He went on to earn degrees in Biochemistry and Oceanography at Penn State, Florida State and the University of Texas Medical Branch. He first leaned to dive as part of a Phys Ed course at Penn State. While at Florida State, Tom was a student in the US Navy’s Scientist In The Sea (SITS) program, a 10-week immersion course in scientific diving designed to train graduate students to become effective “Scientists in the Sea”. Led by Navy Aquanaut divers from the Sealab saturation diving program and numerous diving scientists from all professions, the SITS course provided the foundation for Tom’s diving research.
Upon arriving in Texas for his PhD studies, Tom participated in numerous field trips to explore dry caves in the hills of central Texas and mountains of northern Mexico. After completing his doctoral degree, Tom was hired as a Research Scientist at the Bermuda Biological Station to study tar polluting the island’s beaches. It was in Bermuda that he became interested in marine cave biology. On this relatively small, low lying oceanic island, numerous limestone caves, in close proximity to the sea, contained clear, deep pools of tidal, saltwater. Curious as to what life might inhabit such systems, Tom began to systematically dive, explore and collect marine life from these seawater-flooded labyrinths. Tom’s diving explorations of Bermuda caves resulted in the discovery of more than 200 species of crustaceans and other marine invertebrates, 80 of which were unique to Bermuda’s caves and new to science.
Prior to these discoveries, all aquatic cave organisms had been thought to be limited to freshwater habitats. Following up on his Bermuda work, Tom organized and led a series of diving expeditions to study marine caves around the world. Among them were trips with cave diver Sheck Exley to the Atlantida Tunnel in the Canary Islands, the world’s longest submarine lava tube cave; explorations of submerged volcanic caves in the Galapagos Islands; a four month trip to Guam, Palau and the Philippines; and a year-long, island-hopping and cave exploring trip across the South Pacific that included month-long stops in French Polynesia, the Cook Islands, Fiji, Tonga, Western Samoa, Niue, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Solomon Island, Tasmania, mainland Australia and New Zealand.
Tom and his wife Yolanda also were awarded three, 6-month scientific exchange visits to Romania, Czechoslovakia and Hungary in the early 1980’s, while these countries were still behind the Iron Curtain. During trips to Eastern Europe, Tom worked with local cavers and taught diving and cave diving courses.
Tom is currently a Professor of Marine Biology at Texas A&M University at Galveston where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Biospeleology, Scientific Diving and Tropical Marine Ecology. His research concerns studies of the biodiversity, biogeography, evolution and ecology of animals inhabiting anchialine caves; cave conservation and environmental protection; and cave and research diving involving ongoing projects in Bermuda, the Bahamas and the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.
Tom has published more than 160 scientific papers and book chapters and discovered and described more than 350 new species of cave-adapted marine organisms including 3 new orders, 9 new families and 55 new genera. His research has been featured in a number of documentary films and magazine articles. He is a Diving Instructor (#4144) with National Association of Underwater Instructors (NAUI) and a Cave Diving Instructor (#156) with the National Speleological Society Cave Diving Section (NSS/CDS).
Dr. Tom Iliffe
Department of Marine Biology
Texas A&M University at Galveston
5007 Ave. U
Galveston, TX 77554 USA
(409) 740-4454