Dr. Michael L. Zettler is a senior scientist who has been working in the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea research (IOW, Warnemünde, Germany) for almost 28 years. As the leader of the working group “Ecology of Benthic Organisms” he is responsible for team activities dealing with taxonomy and ecology of macrozoobenthos. He is author and co-author of about 300 publications dealing with marine and freshwater benthic species. In addition to his interest in the taxonomy of selected groups such as Mollusca, Crustacea and Polychaeta, he has for many years focussed his attention on the relationships between oxygen minimum zones and macrozoobenthic colonisation around the world. In particular, the Baltic Sea, the Gulf of St Lawrence, Namibia and Chile should be mentioned here.