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Ocean Lecture Series
Spines, Slime and Camouflage: How to Avoid Being a Deep-sea Meal
Tammy Frank
About the Lecture
The deep-sea is the largest habitat on earth, starting at about 200 meters, and continuing down to depths of more than 10,000 meters in the deepest ocean trenches. Until the late 19th century, it was assumed that conditions in the deep sea - great pressure, low temperature, and little to no light - were too harsh to support life. However, we now know that this environment contains a remarkable diversity of animals, with unique adaptations for survival. As the name of the game for survival is to eat and not be eaten, many of these adaptations involve ways to find prey and avoid predators.
In this talk, Dr. Tamara Frank will discuss some recent discoveries made on her last two research expeditions, involving a 4-eyed fish and a deep-sea billbug, that give us some new insights into how animals "see in the deep-sea". She will also give an overview of ways that deep-sea animals detect prey without using vision, as well as how they avoid becoming prey themselves, a particularly daunting task for those species living in the water column where there is nothing to hide behind.
About the Speaker
 Dr. Tammy Frank is an Associate Research Professor in Harbor Branch's Center for Ocean Exploration and Deep-sea Research. Her educational background includes a B.S. from California State University, Long Beach, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from University of California, Santa Barbara. She joined Harbor Branch in 1992 as a Postdoctoral Fellow, after postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Connecticut Medical School and Hatfield Marine Science Center in Oregon. Discovering that Florida is the only state in the continental U.S. that met her temperature tolerance, she has been at Harbor Branch ever since.
Dr. Frank's research focuses on the effects of downwelling light on the distribution pattern of midwater animals, as well as functional adaptations of photoreceptors to very dim light environments. Her work combines in situ studies from the Johnson-Sea-Link submersible to quantify animal distribution patterns with shipboard based laboratory studies on the photosensitivity of animals brought up with midwater trawl nets and deep-sea traps. Her work has been funded by the Whitehall Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the NOAA National Undersea Research Program, and the NOAA Ocean Exploration program. She has been chief scientist on 40 research cruises, and participated on 40 more as a lucky hitchhiker, conducting work in the Gulf of Maine, and off the coasts of the Bahamas, California, the Canary Islands, Cuba, Costa Rica, Florida, Hawaii, and Samoa. In addition to conducting her research, Dr. Frank teaches Geological and Chemical Oceanography, Functional Biology of Marine Animals, and Oceanographic Experience for Undergraduates in Harbor Branch's "Semester by the Sea" program.
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