Steve Haddock

@stevehaddock.bsky.social

2001 Followers 279 Following

Marine biology, ctenophores, bioluminescence, deep-sea, genomics, computing for biologists. The Radiant Sea. Photo book. Cello? Views my own. bit.ly/arms-deep bit.ly/radsea

Three examples of radiolaria found in shallow tropical waters. The one on the left has a central capsule and multicolored "tentacles"; the one in the middle is a long tube, and the one on the right is a cloud around a central capsule.
GIF showing font rendering with and without width adjustment feature called Texture Healing.
Picture of a spooky looking underwater channel, and a diagram from a manuscript about limpets that live in air pockets far below the surface.
Brittle star with green fluorescent armtip on black background.
A photo of a large red comb jelly on a black background.
Orange+pink colored ostracod Gigantocypris, with pink eggs inside its carapace and large forward-facing reflectors. Diameter about 2cm. From The Radiant Sea. S.Haddock•MBARI.
Poster showing details for a talk entitled The Radiant Sea, Unveiled. To be held at 6pm on Friday January 16th at 35 Pacific Ave in Santa Cruz, CA
A pinkish, translucent, roughly bell-shaped jelly on a black background. Iridescent and red vertical stripe run down its tapered body. The top comes to a point, and the bottom is slightly flared. Upon close inspection, you can see little grape-like clusters of gonads next to the vertical stripes, which are the comb rows and main canals. This [relatively] massive Beroe was observed on a blue-water scuba dive off California. It is 18cm (7 inches) long. Photo: S.Haddock ©MBARI 2025 Fun faCT: If you look closely, you can see the reproductive cells on both sides of the canals. Viewed from the end, rather than the side, the female eggs develop next to the major body axis (like North, S, E, W), and male cells develop on the sides of the canal that are 45° off from the axes (NorthEast, SE, SW, NW). So here you can see 2 sets of eggs, and 4 sets of male gonads.
Screen shot of the Smithsonian Magazine web page showing the covers of 10 photography books, one of which is our book The Radiant Sea.
An animation (I hope) of the siphonophore Abyla in white light and in blue light showing the green fluorescent zooids.
Bolinopsis microptera comb jelly (ctenophore) swimming horizonally.
Photo of a stack of purple books in front of a large black book.
Panel of photos. At left the cover with a squid embracing the text The Radiant Sea, and examples from the pigments, bioluminescence, fluorescence, and iridescence sections.
A spherical comb jelly floating against a dark background, with its tentacles deployed, tentilla (side branches) fanned out. There is a number 1 above the body and number 2 below the body. Photo by S. Haddock taken around 1990.
Juvenile Histioteuthis squid, illuminated by blue light and photographed through a yellow blue-blocking filter. Red dots are photophores, and green sphere is the lens of its enlarged eye. Photo: S. Haddock • MBARI
Picture of several piles of books including The Radiant Sea, looking shiny.
Top view of the large hyperiid amphipod Cystisoma, showing the mosaic of orange pigmentation in its eyes. Photo by S. Haddock from the book The Radiant Sea.
Flip through of the book The Radiant Sea by Steven Haddock and Sonke Johnsen. Five sections and photo galleries talk about Transparency, Pigmentation, Iridescence, Bioluminescence, and Fluorescence as exhibited by marine animals.
screenshot from the pudding article showing the search results of characters from What Do People Do All Day? Out of dozens of animal characters, the results show just a male fox and male cat.
Iridescence of the ctenophore Beroe
Two pictures of a ctenophore in the genus Callianira, collected during blue-water scuba dives off the coast of Hawaii. The figure on the left is a rather poor photo, in an aboral view, against a black background. The photo on the right is a lateral view on a white background. The ctenophore is shaped like an arrowhead, and in the white-background view you can see that it is covered with small reddish-brown speckles. Larger spots cover the body, and small spots are arranged in rows parallel to the base of each comb plate. One tentacle is extended showing the pink-pigmented tentilla.
Two divers hover below a boat in the open ocean 4 miles off the coast of Hawaii. Crissy Huffard from Colleen Durkin’s lab is “flying” plankton into the view of their special ISIIS camera.
Graph of fluorescence spectrum of a cloned fluorescent protein, maturing from green to red over time.
An assemblage of shingle urchins, looking like purple muppets, taken by lowering my camera into a tidepool on the Big Island of Hawaii.
Drawing of the head of the dragonfish Aristostomias, showing the red-emitting photophore under the eye.
Three panels: On top is a face on view of a large Tomopteris polychaete, with orange pigment spots along its long anterior antennae. Lower left shows the yellow bioluminescent emission typical of the genus Tomopteris. Lower right shows the blue bioluminescent emission of a Tomopteris species. This color is typical for marine animals, but atypical for Tomopteris, which is the odd-species-out for luminescent emission spectra. Blue-emitting Tomopteris were independently discovered by our lab in the Pacific and by Anaïd Gouveneaux working in Jerôme Mallefet's lab in Belgium. Warren determined that the chemical which gives the yellow color seems to be aloe-emodin, but the function of using yellow light rather than blue remains unknown. See the two manuscripts linked in the main text, and references therein, for more detailed info.
Diver wearing bright green and blue DuckFeet fins, entering the water off the side of a dive boat on an overcast day.
Left image is a line drawing of a comb jelly from Carl Chun's 1880 masterpiece based on a specimen from the Mediterranean Sea. On the right is a photo of the same species (or at least the same genus) collected with blue-water scuba diving off the coast of Santa Barbara, CA. The photo shows thin bluish-white canals outlining the body against a black backdrop. The widely spaced comb plates are a diagnostic feature of this lobate ctenophore. The image from Chun has been rotated 180° to align with our modern understanding of these animals. Historically, they have been interpreted like medusa jellyfish, with the mouth down, but we know they encounter their environment oral end first.
Three lightning bolts visible on a black background. The horizon is a bit offset since this was handheld from the deck of a boat.
Two photos of a large beetle. The top one was taken in regular white light, and the lower one was photographed with a blue light and yellow filter. In the fluorescence photo, the eyes of the beetle glow with a greenish hue.
A collage of pelagic molluscs collected in the Gulf of California.
White crustacean with two tiny orange eyes swims toward the camera. S.Haddock © MBARI
Orange crustacean poised with its sharp-tipped appendages grasping into space. Photo S. Haddock © MBARI
Cartoon of two young people "peeling back the cover" on deep-sea mining operation. The NYT commissioned a nice illustration for us, but I felt compelled to make my own image that had a bit more emotion in it.
The pelagic nudibranch Phylliroe
Molecular tree based on 18S showing the position of Bathydevius (starred) relative to the rest of bioluminescent nudibranchs (blue labels). Intermediate taxon labels have been omitted for clarity.
Examples of benthic (nudibranch, anemone, tunicate) and pelagic (ctenophore, scyphomedusa, doliolid) animals which share the feeding adaptation of engulfing their prey with a flexible cowl.
End-on view of the "mystery mollusc" Bathydevius caudactylus, as described in Robison and Haddock (2024). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dsr.2024.104414
Close up of a soap bubble. Photo by S. Haddock
Collage of 24 specimens of pelagic gastropods, including heteropods, gymnosome and thecosome pteropods, a pseudothecosome, and a nudibranch.
Transparent squid seen during blackwater dives pulsing its pigmented chromatophores.
Collage of photographs showing live deep midwater organisms.
Frame from a video of a bioluminescent scyphomedusa, Periphylla.
Map of the world showing iNaturalist reports of Physalia, the blue bottle. To the north, as far as the UK (thank the gulf stream) and to the south at least to the south island of New Zealand and the tip of South America.
Baby Physalia a few mm long, collected by hand off Hawaii. For scale is shown to scale composited next to a pencil. Collected with Shannon Johnson, Wyatt Patry, George Matsumoto, and Jacob Winnikoff off the Kona coast of Hawaii. Its developing float is barely seen as a bubble on top, but soon this will grow to make it a permanent resident of the air-sea interface.