Black Tiger in the Bay

A story from Lonny Lundsten.

Black tiger nudibranch

Sometimes it’s hard to imagine how many animals there are that have never before been seen by human eyes. Lonny is a new-age explorer who specializes in identifying critters new to science. Here Lonny, a Senior Research Technician at MBARI, visits a third sea mount, the Guide Sea Mount and discovers a new type of sea slug with the ominous name of Black Tiger Nudibranch.

LONNY LUNDSTEN’s official title is Senior Research Technician at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), but he wears a lot of hats. His primary job is analyzing video five hours a day. MBARI has several robotic submarines, which they deploy. One has the capability of diving down to 4,000 meters and the robots have provided 25,000 hours worth of video for MBARI’s library. Every year scientists are bringing in another 1000 hours or so. 

Lonny is one of five technicians who review all of the video footage, identifying species, geology, and equipment that has been deployed. All of that info is put into a searchable database, so one could very easily do a search, for instance, of say the vampire squid. That individual would be able to discover where it’s been seen, what the water properties are like where scientists have seen it, the depth and geographic distribution. The database tracks about 4500 different concepts and includes 6.5 million observations!

Lonny was born and grew up in Sacramento, CA. After high school, Lonny worked in his family’s commercial print shop business for six years. The job entailed long hours, working in a hot factory, fumes from printing ink and chemicals, and long, long days. The shop mostly printed magazines and things like that. But one day they did a trade with a dive shop to print little 8 ½ x 10” pamphlets for them, and the trade was that two people could learn to dive. Well, Lonny fell in love with scuba diving and the oceans, and decided to see if he could make a living pursuing an interest in that.

The first thing that brought him to Monterey Bay was scuba diving and the Monterey Bay Aquarium. He was in his late 20s and fell in love with Monterey and Pacific Grove and decided he wanted to move to this area to pursue studies in marine science. 

Lonny initially went back to school at his local community college then transferred to Cal State Monterey Bay (CSUMB) to complete his undergraduate work in marine science. As a senior he started taking classes at Moss Landing Marine Labs (MLML). There he was exposed to the lab, the kind of work people were doing, and had great experiences going down to Baja with Mike Foster. After completing his undergraduate degree, Lonny attended MLML where he earned his Masters Degree. 

Lonny got a job at MBARI the summer before he started at MLML. He ended up working on seamounts off the coast of California, describing the ecology and biology of three seamounts off the coast. His MBARI work ended up applying to his masters thesis.  To complete his masters, Lonny reviewed 192 hours of video, which included 254 species and 140,000 observations that he used to describe the biology of the seamounts.

While Lonny has the opportunity to periodically go out to sea, the bulk of his work is done in the lab. He’s typically gone out to sea six weeks a year and has been to the Arctic twice, where he got to see a polar bear on the ice in the wild. He’s also been in a submarine down 2000’ at the Kermadec Arc, north of New Zealand.

In his current job, in addition to video analysis, Lonny and his colleagues write scientific papers in which they describe species new to science. So far Lonny’s described 15 such species, which is a highlight for him. Lonny also does all the social media for MBARI, plus video related technology, including designing recording systems on their ships. He doesn’t do just one thing these days and thinks that’s probably pretty true of most careers now.  Lonny says you have to be prepared to do a lot of different things.

Lonny recently helped author a paper that was published December 2018 with five new nudibranch species from MBARI’s collection efforts- two from Monterey Bay, one from the Gulf of California, and a Black Tiger Nudibranch from Guide Seamount just off Davenport, CA, within the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary.

 You can watch Lonny’s story on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/U6YfvUcuX90

BLACK TIGER IN THE BAY

I have many memorable experiences of wildlife encounters in the Monterey Bay. Some of my favorites are these instances where I see an animal that we, human beings, have never seen before. One example is this Black Tiger Nudibranch. This is a species, which is new to science. We actually just published a paper recently. We were diving with an ROV at Guide Seamount. An ROV is a remotely operated vehicle. It’s a robot submarine.

So there we were diving at Guide Seamount, which is just off of Davenport in Central California. It’s part of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. And we were doing a survey there to see what existed. We had previously done some deeper dives on the seamount, but we really hadn’t been to the summit. We didn’t know what was there.

So we get down and we see real dense populations of bamboo corals. These are a really interesting deepwater coral. They get quite big. They can be very long lived. They also bioluminesce, which is just a cool, kind of fun fact about these animals. But we were exploring this region that was very densely populated with those corals. And as we’re cruising with the ROV up a pretty steep wall, we saw this large sea slug that I did not recognize. And so we came in for a closer look. It looked similar to other species of Tritonia that we find here in Monterey Bay and along the West Coast of the United States, but the color, the rhinophores, some physical characteristics of that animal were much different than anything we’d seen before. 

We were at about twelve hundred meters below the ocean surface, and I’m familiar enough with the fauna out there at those depths that usually when I see something that I haven’t seen before there’s a good chance that it’s new to science.

So, we got a closer look. We did some filming, and I had a pretty good hunch that this was something that was absolutely new to science. We took some great video of it. We collected the animal. We use a suction sampler on the ROV. It’s basically like an underwater vacuum. We put this funnel up to the animal, suck it into a canister on the ROV, and then once it’s collected, we preserve it and go through a formal process of describing it as a new species. And that’s a long process. We collected this animal in 2015, and now in 2018 we’ve just published the paper describing it.

It’s very exciting to be cruising along with the ROV in a relatively familiar habitat in a place where most of the organisms that you’re seeing you’ve seen before, and then all of a sudden, out of the blue, appears something that you have not seen before. And it’s a relatively large animal; it’s a hand-size animal. Most sea slugs are about the size of your pinky, and this was palm-sized, so pretty large. And just exciting! You know, to see that for the first time, it’s very, very cool.

So that type of encounter is one of my most favorite. I really enjoy seeing something, first of all, that nobody’s ever seen before. That makes me feel as if I’m one of those old world explorers seeing something that no other human has laid eyes on. It’s pretty exciting, and recognizing that for what it is, is pretty special.

And then to go through that process of describing it, then creating videos and sharing that with the world is one of my most favorite encounters and processes.

We’ve actually found many new species. One of the things that I’ve been working on most often recently is carnivorous sponges. We found a lot of new species even in our own backyard here in Monterey Bay. We’ll do dives in the canyon, and we’ve found several new species of corals, several new species of carnivorous sponges, and those are all new to science.

Here we are in 2018 with a lot of technology being deployed in the ocean throughout the world. Monterey Bay is one of the most well-studied ocean regions on the planet, probably the most well studied deep water habitat on the planet, and yet we’re finding species which are new to science. To me that is the most exciting thing about my job and about working here in Monterey Bay.

Postscript:

Just a bit about the process of preserving specimens. We usually preserve them right away. Most aren’t going to survive, and you do need to preserve them, you do need to preserve the tissue to do all the analyses. For each type of species it’s a different type of analysis. There’s various ways of preserving tissue, but yeah, we have to preserve them.

They eat a variety of things. They mostly feed on things like corals and other cniderians, that’s their primary prey. Some do eat sponges, but they’re mostly coralivores. We didn’t see this one feeding, but we’ve seen other Tritonia feeding on corals. He was near a lot of coral, so I presume he’s a coral feeder, but that’s not known for sure. 

We could probably do some kind of gut content analysis, but when you have one specimen you want to do the least amount of damage as you possibly can. For nudibranchs you have to take out their radula, which are their jaws and their teeth. So that’s kind of destructive as it is, but if we wanted to do a gut content analysis it would be even more destructive. If we had more than one, we’d probably do something like that.