August, 1999 
SCAMIT Newsletter 
Vol. 18, No. 4 
In the early 1960’s I received a grant from the 
National Institutes of Health to study the 
effects of environmental variables on the 
species that I had used as indicators of 
pollution, namely Capitella capitata, Dorvillea 
articulata, Neanthes arenaceodentata , and 
Nereis grubei. My first attempt was 
unsuccessful, but in the meantime I had gone to 
New York to attend the First International 
Oceanographic Congress; I used the 
opportunity to stop at Washington, D.C. and 
meet the people at NIH and explain what I 
wanted to do. The second attempt was 
successful. One of my friends at USC (now at 
CalTech) had worked out a method of 
controlling the concentration of DO in an 
Erlenmeyer flask. I used over 1000 
Erlenmeyer flasks, many of which I still have. 
Anybody want any of them? I established the 
culture of Neanthes from 6 worms collected in 
Los Angeles Inner Harbor in 1964. This was 
the beginning of my lab culture of this worm 
which has been in continuous culture since that 
time with no new bloodlines or genes added. 
Tom Richards and Jack Anderson helped me on 
this NIH grant. The technique of controlling 
the DO in the flask was used my many of my 
grad students. Not only did we measure 
survival, but sublethal effects, burrowing in 
Limnoria, amino acid compensation, 
hemoglobin compensation, and others. The use 
of this method was the beginning of our studies 
of sublethal effects of environmental variables 
which has continued to this day as growth rate 
of juvenile Neanthes. Next: I go to Europe. 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
Benedict, B.R. 1977. Mayerella acanthopoda, a new species (Amphipoda, Caprellidae) from 
Southern California.. Crustaceana 33(1): 47-55. 
Bousfield, Edward L. 1987. Amphipod parasites of fishes of Canada. Canadian Bulletin of 
Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 217:1-37. 
Childress, James J. & Brad A. Seibel. 1998. Life at stable low oxygen levels: adaptations of 
animals to oceanic oxygen minimum layers. Journal of Experimental Biology 
201(8): 1223-1232. 
Dahlgren, Craig P., Martin H. Posey, & Alan W. Hulbert. 1999. The effects of bioturbation on 
the infaunal community adjacent to an offshore hardbottom reef. Bulletin of Marine 
Science 64(l):21-34. 
Dojiri, Masahiro & Jurgen Sieg. 1997. Chapter 3: The Tanaidacea. Pp. 181-268 IN: Blake, James 
A. & Paul H. Scott (eds.). Taxonomic Atlas of the Benthic Fauna of the Santa Maria 
Basin and Western Santa Barbara Channel. Volume 11: The Crustacea Part 2 - The 
Isopoda, Cumacea and Tanaidacea. Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, Santa 
Barbara, California. 278pp. 
Envall, Mats. 1998. General problems in estimating nemertean relationships on ribosomal 
sequence data - an example using six monostiliferous species and mitochondrial 16S 
rDNA. Hydrobiologia 365:19-31. 
Hickman, Cleveland P. Jr. 1998. A Field Guide to Sea Stars and other Echinoderms of Galapagos. 
Sugar Spring Press, Lexington, Virginia. 83pp. 
Jensen, L. A., R. A. Hickmann, M. Moser, & Murray D. Dailey. 1982. Parasites of Bocaccio, 
Sebastes paucipinnis, from southern and central California. Proceedings of the 
Helminthological Society of Washington 49:314-317. 
Lafferty, Kevin D. & Armand M. Kuris. 1999. How environmental stress affects the impacts of 
parasites. Limnology and Oceanography 44(3):925-931. 
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