Film: Excerpt: Born Like Stars
By Steve Haddock & Brad A. Seibel
Biography:
Steve Haddock
Steve Haddock is one of those people lucky enough to have his dream job, although it didn’t always look like this was going to happen. Like many kids, he became fascinated with marine creatures while playing and diving at the beach. Studying toward an engineering degree at a small college, he was came to the realization that he would rather do something he enjoyed, even if he might not make much money doing it. A far-sighted professor, sympathetic to his crisis, steered him to graduate studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Within a month of arriving, he was on a research ship off the Bahamas, diving in submarines with a team of experts who studied bioluminescence and jellyfish. From this point there was no turning back. He continues to study these wonders in his lab at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in central California.
Brad A. Seibel
Brad A. Seibel’s research explores the constraints placed on organismal function by the environment and how organisms have compensated for, or adapted to, these constraints. In order to increase the “signal to noise” ratio in physiological investigations, it is useful to compare animals that live in extremes of environmental conditions. He has worked primarily in deep-sea and polar environments. He has focused primarily on cephalopods (squids and octopods), which are a valuable model for metabolic and locomotory physiology. Previous studies on shallow-living cephalopods have demonstrated very high metabolic rates due to the inefficiency of their jet-locomotion and energy-demanding pelagic existence. Because of the constraints on their oxygen delivery systems, cephalopods appear to operate chronically on the edge of oxygen limitation. Yet, unique aspects of their physiology have allowed cephalopods to exploit hypoxic deep-sea environments. This research has recently taken on new significance with proposals to mitigate global warming by dumping CO2 into the deep sea.