Craig is temporarily a post-doctoral fellow at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute who is looking for a permanent position. He spends most of his time balancing his overwhelming geekdom with normalcy so he can function in the real world. Luckily his wife likes his geekiness.
Peter Etnoyer is a Graduate Research Associate at the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. He studies deep corals and ocean fronts, and he loves to be on the water.
Kevin Zelnio is a Graduate Student Researcher at Penn State studying the ecology of hydrothermal vent and methane seep communities. He raises awareness of the plight of the spineless through folk music.
This is Science Week-end. Any thing you read here should be interpreted within the context of picnics, cartoons, horror movies, and late-night sushi dinners. The last five days of Science Week featured stories from colleagues contemplating important stuff like research effort, sediment transport, and blue smokers. I think it went well. It's good to have new writers. We need more.
To be honest, the "Science Week" challenge caught me off guard. Deep Sea News always writes about science. We never drag on about ourselves. Craig and I are invertebrate biologists interested in the physical and evolutionary processes that maintain deep-sea biodiversity. It's like saying "Let's have Overdrive Week," at Hot Rod Magazine. We barely have time to consider anything but sea spiders, squids, giant isopods, and bubblegum corals. Still, that won't stop either us from telling you about deep-sea fish.
Cod fish have been getting a lot of attention in the media because they supposedly harbor the source of a new cure for cancer. This diagnosis is a reprieve, in a way. Cod fish also dominate the global fisheries statistics, accounting for somewhere near 90% of the global fisheries catch. They're obviously delicious. It's like a crime.
Cod already suffered commercial extinction in the North Atlantic, for example. There's a book about it (called "Cod") showing that historical abundance of cod explains early European migrations, and these migrations are closely tied to cod's demise. Apparently, there is an inverse relationship in marine fisheries between tastiness and survivorship.
Unfortunately, science won't stop people from driving these species to extinction. Culture might, though. I've heard the most recent recovery of groundfish stocks (like cod) occurred in the North Pacific during World War II, when large areas of the ocean became de facto marine reserves in widespread naval conflicts.
Deep-sea cod (family Gadidae) are "one of the most important families of fishes in the deep-sea". Their deep siblings include pollock and hake. Pollock is what they use to make fake crab legs in the Subway seafood salad. It's packaged as sarimi, a strange white Asian boloney. Sarimi fishermen catch pollock with bottom trawls off Alaska, and press the meat into a white pressed sausage stained with bright colors in the sliced meat section at the Vietnamese grocery.
Fishing is an international business. In Spanish, they have a different word for live fish (pez, pronounced pace) and dead fish (pescado, pronounced pay-skah-tho). My favorite pescado cod is the "baked miso cod" at Sushi Roku in Pasadena. My wife smiles everytime I order it because she knows she can hold it against me in the future. The flavor inevitably outweighs my guilt. It's so tender. You poke it with a fork and it falls apart. It's much easier to pass on the bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus), because tuna's often riddled with mercury.
Mercury is pervasive in sushi. Pregnant ladies, boyfriends, and husbands beware. Recent studies show that some of the finest Sushi eateries in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago are failing federal mercury standards. Metropolitan sushi is poison to unborn children. Check out GotMercury.org to learn more about toxic contaminants in raw seafood.
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