Fellow, California Academy of Sciences. My principal research interest concerns the systematics of grenadiers, a group of about 300 deep-sea fishes related to the codfish. Some of the species are commercially exploited by large trawlers dragging at depths often exceeding 1000 m. The group seems to have evolved in the deep sea, as no shallow-water close relative is known.
Fossils support their existence since Cretaceous times.
The adaptations, diversity, and distributions of these fishes are challenging to me, and I am interested in the evolutionary processes that have made them what they are. My preoccupation with grenadiers began in the early '60s while I was employed as a fishery biologist working in waters of the tropical western Atlantic. At that time grenadiers were poorly known and infrequently collected. Only a few of the 30 or 40 species we commonly encountered in our trawls were identifiable, although they were an important component of the fauna we were trying to assess. My recent studies focus on western Pacific, Australian, and Indian Ocean grenadiers.