For me, one of the fundamental 
unanswered questions is
what and how many species 
are there in the ocean?
My name is Greg Rouse.
I'm a professor here of marine biology
at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 
University of California San Diego.
And I'm also a curator of one
of our collections here at Scripps
called the Benthic Invertebrate Collection.
So a lot of the work my lab does
is to discover species.
The area we work on is mostly 
in the deep sea,
and we really like working on places called
hydrothermal vents and methane seeps.
What really got me into this game in the
whole beginning in terms of moving here
from Australia was whale falls. A whale
carcass falling to the bottom of the sea
is this massive pile of nutrients that
is analogous to what we see at
hydrothermal vents and methane seeps and
that led to the discovery of this
bone-eating worm called Osedax and I've
spent many years studying that.
Another real interest of mine are, and the only
fish that I've ever worked on,
are called seadragons.
The big discovery that came
out of this project that was led by my
student who's now graduated, Josefin Stiller, 
was the discovery of a third seadragon,
the Ruby seadragon, which was in
deeper water of Western Australia which
we were super excited about to find such
a big new species.
So we now have a website set up
called "DragonSearch."
People who photograph seadragons in the wild
or to even take pictures of seadragons 
in captivity, that they can
upload those seadragons and we use
machine learning to identify those
seadragons down to individual and get an
understanding of sea dragon diversity
through time so it gets the public involved.
So I love trying to tease out these
stories of how things are related to
and how we have species 
distributed the way they are.
