This article is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Carla Helfferich is a science writer at the Institute.
Scientists can be an amazing lot.
Sometimes it seems to me they thrive on difficulty. Take, for example, the work I saw in a poster at the recent Ocean Sciences Conference, which is a joint meeting of the American Geophysical Union and the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography. Three scientists set themselves the problem of figuring out how an invisible animal feeds. Properly speaking, the tiny marine animal in question isn't invisible. The subject of the study conducted by C.C. Morris, D. Deibel, and P.F. Flood is the larvacean tunicate Oikopleura .