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 |  | Paula Mikkelsen is a malacologist involved in research on the systematics and phylogeny of living marine mollusks ("seashells"), and their diversity in the tropical western Atlantic. Mollusks are the second largest animal group on Earth (after insects), with about 100,000 living species. And the diversity of marine mollusks in the tropical Caribbean is very, very high. Dr. Mikkelsen's focus in this area during the last 10 years has been the Florida Keys, working with the new Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. The Keys are more "Caribbean" than "mainland" in flora and fauna, and the mollusks inhabiting similar marine habitats in Andros will make interesting and valuable comparisons.
Paula grew up in Maine, but spent most of her adult life in Florida, receiving her Ph.D. from the Florida Institute of Technology in 1994 . She has been curator of malacology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York since 1997, but returns to Florida to conduct most of her field research.
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|  | Dan Brumbaugh, marine program manager at the American Museum of Natural History's Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, is interested in the design and implementation of marine protected areas. Currently working to assist the Bahamian government, he is pursuing projects that fuse the scientific disciplines of remote sensing, physical oceanography, and marine systematics and ecology with areas such as anthropology and economics — all important for achieving large-scale analyses of marine reserve networks. Within evolutionary biology, he is also interested in the mechanisms of adaptation and the dynamics of speciation in colonial invertebrates such as hydroids, corals and bryozoans.
Dr. Brumbaugh studies adaptation in the field by experimentally cloning and transplanting individual colonies, and unravels patterns of speciation in the lab using DNA sequencing in combination with morphological and stratigraphic analyses.
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|  | Gordon Hendler is an author of Sea Stars, Sea Urchins and Allies: Echinoderms of Florida and the Caribbean, and is an expert on that group of animals, which also includes the brittle stars, sea cucumbers and feather stars. He has published on many aspects of echinoderm biology, including taxonomy, ecology, behavior and development, and has studied echinoderms in locations from the Antarctic to the tropics. At Andros Island, his primary mission is to find which echinoderm species are present and estimate their abundance. If possible, he will compare the biology of important species at Andros Island with their counterparts under study in Belize and the British Virgin Islands.
Dr. Hendler is curator of echinoderms at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, head of the museum's department of invertebrate zoology and an adjunct professor in the marine biology program at the University of Southern California.
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|  | Chris Boyko studies the taxonomy, ecology and phylogenetic systematics of crustaceans, with a growing appreciation for the diverse world of the parasitic Crustacea. He is also interested in the biodiversity of invertebrates in general and has conducted invertebrate surveys in coastal Georgia, and on Easter Island in the South Pacific.
Dr. Boyko has served as a consultant for the American Museum of Natural History, the Newark Museum and the Institute for Exploration at Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut. Married and living in Astoria, N.Y., he collects original comic book artwork as a hobby and has edited a recent book on the subject entitled, The Comic Art Price Guide.
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|  | David E. Russell is a marine biologist with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's
Environmental Science Center in Fort Meade, Md. He specializes in the biology and taxonomy of
polychaete worms ("bristle worms") and the use of the benthic (or bottom-dwelling) invertebrate
community as an indicator of environmental quality in estuarine and coastal waters.
Russell grew up in southern California where the many days each year spent at the beach, in the surf or crawling about tide pools, no doubt had a lasting influence. He received a bachelor's degree from Claremont McKenna College and a master's from California State University at Long Beach. A job with a company monitoring the impact of ocean wastewater outfalls on the central California coast lead to an interest in the benthic invertebrate community as an indicator of environmental quality, and polychaetes, in particular, since these "wonderfully diverse worms" are, as a group, a major component of most marine benthic communities. When the opportunity arose to study polychaetes with Kristian Fauchald at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., Russell jumped at it. He completed a doctorate in zoology at The George Washington University supported by the museum's Caribbean Coral Reef Ecosystems Program, a long-term effort to study the barrier reef off Belize, one of the largest in the Western Hemisphere. Russell has taught college courses on invertebrate zoology, ecology, marine and estuarine biology, and coastal environmental issues. He is married, has two sons, 7 and 10, and enjoys running, gardening, camping with his family, and stunt kite flying.
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|  | Brice Semmens started working with Caribbean reef fish in 1993, when he conducted work with the Florida Keys Nature Conservancy on a reef fish survey protocol assessment for the Reef Environmental Education Foundation, known as REEF. Since that time, he has continued to be involved with the REEF program, both in the Caribbean and on the West Coast. Brice has also conducted several research projects, with considerable effort at the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Florida Keys.
Brice has worked as a researcher at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, a National Science Foundation center based in Santa Barbara, Calif. His work there focused on environmental education and marine protected areas. Brice is currently working on a Ph.D. in the department of zoology at the University of Washington.
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|  | Christy Pattengill-Semmens is science coordinator for the Reef Environmental Education Foundation, a nonprofit organization that enables sport divers and snorkelers to actively participate in the collection of fish sighting data. Through her work with REEF, she leads field survey trips for volunteers and participates in a variety of special research projects. During the last two years, she has conducted fish surveys in Bonaire, Cozumel, the Cayman Islands, the Los Roques archipelago, the Gulf of Mexico, the Virgin Islands and the Florida Keys.
Christy earned her doctorate from the department of biology at Texas A&M University. Her dissertation research was on the structure and stability of reef fish assemblages at the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary in the northwest Gulf of Mexico.
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|  | Brian Lapointe is an algae expert and director of marine nutrient dynamics at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution in Fort Pierce, Fla. During the Bahamas expedition, Dr. Lapointe and his assistant, Peter Barile, will document the percent of coral cover along the reef at various points and compare it to water quality in those areas. Their work on reefs around the world has shown a relationship between the increase of dissolved inorganic nitrogen concentrations in the water column and the demise of coral reefs.
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|  | Peter Ersts is the geographic information system (GIS) program officer at the American Museum of Natural History, Center for Biodiversity and Conservation. In addition to managing the remote sensing and GIS lab facility and providing spatial datasets for the center's projects, Peter has assisted in designing and facilitating workshops — techniques for applying remote sensing and GIS to biodiversity conservation — both in Bolivia and Vietnam, and is actively planning additional workshops in South America, Africa and Indochina.
Peter previously worked for the NASA Landsat Humid Tropical Inventory Project, where he analyzed Landsat data to determine rates of deforestation in the Pan-Amazon Basin and Central Africa. Peter earned his degree in computer science, with a specialization in image processing and a concentration in geography, from the University of Maryland.
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|  | Peter Barile is a doctoral candidate at Florida Tech in Melbourne, Fla., and is affiliated through Dr. Brian Lapointe's laboratory at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution. Peter studies the linkages between human activities in upland ecosystems, such as the islands on the Bahama bank, and the health of adjacent coral reef ecosystems. Specifically, Peter looks at the common overgrowth of coral reefs by macroalgae as fueled by land-based anthropogenic nutrient loadings.
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|  | Eric J. Hochberg, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Hawaii's department of oceanography, is studying the airborne and satellite digital remote sensing of coral reefs. By getting truer readings of the light reflected from reefs, Eric can help determine the actual composition of the reef and the density of different organisms.
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|  | Research intern Josh Drew has conducted field work in Australia, Belize and Mexico. He headed to the Bahamas just months after receiving his master's in biodiversity conservation and policy from the University at Albany, State University of New York. His thesis work at Albany focused on how marine reserves could be used as a fisheries-management technique for the Bahamas. He has also worked as a research intern at the American Museum of Natural History, part of the time studying how remote sensing can be used to help better locate areas for conservation. That's a goal of this project, too.
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|  | Sean Grace specializes in anthozoans (such as corals, sea fans and anemones) in the department of biological sciences at the University of Rhode Island.
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|  | Tim Turnbull is a specialist in Andros Island ecology and reef monitoring, who lives part time on Long Island and part time in Andros here in the Bahamas.
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| E X P E D I T I O N S
Main | Today from the Bahamas
Pictures: Courtesy Paula Mikkelsen | Franklin Viola/viola.com | Courtesy Dan Brumbaugh | Robert Yin/Corbis | Doug Perrine/Innerspace Visions | Courtesy Chris Boyoko | Bill Harrington/Innerspace Visions | Courtesy David E. Russell | Doug Perrine/Innerspace Visions | Courtesy Brice Semmens | Franklin Viola/violaphoto.com | Courtesy Christy Pattengill-Semmens | Doug Perrine/Innerspace Visions | Franklin Viola/violaphoto.com | Courtesy Peter Ersts | LANDSAT; Courtesy American Museum of Natural History | Franklin Viola/violaphoto.com | LANDSAT; Courtesy American Museum of Natural History | Doug Perrine/Innerspace Visions (3) | | | |
