Seventeen orders of magnitude in body size separate the smallest metazoans from the largest. Over 1.3 million metazoan species are currently described and potentially millions more await description. Much of this amazing biodiversity and body size range lies in the world’s oceans. This project focuses on untangling the complexity of processes that drive the structure and dynamics of marine invertebrate biodiversity and body size range. This encompasses investigating oceanographic, climatic, and biotic processes occurring across scales of time and space. This project will link theory with data while addressing important theoretical concepts. This project also addresses how the intricate workings of marine communities and species will respond to anthropogenic disturbance, e.g. climate change, interference of carbon flux, mining, and fishing.