ABOUT US

Prof. Ivan Goodbody

MA Dublin, PhD Aber, Professor Emeritus (UWI, Mona)

Having found it necessary to relinquish all laboratory and fieldwork, Prof. Goodbody devotes most of his time to the publication of the results of work he has carried out on Caribbean Ascidiacea. His research extends over fifty years, ever since the opening of the first marine laboratory in Port Royal in November 1955, and was conducted mostly in Port Royal and Belize.

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In Belize, he collaborated with the Smithsonian Institution’s Caribbean Coral Reef Ecosystems Project, concentrating on two mangrove systems on the Barrier Reef: the Pelican Cays in the south and the Twin Cays in the central region. Two recent publications written in collaboration with Smithsonian colleagues describe these two environments and are complemented by two other publications describing the diversity of Ascidiacea at these localities. All four papers are published by The Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. in Atoll Research Bulletin. Other papers arising from the Belize research describe three new species of ascidians, and the Bulletin of Marine Science published a majorre-description of Caribbean species of ascidians in the genus Ecteinascidia, prepared in collaboration with Linda Cole of the U.S. National Museum of Natural History.

Prof. Goodbody has also collaborated with the Mona Institute of Applied Sciences in preparing an interactive CD-ROM depicting images of Caribbean Ascidiacea for use by students and researchers needing to identify animals in this Class. The photographs, taken in Belize and Jamaica during the course of his research, show common Caribbean Ascidiacea in their natural habitat.

As well as writing about ascidians, Professor Goodbody has published a paper in the Jamaica Journal of Science and Technology entitled "Port Royal as a focal point for marine biodiversity". He also collaborated with former CMS Director, Dr. George Warner, in writing a chapter on Jamaica’s marine biodiversity in the book "Caribbean Marine Biodiversity, the Known and the Unknown".

Together with his wife, Charlotte, Prof. Goodbody continues the identification of deep water fauna from two sites in the vicinity of Jamaica with the results being stored in a specialized database. For her part, Mrs. Goodbody continues to curate collections of marine animals from the deep sea in the department collections. In collaboration with a German scientist, she has published the description of a new species of deep sea sponge collected from Jamaican waters.