When Larry Madin first became aware of parasites in the open ocean, he was a graduate student living in a sort of scientists’ commune in the Bahamas. It was a large, unfinished house on Bimini, with plywood floors and bare holes for windows and one bathroom for the one or two dozen biologists, spouses, and children who lived there. It was an interesting experience, says Madin. Fortunately we were all young. The expedition had been organized by Madin’s adviser at the University of California at Davis, an ornithologist turned marine biologist named Bill Hamner. Hamner got his students to live on fish and rice and in close quarters for a year with the understanding that they were doing something new--scientifically new. From Bimini they could take a small boat just half a mile offshore and scuba dive in the Gulf Stream every day. They could watch the gelatinous animals that floated there the way Konrad Lorenz had watched birds, the way Jane Goodall had watched chimps. They could do jelly ethology, which no one had ever done. This was in 1971 and 1972. Madin spent that year watching little jelly barrels called salps, each a few inches long, and among the things he noticed was that they often carried a freight of even smaller crustaceans as parasites.
In the summer of 1972, Richard Harbison was getting to know jellies, too, and sailing away from a career in biochemistry on a research vessel belonging to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. On hot days in the middle of the Atlantic, Harbison jumped off the ship with other members of the crew: swim call. Unlike most people, Harbison did not need to be told that the ocean is filled with gelatinous animals that are as unrelated to medusas, the true jellyfish, as we are--things like salps, for instance, which belong to our own phylum, the chordates. Harbison had been interested in salps since college. I don’t know why--just because they’re weird, he says. Jumping off the ship, he got a chance to swim with them, and to notice that they often seemed to be dotted with crustaceans, some a half-inch in size, some much smaller. Later he also got to put in to Lisbon, an entertaining port. I said to myself, ‘This is a hell of a lot better than being in a lab coat,’ he recalls. ‘This is really fun.’
