The Earth Commons
The Earth Commons

Helm Lab

The Helm Lab investigates the ecology, evolution, and life history of life in the open ocean—an area beyond any one nation’s jurisdiction, which is larger than the surface of Mars—and examines the policies and actions necessary to conserve and protect this ‘other half of Earth’. We conduct this work with an interdisciplinary approach, from DNA sequencing to United Nations meetings. This work is a global challenge, requiring a global approach. We collaborate with community scientists around the world to achieve our goals.

What we study

Marine Biology / Ocean Ecology

Neustonic ecosystems, species distributions, natural history

Evolutionary & Developmental Biology

Metamorphosis, life-history transitions, gene regulation

Molecular Genetics & Genomics

Genes and proteins controlling developmental transitions, transcriptomics

Impact areas

Governance, Ethics & High Seas PolicyInforming UN governance and international policy
Marine BiodiversityBetter understanding high seas biodiversity and ocean ecosystems
High seas conservationResearching and informing how we conserve and protect high seas life

Our team

Rebecca Helm

Assistant Professor
Assistant Professor, Earth Commons

Gabrielle Carmine

Postdoctoral Associate

Tom Iwanicki

Senior Research Fellow

Megan Maloney

Research Fellow

Projects & Partnerships

GO-SEA Science

Founder and director of the Global Ocean’s Surface Ecosystem Alliance, a community science program to document the abundance and occurrence of neustonic species.

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The Living Sailor

Team Leader alongside Smith Fellow Tom Iwanicki of the Living sailor, a project using community-sourced images to investigate By-the-wind sailors navigate the world’s oceans and what that reveals about their global distribution

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News

Read more

Neuston, we have a problem: why do we know so little about the creatures floating on the ocean surface?

They withstand ocean storms, extreme heat and may impact everything from coral reefs to the deep sea. Why has it taken so long to pay attention to the neuston?

The Ocean’s Biggest Garbage Pile Is Full of Floating Life

The UN Agreed to a Historic Treaty To Protect Marine Life. Now What?

The Constellation of Creatures Inhabiting the Ocean Surface

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Kailua Beach, Hawai’i: The first time I laid eyes on a By-the-wind sailor, I stopped dead in my tracks, dusted the sand off my hands, grabbed my iphone and…
Excitedly snapped this photo of the sand beneath my feet. That is an experience I – a greying and sun burnt marine biologist – share with literally thousands of people around the world! By-the-wind sailor are beautiful blue jelly like animals that drift by the wind and waves, and when…
The wind blows *just right* countless sailors wash ashore within the gaze of people enjoying a walk on the beach. A numbers game: Some of those beach-goers have their phone in their pocket, some of those phones have…
iNaturalist downloaded at the ready! iNaturalist is the largest community (citizen) science repository for documenting life on Earth. With a camera click, those beach walking naturalists can upload their by-the-wind sailor observations where…
By-the-wind sailors are cataloged: what, when, where… all around the globe! Right now iNat has more than 18,000 sailor observations! This treasure trove of data allowed us to…
Ask a thousand volunteers on Zooniverse, the largest crowd-sourcing science platform to help us determine for each iNaturalist observation: count, how many? condition, dead or alive? and sail direction, left or right? But wait, sail direction, what?
By-the-wind sailor are a spiraling mystery: the sail can either point to the left or to the right and this has puzzled scientists for more than a century. What is known: lefties move to the left of the wind, righties move to the right. In the 1950s a Soviet scientist named A.I. Savilov predicted…
That the sail direction was key for by-the-wind sailor’s global distribution. In the Northern Hemisphere, based on wind and currents, lefties are pushed out towards the coast and righties are concentrated inside oceanic gyres, with the opposite pattern in the South…
With the power of community science: literally thousands of people from around the world, we were able to gather a heaps of data from the iNaturalist observations spanning the entire planet to tackle this decades old hypothesis…
Sometimes the photos proved challenging for Zooniverse volunteers to decipher, due in part to the angle of photography, whether debris obscured the sailor, too many sailors photographed, or even other species photobombing; all of these offer insight for gathering good data. Overall…
We show you can get high quality data on a globally distributed high seas species using iNaturalist and Zooniverse. Many (sandy) hands make for great science! For more info see The Living Sailor project page and read the paper out now in Citizen Science Theory & Practice. As for Savilov’s hypothesis, we are excited to share more soon. In our upcoming analysis, we include The Living Sailor data, other community science data from inside the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, and genomic and oceanographic analyses. From one jelly admirer to another: it is worth the wait!

Follow an ECo Fellow—and thousands of citizen scientists—on a quest to understand a mysterious jelly species

What do your phone’s camera, a Soviet biologist’s hypothesis, and this curious jelly have in common? Follow sensory ecologist Dr. Tom Iwanicki   to find out. Using thousands of community-sourced photographic observations from iNaturalist and Zooniverse, Tom—a Smith Fellow and former ECo Fellow working in Professor Helm’s lab—has been investigating how left- and right-handed By-the-wind sailors navigate the world’s oceans and what that reveals about their global distribution.

Read the paper