Participant Interview:
Anna Metaxas
Biologist
Dalousie University

Jeff: How did you get started in larval ecology research?
Anna: While doing rocky intertidal research I realized that one of the things that we know very little about are the factors that determine larval supply. We know that larvae leave and come back but not much in between. They can spend anywhere from 2 hours to years wandering around in the water column so that's a big gap. There are millions of larvae released but they aren't all coming back. Somewhere around 90-99% of the released larvae die. This intrigued me and I thought that this would be something cool to study.

Jeff: Is studying vent larvae a side project for you?
Anna: Yes. My general research interest involves looking at the extent that larvae can out-behave the flow of currents. In terms of the vents, I've done projects rearing larvae of animals similar to ones at the vents. Then, when I went to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, I got involved in a big project looking at larval dispersal at vents. Later, I contacted Verena Tunnicliffe and she invited me to come along on this cruise as the person to look at larvae at Axial. What I would like to do is relate larval supply to recruitment at a vent so I could do a spatial description at different types of vents. I'd like to compare larval supplies in Axial at ASHES, an older vent, to Cloud, a newer one. Then I'd like to put down settlement surfaces to see what actually settles in those areas. It's a comparison between what's available and what actually settles to make it to a later stage.

Jeff: What stage is vent larval research in?
Anna: At this stage we can only collect descriptive data, see what happens, then try to make a hypothesis about how this data relates to the communities we see, then test it. But until we know what's out there, it's really hard to decide what factors influence what. Much of what we know about vent larval dispersal was learned in the Woods Hole project. We don't know much. The paper from that project hasn't even come out yet. It's very new. The problem with the larvae is that everyone wants to see tubeworm larvae and they are the ones we're probably not going to see, simply because they're so fragile. In my experience the larvae just explode upon contact with the water-air interface. We'll see what we get out here. They are hard to get. Gastropod larvae and polycheate larvae are very abundant and in the few samples that have been collected, were seeing those more than tubeworms.

Larval ecologist Anna Metaxas in the biology lab after completing her larval traps. Baseball on top is for ROPOS to grab and take off trap's lid.

Larval trap being placed on the seafloor by ROPOS.