Critter of the Month - Holothurians

Kevin Hardy tells us which marine creature he'd like to be and why...

I'm Kevin Hardy from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. If I could be a marine critter I would be a holothurian.

I think that's a great sounding name to begin with, but they're also cool little animals. They run around and they have different forms. Some look like flat fish, some look like caterpillars, some can swim through the water column, they look like nudibranchs. You see them occasionally solo walking around by themselves, other times they're in herds. So, I just think they're cool.

What's exciting about them is I think their behaviour: they seem very placid, very calm. Totally unlike I am. They seem to get along with each other pretty fine, they come in brilliant colours. We see them off the Sea of Cortez, we see them offshore, pretty much anywhere you go and certainly in the deep ocean, in trenches, their down there.