While most professors are limited to lecture halls and classrooms, Amanda Kahn, assistant professor at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, uses the sea.
Kahn focuses her work on sponges and invertebrates.
The Moss Landing Marine Lab has several laboratories that are shared among the seven California State Schools in Moss Landing, California, according to the MLML website.
“They say if you want to think of how we explore the deep sea, it would be like walking around in New York City with only a flashlight and you can only see New York with what your flashlight illuminates,” Kahn said.
Kahn’s research focused on the “sponge loop” and how sponges are able to turn bacteria into food that other animals can eat.
“Sponges sit in a really unique position in the food web that they live in because they're able to tap into this food source that other animals can't,” Kahn said. “That sort of transformation can make sponge areas where there are lots of sponges, almost like oases of food in those food poor habitats.”
She said a way to prevent harm to invertebrates is by understanding the impact humans have on them.
“Deep sea mining looks like it could be quite severe in its effects,” Kahn said. “The material that’s brought up and ground up for mining and then released is something that can have a pretty rough effect on sponges.”
She said deep-sea mining is scheduled to start this year and its relevance and timeliness are important to sea species.
“We can have a really dramatic effect on ecosystems without even knowing what those effects are going to be,” Kahn said.
Sponges in soft sediment habitats depend on hard surfaces.
By removing those surfaces, organisms that occupy it and the larva that could grow and inhabit it may be removed, wrote Kahn in a Dec. 8, 2022 Visible article.
She initially began her research studies on deep-sea sponges in 2007, while she was pursuing her master’s degree in marine science at Moss Landing Marine Labs. She got more involved in sponges during her Ph.D. studies at the University of Alberta in 2010.
“I came down to the Moss Landing Marine Labs open house when I was an undergraduate student and they had a display for their scientific diving program, and I breathed on a scuba regulator and was like, ‘Holy cow,’ ” Kahn said.
Kahn said her interest in sponges initially started after she went scuba diving during an internship.
“I studied sponges and I realized in those 10 weeks that in the deep sea, we know very little about them, how they work, and I just kept on asking questions and finding that there was nothing in the literature to tell me answers,” Kahn said. “It’s sort of like a cool rabbit hole where you get stuck in it.”
Assistant computer science professor Philip Heller is a collaborator of Kahn. He focuses his research on working with skeletal sponge samples.
Heller said he has been collaborating with Kahn for the past three years. Their research looks at sponges in the past to predict how sponges will react to climate change.
“She’s incredibly enthusiastic,” Heller said. “She and I with this project are accomplishing more than we could possibly accomplish alone.”
Marine science master’s student Sydney McDermott is one of the students working in Kahn’s lab.
“[Kahn] always had something very relevant to bring so it’s not textbook learning,” McDermott said.
Kahn incorporates her research as she teaches invertebrate zoology and marine ecology.
“Being able to talk about what I know from studying invertebrates is really great,” Kahn said. “I have research that’s coming out probably this year related to some work with octopuses and I’ve been bringing that up in my population biology class.”
