Image

Cultured Starlet

WHOI biologist Ann Tarrant looks through her microscope at cultured larvae of the starlet sea anemone, Nematostella vectensis, which lives in salt marshes in the Gulf of Mexico and along the eastern Atlantic seaboard of the United States. After the Deepwater Horizon blowout in April 2010, Tarrant was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to study the anemone and its response to petroleum-based pollutants. Although invertebrates like the anemone are vitally important to estuarine food webs, almost nothing is known about how they respond to petroleum-based pollutants or the combined exposure of oil and dispersant. (Photo by Stephanie Murphy, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)