“They’ve kind of solved all the niches that are out there in the world, and so if you’ve got an interesting question, you can go somewhere in the world and poke at it to understand how they’ve made a living,” David Fields, senior research scientist at Bigelow Laboratory, says with a grin. “And on top of that, they’re beautiful.”
This is likely a Lophothrix, a copepod measuring about 5 millimeters. For 30 years, Fields has studied copepods all around the world. Ubiquitous throughout the ocean, they have adapted to live in many different environments — from mangrove trees to the Antarctic seafloor.
