Steve Haddock
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stevehaddock.bsky.social
Steve Haddock
@stevehaddock.bsky.social
Marine biology, ctenophores, bioluminescence, deep-sea, genomics, computing for biologists.
The Radiant Sea. Photo book.
Cello? Views my own.
bit.ly/arms-deep bit.ly/radsea
Let's do another #ctenophore survey.
You are scuba divining and see this lobate comb jelly cruising in search of prey. Is it swimming to the LEFT or RIGHT?
🦑🧪🌊
October 20, 2025 at 4:30 AM
I found your book displayed *directly* in front of our book at the local shop..!
Naturally I had to buy a copy to reduce the height of the obstruction 😉
October 11, 2025 at 12:32 AM
Apologies that I'm going to be all about THE RADIANT SEA for the foreseeable future, but .... 😉
Our book has been released in the U.K. now and should be available at your local bookshops! 🦑🧪 (with @sonkejo.bsky.social)
October 10, 2025 at 1:50 PM
For CTENOPHORE DAY, a little survey:
Which end of this fishing Pleurobrachia is the mouth on? Please just "vote" in the comments — no definitive answers. 🦑🧪🌊

P.S. this is one of my earliest #ctenophore photos, shot on film in a home-built kreisel.

P.P.S. Legit data-gathering for a future paper.
October 4, 2025 at 2:38 PM
Not to hijack this thread, but our book The Radiant Sea includes 35 pages of fluorescent animals (and humans.. and asparagus).
Here is a young strawberry squid showing green fluorescence in the eyes and red fluorescent caps on its photophores. 🦑🧪🌊
October 1, 2025 at 2:42 PM
It is great to see Mackenzie Gerringer's taxonomic work, describing a fish we collected from 3800 meters, featured in the @nytimes.com. We tried to spin this story to combat the blobfish's "ugliest creature" reputation, to get people excited by deep-sea exploration, not turned away. 🧪🦑
September 8, 2025 at 10:42 PM
My first sighting of The Radiant Sea in the wild, at our local bookshop. If you have any “encounters” I would love to see them. 🙃 #booksky
September 7, 2025 at 3:43 PM
Thanks to your incredible support, THE RADIANT SEA is already the top-selling new release in... Entomology?

There are going to be some disappointed bug-huggers out there (looking at you @franzanth.bsky.social). 😉
I am hopeful they will warm up to pictures of ocean bugs like Cystisoma.
August 29, 2025 at 4:38 AM
Our science photo book The Radiant Sea is out Sept 2nd!!
30 years of research, 10 years of "we should", and a year of collating pix and writing.
Sönke and I show (mostly for the first time) images of how organisms produce, use, and interact with light in the sea. #bioluminescence #fluorescence 🦑🧪🌊
August 28, 2025 at 2:22 AM
It seems like a bad sign that WaPo used a European hurricane prediction in their article instead of a NOAA forecast.
US science is doomed. ⛈️
August 13, 2025 at 5:04 AM
This was super interesting and somewhat fit with expectations [unfortunately?] but ... as a Richard Scarry aficionado, I am curious about the dataset; there are only two male animals listed for What Do People Do All Day? The schoolteacher is a female bear, Huckle's mom has her own story, etc
July 16, 2025 at 7:24 AM
Come out and say Hi at MBARI’s open house Saturday the 12th from noon to 5. This is the one day a year that we are open to the public.
We will have a biooptics and plankton booth set up!
July 11, 2025 at 5:37 PM
I am used to photographing #ctenophores in darkfield, but under those conditions it is hard to see the pigment spots on this little (5mm) specimen.
Fun to see the patterns that show up when viewed against a white background. 🧪🦑🌊
June 11, 2025 at 10:02 PM
This was unexpected..! I snuck a copy of The Cartoonist Club by @scottmccloud.bsky.social into our kid’s reading pile. He’s always saying “I can’t draw,. I’m not creative.”
Well, this morning at school I saw this poster and said “Hey look”. He said “Yeah, me and Ollie are starting that” (!)
April 25, 2025 at 3:31 PM
It’s hard to beat field work in Hawaii with @cadurkin.bsky.social @lenaunderwater.bsky.social and others of the @mbarinews.bsky.social team..!

We are using blue-water scuba diving to study #ctenophores, siphonophores, radiolarians, and #bioluminescence.
🦑🌊🧪🤿
April 5, 2025 at 12:28 AM
It's a challenging time to be looking for a science job.
How about a fully funded postdoc, in an exciting field, working with a pioneer in the field of biooptics?? 🧪
March 28, 2025 at 3:05 AM
They are super cute. These were living in about 5 inches of water in a Hawaiian tide pool.
March 20, 2025 at 12:13 AM
Given present knowledge, you will have to look to the dragonfishes for red luminescence, although they have an accessory fluorescent pigment to lengthen the emission wavelength…
March 14, 2025 at 1:24 AM
A fun case of usual-unusual: Most luminescence in the sea is blue-green, but Tomopteris worms emit yellow light.

With Warren Francis, we found a species that emits blue light — unusual but usual. 🦑🧪
link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00227-016-3028-2
doi.org/10.1002/bio.2671
March 11, 2025 at 6:13 AM
Pausing to adjust my mask during last year's blue-water expedition off Hawaii. 😉
Photo by Natalia Llopis. 🌊🧪🦑
March 5, 2025 at 6:20 AM
One fun thing about working on #ctenophores (comb jellies) is that you get to see animals nobody has depicted for more than a century. I haven't found any images of Deiopea from the time between Chun's 1880 drawing and my 1990s photo. Even shallow SCUBA exploration can yield surprises 🌊🦑🧪
February 13, 2025 at 7:47 PM
@ferrisjabr.bsky.social
Spotted at Cal Academy. 👀
February 9, 2025 at 11:18 PM
We did a scuba dive today to swap out an instrument on one of our offshore moorings. While clearing off the biofouling, we got biofouled, hood to flipper, by caprellid amphipods (aka headbangers). Here’s my leg after moderate scraping… 🦑🧪🌊
January 31, 2025 at 3:46 AM
Even on a dive boat, sometimes the most spectacular displays are above water. This was from when @caseywdunn.bsky.social and I were on a small liveaboard off Komodo, Indonesia.
I like the offset paths of the double-flash on the right.
January 30, 2025 at 11:06 AM
In this #fluorescence picture of a Hercules beetle from Panama, you can see a black spot where the pseudopupil is located, as explained to me by Eric Warrant.
#crustmas #hexapodecember
December 18, 2024 at 5:33 PM