Scientist Spotlight
Terry Gosliner
Terry Goslinerâs lifelong passion for nudibranchs and the natural world has taken him to the depths of the Indo-Pacific Ocean and into classrooms and government offices across the globe, all in an effort to increase protections for biodiversity hotspots and raise awareness about ocean sustainability.
Identify everything
Terry Gosliner grew up in Marin, California, during a time when the landscape was largely rural. He recalls a childhood defined by exploration of the hills and tide pools near his house, and by a never-ending quest for more and more knowledge about the natural world.
In elementary school, Goslinerâalready obsessed with field guidesâasked his mother, an Academy Member, to order the institutionâs quarterly scientific papers.
âI was hungry for knowledge,â Gosliner says. âI wanted to be able to identify everything I encountered in my life and to know what it was.â
Virginia Gosliner sought out nature talks, signed her son up for local seaweed and shoreline walks, and found a used microscope for sale at a UC Berkeley lab. Soon after, a middle-school teacher lent Gosliner the 1963 publication, Animals Without Backbones: An Introduction to the Invertebrates. Armed with that book, his microscope, and a bucket of creek-water that sat on his bedroom desk, Gosliner spent nights and weekends peering through the lens at life forms made visible in droplets of water.
Goslinerâs high-school science teacher, Gordon Chan, was famous for his after-school field trips to places like Point Reyes seashore and Marinâs Civic Center lagoon. One fateful day, Gosliner showed Chan a drawing of a nudibranch (invertebrates also known as sea slugs) and asked to see what they looked like in the wild.
âOnce he showed me a living nudibranch,â Gosliner says, âI was hooked. Thatâs when I really started looking into California nudibranch species. I wanted to find every single one of them.â
Today, Gosliner is one of the worldâs foremost authorities on nudibranchs and their relatives, but his first scientific discoveryâa species outside its normal geographic rangeâwas made in Chanâs high-school class. Before the end of his senior year, Gosliner had not only collaborated on his first scientific paper about that nudibranch (which was published in the California Malacozoological Society's journal), heâd also discovered his first new species.
Call of the nudibranchs
Nudibranchs are soft-bodied marine mollusks found in oceans across the world, from Antarctica to the tropics, at a wide range of depths. Famous for their often extravagant colors and wildly diverseâand just plain wildâassortment of shapes, theyâve evolved a raft of intriguing defense mechanisms to compensate for their lack of a hard, protective shell.
Some nudibranchs have admirable camouflage skills; others go the opposite way, exhibiting shockingly bright colors and patterns meant to warn predators away. Perhaps their most impressive defense, however, is an arsenal of chemical weapons, many shaped by diet. Nudibranchs that feed on certain sponges, for example, become toxic to predators when they concentrate the spongesâ toxins in their own bodies. Nudibranchs adapted to feed on hydrozoansâlike the Portuguese man oâ warâcan safely ingest and store their dinnerâs stinging cells, eventually moving those cells to the outsides of their own bodies and becoming stingers in their own right.
âThis [range of defenses] is what makes the nudibranchs so diversified,â says Gosliner. âIt results in their freedom of movement, diversity of form, and the intensely bright coloration they use to advertise against predators. Everything about them just piques the imagination.â
Gosliner estimates heâs discovered between 1,200 and 1,500 new species of nudibranchs (so far) and published more than 150 scientific papers. Heâs also authored five books and has âdescribedââthe formal process of scientifically documenting and naming new discoveriesâa whopping 296 new species.
And that very first nudibranch discoveryâthe one made in high schoolâwas actually a joint effort with close friend and classmate Gary Williams, now also a Curator of Invertebrate Zoology and Geology at the Academy. It took several years for Gosliner and Williams to confirm that their 1967 specimen was, in fact, a new species, but when the two finally published their discovery in 1975, they named it Hallaxa chaniâa tribute to their high-school science teacher.
Finding a hotspot
After earning a PhD at the University of New Hampshire, Gosliner headed for the South African Museum in Cape Town, where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet. The waters there were not only considerably warmer, they were also relatively unexplored.
âSo few papers had been published on the nudibranchs of South Africa that everything I was finding there was new,â Gosliner recalls. âI thought it was biodiversity heaven. Little did I know.â
In 1982, when Gosliner was hired by the Academy as an assistant curator, âwe thought Papua New Guinea was the center of biodiversity,â he says. âIt was the only part of the Coral Triangle that had been well studied.â
That all started to change in 1991, while Gosliner was leading a diving team in Papua New Guinea that included a well-traveled underwater photographer.
âHe told me, âThis is really nice, but what Iâve seen in the Philippines is even richer.â So the next year I went to the Philippines,â Gosliner says, âand he was absolutely right. The biodiversity there was mind-boggling.â
Since that time, Gosliner and the Academy as a whole have conducted more than two decades of exploration, research, and community outreach in the archipelago nation of the Philippines, and those 7,000-plus islands are now recognized as a biodiversity hotspot. The Philippine Coral Reef exhibit that visitors experience today is an extension of that work, mirroring the reef habitats of the Philippinesâ Anilao, Batangas, and the Verde Island Passage.
Despite challenging environmental threats to coral reefs and marine life worldwide, the results of Academy work in the Philippines gives Gosliner reason to hope.
âThe coral reefs in the Philippines are in better shape today than they were 20 years ago when I began diving there,â he says. âThey are surprisingly resilient. Our collaborative efforts in the Philippines show that we can protect these habits. If we can halt damaging activities such as dynamite fishing and pollution run-off, coral reefs and other marine habitats will return to health.â
Redefining research
Everything under the Academyâs roof is a living, breathing reflection of the ongoing work conducted by the Academyâs research division, the Institute for Biodiversity Science and Sustainability. In his three-year stint as IBSSâ Dean of Science and Research Collections and Harry W. and Diana V. Hind Chair, Gosliner oversaw the efforts of more than 100 scientists, collection managers, fellows, and graduate students seeking new knowledge about lifeâs diversity and the mechanisms of evolutionary change.
âWhen I first got here,â Gosliner says, âthe curators were challenged to become more active as researchersâwe made scientific productivity the highest priority.â As he gained more experience, Gosliner sought new ways for the Academy to train and mentor young students and to connect with the community at large. He established a relationship with San Francisco State University, giving Academy curators the opportunity to teach, and focused Academy recruitment on finding scientists eager to engage with the public.
âYou canât just accept discovering science as âenough,ââ Gosliner says. âWe have an obligation to explain its relevance. We need to find more ways to transfer scientific findings to the public so that we can positively impact public policy and conservation managementâespecially now, when the natural world is changing so rapidly.â
IBSS began a new chapter in 2014, when the Academyâs new Chief of Science and Sustainability, Meg Lowman, succeeded Gosliner as Dean of Science and Research. Itâs a move welcomed by Gosliner, freeing him to return his full attention to his own research and lifelong passions: the quest for ever-more knowledgeâand nudibranchsâand the promotion of sustainable conservation practices in biodiverse regions like the Philippines.
Department: Invertebrate Zoology and Geology
Title: Senior Curator of Invertebrate Zoology and Geology
Expeditions: 70
Academy Videos:
"Nature Kid" Meets Nudibranchs
Protecting Unique Ecosystems
Everyday Adventure
Coral Bleaching
Related Content:
"Scientist at Work" blog, The New York Times
"From Beautiful Nudibranchs to Coral Graveyards: Marine Research in the Indian and Pacific Oceans," The Huffington Post
The Wild World of Undersea Worms, Fora TV
Explore IZG projects and expeditions, meet curators and researchers, and browse some of the 2.5 million specimens in the collection.