Aug 3, 2020

Big ships and underwater robots: heading out to sea with the Ocean Observatories Initiative

It’s summertime, and that means scientists across the University of Washington College of the Environment are in the field collecting data. Researchers in the School of Oceanography are no different and are working off the Oregon coast on their annual expedition to maintain the long-running cabled ocean observatory. Part of the broader National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), UW oversees the Regional Cabled Observatory that spans several sites in Pacific Northwest waters, ranging from shallow coastal locales to deeper waters in the open ocean more than 300 miles offshore.

New studies show how to save parasites and why it’s important

Chelsea Wood alongside one of the ponds in the research experiment.

Parasites have a public relations problem. Unlike the many charismatic mammals, fishes and birds that receive our attention (and our conservation dollars), parasites are thought of as something to eradicate — and certainly not something to protect. But only 4% of known parasites can infect humans, and the majority actually serve critical ecological roles, like regulating wildlife that might otherwise balloon in population size and become pests.

Deep-sea anglerfishes have evolved a new type of immune system

Female anglerfish with a parasitic male attached to her back.

Deep-sea anglerfishes employ an incredible reproductive strategy. Tiny dwarfed males become permanently attached to relatively gigantic females, fuse their tissues and then establish a common blood circulation. In this way, the male becomes entirely dependent on the female for nutrient supply, like a developing fetus in the womb of a mother or a donated organ in a transplant patient. In anglerfishes, this unusual phenomenon is called “sexual parasitism” and contributes to the reproductive success of these animals living in the vast space of the deep sea, where females and males otherwise rarely meet.