KarunaNews Story

Luiz Rocha dreamed as a child of being an explorer. Today, as the ichthyology curator for the California Academy of Sciences, he has tackled some of his field’s biggest questions. There’s “nothing better for an explorer than going to a place that nobody has ever been, finding a species that nobody has ever seen before,” he says. And now, by venturing into the ocean’s twilight zone — the watery depths between 180 and 330 feet deep — his latest expedition led to the collection of 2,000 specimens. Remarkably, 100 had never been recorded in the region, and 20 were entirely new to science. The expedition retrieved autonomous reef monitoring structures, or ARMS, in Guam. “[They] are essentially small underwater hotels that coral reef organisms colonize over time,” he explained. For Rocha, it’s just the beginning. He once told the California Academy of Sciences that the process of discovering and describing new species presents an ever-evolving puzzle.