“Whatever discoveries are made, they contribute to a greater understanding of the tremendous biodiversity of the deep sea, which is still largely unexplored and under-sampled.”
Jann Vendetti is the Associate Curator of Malacology (Molluscs) at The Natural History Museum, Los Angeles County and a founding member and Associate Director of the Museum’s Urban Nature Research Center. She earned her Ph.D. in Integrative Biology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2009, where she integrated methods from paleontology, larval biology, and molecular biology into the study of whelks in the gastropod family Buccinidae.
Vendetti conducted grant-funded postdoctoral research at California State University, Los Angeles, and received a David Rubenstein postdoctoral fellowship from the Smithsonian Institution. We caught up with Jann to discuss her journey to the Ocean Census/JAMSTEC expedition.
What is your academic background and area of expertise?
JV: My graduate research focused on living and fossil snails, and my Ph.D. in Integrative Biology was associated with the University of California, Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology. This training has been fundamental to my understanding of the long history of speciation and extinction in molluscs through deep time and has contributed to my appreciation of them as remarkable lineages and species. My area of expertise is marine and terrestrial gastropods, but I am also interested in chitons, bivalves, scaphopods, cephalopods, and other molluscan groups.
Why were you drawn to marine science/taxonomy as a career?
JV: I was lucky to spend some time near tide pools as a child and was awed by the amazing diversity of invertebrates in them. This was a formative experience that inspired my desire to pursue marine science in college and graduate school. I became interested in taxonomy and scientific naming later, and discovered that I enjoy the particulars of scientific name descriptions and the grammatical rules of Latin.
What excites you the most about the upcoming Ocean Census/JAMSTEC expedition?
JV: This expedition has the potential to discover and collect molluscs new to science, and because one exploratory focus is caves, there is the potential to find “living fossil” species in these special habitats. Whatever discoveries are made, they contribute to a greater understanding of the tremendous biodiversity of the deep sea, which is still largely unexplored and under-sampled.
If you’re a scientist interested in supporting our mission, we’re inviting specialists in taxonomy, marine biology and related fields to join the Ocean Census Science Network.
Featured image credit: Dimitris Poursanidis / Ocean Image Bank
