned by the University of Washington and leased to the NMFS for the summer. I had been aboard the Alaska as a grad student at UW, and thought it a big vessel at the time, but that was in the narrow inlets of Puget Sound. In the Bering Sea, that boat was little more than a tiny piece of flotsam. In the middle of the night, we departed Dutch and headed out to sea.

My first impression of the Bering Sea was GRAY. The ocean was the color of deep gray gunmetal. The sky was a lighter gray of the same hue. Even the deck of the ship was painted gray. The weather was typical for July, with 25 knot winds and 6-8 foot seas. For two and a half days we slogged through the waves towards our destination, near St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea. I lay in my bunk the whole time in the agony of seasickness, interrupted only by occasional dashes to the rail to vomit overboard. After three days, I finally managed to keep down an orange, my first solid food since leaving Dutch. When it was time to work, I forced myself out on deck. Even though it was now officially Summer in Alaska, it was dark, cloudy, windy, and rainy.

At 6 am every day, the captain started up a huge hydraulic engine, which made so much noise it would have woken even Rip Van Winkle from his slumber. The winches were started up, and the ship let out a trawl, a large net designed to sweep the ocean floor clean of every object in its path. Half an hour later, the trawl came up, and its contents were spilled out into bins on the deck. Part of this bounty was hoisted up onto a four-by-eight foot sorting table, where the four other scientists started sorting everything into baskets.

My job was to climb into the deck bin containing the rest of the catch and pull out every crab I could find. Sometimes that was easy, especially if there were only a few large king crabs to pick up. But other times, the bin could be filled with thousands of small snow or Tanner crabs, ranging from thumbnail size to several inches across. Bending down, sometimes on my knees in a bin full of slippery fish, sliding back and forth across the deck, was not my idea of fun. But it was usually better than standing at the table sorting slimy, smelly fish. Many times, when the ship rolled, a large wave came crashing through the scupper into the bin, washed up the leg of my rain pants, and soaked me in a gurry of cold salt water, fish scales, and slime.

One fish, two fish…

The theory behind this work is called sampling. Trying to count every fish or crab in the sea is impossible, so we sampled a measured proportion of them. Theoretically, the trawl has a known width (measurable electronically) and is towed a known distance (measured with LORAN then, GPS now). Many assumptions are made including: the net stays on bottom (debatable but detectable), catches everything in its path (less likely but estimable), and the things it catches are equally distributed along its path and within the net (highly unlikely). Since our sample tows were made every 20 nautical miles (nmi), each one represented an area of 400 square nmi. And since the tow covered only 1/80^th of a square nmi, the proportion of seafloor actually sampled was 1 in 32,000.

Thus, every crab caught and counted represented (theoretically) 32,000 other crabs unseen. And with large king crabs worth over $35 each, if we dropped one overboard or miscounted it, that error could translate into a $1 Million loss to the fishery. So accuracy was extremely important.

You might think that, since crabs are caught with traps, we would use traps to estimate their abundance, but that doesn’t work very well. Too many things can affect the numbers of crabs caught by a trap including tide, current, weather, quantity and condition of the bait, position of the bait in the trap, time it’s in the water, etc. Respected scientists have tried to model this, but the results are only applicaple under specific conditions.

Even so, the trawl catch was usually too much to count, measure, and process in the allotted time of two hours between tows. After dumping it in the deck bin, a subsample of the catch was taken for sorting, that was assumed to be a random representation of all the fish and invertebrates in the catch. Except for crabs. For whatever reason, the crabs often came up in a large clump, and no number of subsamples could adequately represent them. To get a truly representative sample, we had to collect every crab from the catch. After that, we could sort and subsample them as necessary, by counting or weighing portions of the crabs.

My colleagues at the sorting table, mostly from the Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, sorted all the fish by species into separate baskets or tubs. The most abundant were flounders of all sorts: rock sole, yellowfin sole, Alaska Plaice, flathead sole, Bering flounders, and the occasional halibut. Next most abundant were the roundfish: pollock, cod, tomcod, and herring. Least abundant, but much more interesting to look at were the bottomfish with their huge fins and gaping mouths; sculpins, Irish lords, eelpouts, poachers, the occasional rockfish, and sometimes large skates or rarely, sharks.

Team Crab

The Crab Team was composed of myself and one other biologist. After removing all the crabs from the bin, we sorted them all by sex and species. We were primarily interested in five species of commercial value: red king crab (Paralithodes camtschaticus), blue king crab (Paralithodes platypus), Tanner crabs (Chionoecetes bairdi), snow crab (Chionoecetes opilio), and hair crab (Erimacrus isenbeckii). We also caught large numbers of lyre or toad crabs (Hyas lyratus and H. coarctatus, respectively), and helmet crabs (Telmessus chieiragonus), but since there was no commercial fishery for them, we only weighed and counted them.

If there were over 300 crabs, we subsampled them. With the large king and Tanner crabs it was easy to do by number; keep one, toss one, keep one, toss one, etc. With the smaller Tanner and snow crabs, it was much more complicated. Hundreds or thousands could fit into a bushel basket. In that case, we would dump out a reasonable number to measure, weigh them, and calculate the portion represented by the subsample, relative to the total for that species and size group. By then, the crabs had been sampled and subsampled multiple times.

Having previously studied Dungeness crabs for my Dissertation, I had developed a healthy respect for the damage and pain that could be inflicted on fingers in the grip of an angry crab. But those crabs were puny compared to king crabs that often weighed six to eight pounds, and had claws as large as a man’s fist that could easily snap a half inch dowel in two. My initial trepidation about handling them was soon tempered, though, when I discovered that out of the water, these large crustaceans became graceless, lumbering giants, incapable of moving or responding rapidly. Wearing a pair of heavy rubber gloves to prevent being punctured by their many spines, I could easily handle the crabs without fear of being pinched.

After sorting and weighing the crabs, we placed the baskets on top of the sorting table and began to measure. Wearing a large headset like that used by airplane pilots, I talked to my partner, who sat at a keyboard inside the boat typing numbers into a data logger. I preferred standing outside, even if it was cold and wet, to sitting inside the boat, where I was prone to being seasick. As I picked up each crab, I called out its species and sex, then measured it with a stainless-steel caliper, and then checked for various other conditions. If it was a female with eggs, I would describe the size, color, and condition of the eggs. (Various versions of electronic calipers were tried over the years, but none could withstand the constant exposure to seawater, fish scales, and slime). Standing on deck all day fighting the motion of the ship was tiring work. By the time we had finished measuring, the next trawl was up on deck, and it was time to start all over again as the ship moved to the next station.

The last tow came up about 5 pm, but after interruptions for dinner, and returning to the deck to finish work, we often did not leave the deck until 9 or 10 pm. Then it would take us another hour or more to sort through the day’s data, fix errors, file all the printouts, and update our daily notebooks. We were lucky to get finished by 11 each night. There wasn’t much time for anything else.

The Bering Stare

Aboard ship the daily routine was numbing to mind and body. For four weeks, we had no break from the work or the weather. Gray weather, gray seas, gray fish, sort, sample, and measure crabs. It was no wonder that that my colleagues had renamed this place “The Boring Sea”. At seven a.m. we were on deck and stayed there all day. I soon learned I could skip breakfast and sleep until the first trawl came up; after it was processed I could take a quick break to wolf down a peanut butter sandwich before the second tow came up. Occasionally we finished sorting and measuring with a half hour to spare; at those times, I literally collapsed in my bunk with my boots still on, hanging my feet off the side of the bunk. At times, scientists would fall asleep standing at the sorting table. Once, my partner fell asleep at the data logger while I was measuring crabs, and I had to do it all over again. We all acquired that fixed, dilated gaze called “the Bering Stare”.

We lived all day long in rain gear that was constantly wet. There was no place inside the boat to dry it out, so at night we hung it outside from the rigging or hydraulic lines, where it never dried out. We didn’t drop the anchor at night, because it would swing us into the waves and we would jerk up and down against the anchor cable all night. Instead, we dropped one of the trawl doors (a large steel kite the size of a garage door), which turned our stern quarter to the waves and gave us a gentler ride. If the water was too deep, we just drifted, which caused us to turn sideways to the waves and roll in the trough all night.

After finishing our last trawl one day, the skipper came out on deck and said, “That’s it, we’re going home.” We were all overjoyed at the news. It took another day and a half to return to Dutch Harbor. We used that time to clean all of our sampling baskets, blasting each other with the deck hose to wash the fish scales off our rain gear, and packing up all our equipment.

A day later, I was on a flight back to Kodiak, where I would spend the next few months analyzing all of the crab data to estimate the abundance of each commercially valuable crab species. Those numbers would be used to set quotas (officially “Guideline Harvest Levels” or GHLs) for multi-million dollar fisheries that would open in the fall. For me, it was a major learning experience to immerse myself in the analytical process. But even more exciting was what I would learn about the crabs; all those data points would eventually reveal information about the distribution, behavior, and reproductive habits of some of the most fascinating creatures in the ocean.

I couldn’t wait to get started.

This issue of Ecologist at Large is available to all readers. However, if you would like to support my work with a one-off contribution, click “Buy me a coffee” below.

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