What lives out there in Seattle’s underwater landscape? That’s been the question of undergraduate interns in the Sebens Lab over the last 2 months, as they’ve analyzed photos from our recent benthic surveys.
This work was no small undertaking. It required learning hundreds of new species and species codes, and spending many many hours zooming in and out of digital photos to identify invertebrates and algae, and quantify their relative abundance on photographed surface. The curious critters they’ve encountered at times seem stranger than fiction and offer a window into Seattle’s vibrant, underwater world. Here is a compilation of their favorite finds of the quarter: