To get water samples, marine scientists would fill a container with ocean water and bring it up to their vessels, Silver explains. By shaking it, the scientists thought they would get a good mix of the organisms in the water, she says with a laugh. And yet these delicate houses made of dust were destroyed, and nobody was the wiser. Silver began studying marine snow almost accidentally, by scuba diving students. Two undergraduates, Jonathan Trent and Alan Shanks, though, wanted to use scuba diving to study invertebrates in Monterey Bay.
Silver tells how they came back bemoaning the exercise as futile.
There was all this stuff in the water. The visibility was terrible. I told them to stop complaining and look at the stuff that's hiding the animals. I believe that you should be an opportunist. Jonathan Trent is now a researcher at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.