I began studying sea cucumbers when I naively chose to prepare an identification handbook for sea cucumbers, thinking they were a well known group. But, I have made some progress. I soon realized that the available literature was inadequate to identify a number of species in our collection. The report was published in 1984 but it contained several question marks and tentative identifications. So began my journey into the taxonomy and systematics of sea cucumbers.
Taxonomy is the study of classification and comes from the Greek word taxos meaning order.
Systematics is a broader study that seeks to describe the interrelationships and evolutionary pathways of living organisms. Several years earlier, while scuba diving at Tasu on the west coast of the Queen Charlotte Islands, I spied a brightly coloured sea cucumber. Surely something this large had not been over-looked by previous workers. Back at the lab I would surely find a reference about it. Such was not the case.