Bernard Picton, Professor Cathy McFadden and Dr. Estefania Rodriguez before a dive.
Looking for anemones in rockpools.
Relaxing anemones in water with menthol.
Researchers working on the Cniderian Tree of Life visited South Africa to collect cniderians (anemones, octocorals, hydroids and similar), and in Cape Town SURG helped them with dives and collections.
Professor Cathy McFadden, of the Department of Biology, Harvey Mudd College, Dr. Estefania Rodriguez, of the College of Biological Sciences at Ohio State University, and Bernard Picton, Curator of Marine Invertebrates, Department of Zoology at the National Museums Northern Ireland, as well as Rebecca Helm, currently doing research in Cape Town, travelled all the way from Cape Town to Durban, diving where they could, and collecting material for the Cniderian Tree of Life. In Cape Town they managed to do four dives - three on the Atlantic side and one in False Bay, and, amongst many others, collected the clown anemone, a probably undescribed species found through SURG - see the Q and A section, 3 July 2005.
The following is from the Harvey Mudd website: "Professor of Biology Catherine McFadden is part of a 10-person team of research scientists from seven colleges and universities and the Smithsonian Institution who will share a $2.85-million grant from the National Science Foundation's Assembling the Tree of Life Program. The team's project will investigate the origins of the phylum Cnidaria, one the two most primitive groups of animals on earth, which includes such diverse forms as jellyfish, hydra, sea anemones, and corals. The five-year grant will investigate the phylogeny of Cnidaria by developing new molecular markers and gathering large amounts of DNA sequence data from an extensive sampling of Cnidarian taxa. There are more than 10,000 described species of Cnidarians."
See also here for more information on this research project.
SURG would like to thank Mike Nortje of Pisces Divers and Grant Whitford of Blue Flash for their assistance!