David Leo Pawson's guest appearances

David Leo Pawson

Ocean Science

Jeremy Jackson

Marine Invertebrates

OwlTail

Dr. David Pawson talks about what it is like to be on a dive in one of the deep-sea submersibles. In the 1980s Pawson was a member of a team of four scientists who made more than 150 submersible dives off Florida and in the Caribbean, to study the echinoderms. They discovered about 200 species of these beautiful animals, about thirty percent of which were new to science. The team has published many papers describing these animals and their lifestyles, and they continue to conduct laboratory studies of the specimens they videotaped, photographed, and collected. Perhaps the most astonishing dive was made near Nassau in the Bahamas, where the team found about fifty automobiles piled up on the seafloor! These old cars had been transported offshore on a barge and then pushed into the ocean; they inadvertently created an effective artificial reef, and they were covered in animals—sponges, deep-sea corals, sea whips, and more. More recently, Pawson has been conducting research on deep-sea sea cucumbers from the northern Pacific and the western Atlantic. Dr. David Pawson is an expert on echinoderms—sea cucumbers, sea urchins, and sea stars.