Lonny Lundsten
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.
