Biologist Gave Name to Microscopic Organism

Aug 13, 04:35 AM

Current Headlines: By Elinor J. Brecher, The Miami Herald

Aug. 13--Key Biscayne marine biologist/oceanographer Carol Edgerton Natland, who died July 31 at 61, achieved immortality through a microscopic sea creature called, in the vernacular, the "Edgerton mudball."

Scientifically named Edgertonia argillispherula, the single-cell organism showed up in the early 1970s in her lab at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at La Jolla, Calif., where she studied fish teeth and deep-sea agglutinated benthic foraminifera of the Superfamily Komokiaceaea: tiny life forms thousands of feet down that coat themselves in ocean-floor clay.

"She'd sort my deep-sea samples and she was meticulous," said Robert Hessler, the world-renown marine biologist for whom she worked.

"She was sorting these funny little clumps of mud" under a scanning electron microscope. "Nobody paid attention to it but she had the feeling it was more than mud and convinced me I ought to take a look at it," said Hessler, now retired.

"She discovered a whole new superfamily of formaminifera, and that's a really big thing."

It was named in her honor, as was the tubular Edgertonia tolerans.

"She never talked about it unless I did," said her husband, James Natland, a University of Miami marine geologist. "She was very unassuming. But she thought it was neat."

Carol Natland, born in Hollywood, Calif., earned a bachelor of science degree in biology from Mount St. Mary's College in Los Angeles before going to work at Scripps, where she met her husband.

At the 1977 wedding -- her father having died -- she was "given away" by a cousin, Harold "Doc" Edgerton, the MIT electrical engineer who "transformed the strobe from an obscure technology to a fixture of American life," according to his National Academy of Sciences biography.

"She loved to travel," he said, and got the chance during three-month-long research cruises to the North Pacific with Hessler.

They sailed to an area north of Hawaii, "where the depth is 6,000 meters in the center of the ocean," Hessler said.

"It's one of the most nutritionally sterile places on earth. We wanted to know what's the deep-sea fauna like in an area that sterile?"

Natland's tasks included washing and preserving material for later lab work on land.

The Natlands, who have three children, moved to South Florida in 1992. In 2001, Carol Natland was diagnosed with breast cancer.

She was diagnosed with inoperable uterine cancer in July, James Natland said -- the two probably not related.

"She was all the time expecting to fight it," he said.

In addition to her husband, she is survived by sons Gregory and Paul, and daughter Melissa.

The family plans a private service in California, where they will scatter her ashes in the Pacific.

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