Eleven New Starfish with Chris Mah
Grab your parkas, we’re going to Antarctica! Or at least some researchers did in the 1960s, but it took starfish expert Dr. Chris Mah until the past few years to take a look at their samples and find a new genus and eleven new species of starfish. And not just any starfish, starfish from the deep-sea. In a special guest introduction, Dr. Thom Lindley from our friends at the Deep-Sea Podcast explains what exactly “deep-sea” means, from the creatures that live there to the physics of water pressure at depths of thousands of meters. Learn about “the chonkiest of starfish,” Darth Vader’s character arc, and what happens when you mishandle pressurized fish gut contents on this episode of New Species Podcast. (Spoiler alert on the fish guts: they don’t stay in the fish).
Chris’ paper “New Genera, Species, and observations on the biology of Antarctic Valvatida (Asteroidea)” is in volume 5310 number 1 of Zootaxa.
Follow Chris on twitter: @echinoblog
Check out his blog which covers all things marine invertebrates: www.echinoblog.blogspot.com
A very special thanks to Dr. Thom Linley and the rest of the crew from the Deep-Sea podcast for the wonderful introduction to this episode. Please go give their podcast a listen, or check out their website https://www.armatusoceanic.com/podcast
It can be found here: https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5310.1.1
Episode image courtesy of Chris Mah
The Smithsonian’s digital database: https://collections.nmnh.si.edu/search/
A transcript of this episode can be found here: Chris Mah - Transcript
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Music in this podcast is "No More (Instrumental)," by HaTom (https://fanlink.to/HaTom)
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