Grab your parkas, we’re going to Antarctica! Or at least some researchers did in the 1960s, but it took starfish expert Dr. Chris Mah until the past few years to take a look at their samples and find a new genus and eleven new species of starfish. And not just any starfish, starfish from the deep-sea. In a special guest introduction, Dr. Thom Lindley from our friends at the Deep-Sea Podcast explains what exactly “deep-sea” means, from the creatures that live there to the physics of water pressure at depths of thousands of meters. Learn about “the chonkiest of starfish,” Darth Vader’s character arc, and what happens when you mishandle pressurized fish gut contents on this episode of New Species Podcast. (Spoiler alert on the fish guts: they don’t stay in the fish). Chris’ paper “New Genera, Species, and observations on the biology of Antarctic Valvatida (Asteroidea)” is in volume 5310 number 1 of Zootaxa. See the episode details for a link to the paper, and to learn more about Chris and his work, you can follow him on twitter, @echinoblog, or you can check out his blog which covers all things marine invertebrates at www.echinoblog.blogspot.com A very special thanks to Dr. Thom Linley and the rest of the crew from the Deep-Sea podcast for the wonderful introduction to this episode. Please go give their podcast a listen, or check out their website https://www.armatusoceanic.com/podcast It can be found here: https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5310.1.1 Episode image courtesy of Chris Mah The Smithsonian’s digital database: https://collections.nmnh.si.edu/search/ A transcript of this episode can be found here: Chris Mah - Transcript Check out our website: www.newspeciespodcast.net Be sure to follow New Species on Twitter (@PodcastSpecies) and like the podcast page on Facebook (www.facebook.com/NewSpeciesPodcast) Music in this podcast is "No More (Instrumental)," by HaTom (https://fanlink.to/HaTom) If you have questions or feedback about this podcast, please e-mail us at [email protected] If you would like to support this podcast, please consider doing so at https://www.patreon.com/NewSpeciesPod