Diving into Uncharted Waters

Marine Lab Director Cindy Van Dover Literally Wrote the Book on Hydrothermal Vents p.2

Her research on the geology and biology of hydrothermal vents and their chemosynthetic ecosystems has resulted in more than 70 peer-reviewed publications in Science, Nature, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Geophysical Research Letters and other top journals. She also wrote The Ecology of Deep-Sea Hydrothermal Vents, the first textbook on the subject, published in 2000 by Princeton University Press.

In 1997, she wrote The Octopus’s Garden, a.k.a. Deep-Ocean Journeys, a popular nonfiction account of her voyages to the bottom of the sea, intended to introduce general readers to the natural wonders found at hydrothermal vents.

“It’s no exaggeration to say that Cindy literally wrote the book on hydrothermal vents,” says William H. Schlesinger, dean of the Nicholas School. “She’s a worldclass scientist, one of the most respected names in oceanography today.”

Van Dover’s fascination with the sea began as a girl growing up in Eatontown, N.J., about five miles from the shore. Her mother took the family to the beach nearly every day in summer. While other kids her age spent their time splashing in the waves, sunning themselves or exploring the shop-lined boardwalks and shorefront amusement parks of Asbury Park, Monmouth Beach and other nearby beach towns, Van Dover loved to explore the surf zone, salt marshes and tidal pools, seeking out horseshoe crabs and other strange creatures that lived there.

“The animals, they are very odd. Horseshoe crabs, why do they look the way they do? I was just fascinated,” she says. “I thought it was very curious that crabs could have so many legs, no hands and eyes on stalks.”

Understanding how such diversity could exist captivated her. “My heroes were Rachel Carson and Jacques Cousteau,” she says. “I wanted to be an explorer.”

The problem was that any time Van Dover got on a boat, she got seasick. Nonetheless, in high school, unable to resist what she calls “the romance of the sea,” she took marine biology and volunteered to work at a Rutgers University shellfish research lab in Monmouth Beach. There, she studied the time it took for clams to self-clean after contamination.

Part of her work was on land, but part had to be done in a round-bottomed oyster boat called the Nelson. “I’d be throwing up every other minute and I’d swear I’d never go back out,” she recalls in an amused tone. “But then, after a few days, the lure was just too strong to resist.”

As an undergraduate at Rutgers, Van Dover continued her research on coastal invertebrates, studying disease resistance in oysters. But, intriguing as shallow water species were, she realized her true interest lay elsewhere.

“I was spending my days thinking more and more about what the deep sea was like. About how exciting it would be to go there and explore places no human had ever seen before,” she says. “I’d always loved weird animals, and I had a sense that the weirdest ones were in the deep water.

“The dogma back then was that the deep ocean was cold and dark everywhere,” Van Dover says. “But I thought, how could that be right? How could animals reproduce in deep seas without seasonal cues like light and water temperatures? An answer had to be out there. We were just missing it. So that’s where I wanted to be.”

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