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core might have worked because the sediment had not been blown away by
the corer’s bow wave.
Craig R. Smith observed that the effect had to do with the lowering
protocol. The winch operator had not decided how the core went in; rather,
the scientist had given instructions. The samples collected in the EqPac
(equatorial Pacific) transect happened to have been collected under good
sea-state conditions and with a good winch operator.
Nematodes as a study topic
Lambshead was asked why he was concentrating on nematodes
when there were so many other species. He explained that, about 13 years
ago, after he had received a doctorate in pollution ecology and was trying to
use nematodes in pollution monitoring, his far-sighted department head
had decided that, as the deep sea would eventually be used for dumping
and mining, he wanted to have a deep-sea group. Under the 1980s
reorganization of the Natural History Museum under Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher, a decision had been taken to target the groups that
mattered taxonomically. Before that complete reorganization, Gordon
Paterson, for example, had been an echinoderm specialist, but as
echinoderms did not raise any taxonomic problem, he had been sent to the
Smithsonian Institution and retrained under Kristian Fauchald as a deepsea
polychaete taxonomist. Since the museum was trying to focus on fields
where its customer base wanted it to concentrate, the feeling had been that
polychaetes and nematodes, as the biggest taxonomic problem in the deep
sea, should be the focus of a taxonomic organization.
Notes and References
1. P.J.D. Lambshead (1993), Recent developments in marine benthic biodiversity
research, Oceanis 19: 5-24.
2. P.J.D. Lambshead and P. Schalk (2001), Overview of marine invertebrate biodiversity,
17 pp., in S. Levin (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Biodiversity vol. 1 (Academic Press, San
Diego, California).
3. M. Vincx et al. (1994), Meiobenthos of the deep northeast Atlantic, Advances in
Marine Biology 30: 1-88.
4. P.J.D. Lambshead (2001), Marine nematode biodiversity, in Z.X. Chen, S.Y. Chen and
D.W. Dickson (eds.), Nematology, Advances and Perspectives (ACSE-TUP book series,
Tsinghua University Press / Springer-Verlag, Tsinghua [China] / New York, in press);
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