petnoyer

Farewell, Scienceblogs. This will be my last post at SB's DSN. It's a little sad for me, because I kinda feel like I grew up here. Since I started blogging, I had two little girls, moved from Los Angeles to Texas, bought a house, and enrolled in a PhD program. Since moving to ScienceBlogs, I…

If art is the universal language, how do you say "don't eat orange roughy"? We'll have to ask electronic artist Don Relyea, who generated the image above. "Orange Roughy" was inspired by his wife's cooking, which, unfortunately, includes the fish formerly known as "slimehead". Orange roughy are…

GrrlScientist is having a sailfish appreciation day over at Living the Scientific Life. She's posting hot links to the online story at National Geographic about their cooperative fish herding techniques. Its really amazing. I trolled a "maori-style" sailfish image that could make a nice tattoo. It…

Naturally, one of the favorite pastimes here in the Cone of Probability is to monitor as many websites as possible for different forecasts and projections of Hurricane Ike. The more the models stray away from Corpus Christi the less anxious you feel. Currently three models veer to the north before…

Corpus Christi is in the center of Hurricane Ike's projected trajectory. He's coming at us like a fastball over home plate. This is a bit scarier than being on the periphery of the strike zone. TAMU-CC started issuing updates yesterday. One scientific expedition is recalled. If there's anything…

"Flow velocities of ocean-ending outlet glaciers would have to be about 49 km/yr, 70 times faster than those glaciers move today" for Greenland to raise sea level 2 m, says Tad Pfeffer about his new research in Science. That's three times faster than he and his colleagues have ever observed an…

Shrimp fisherman and environmental activist Diane Wilson gave a talk today at the Harte Research Institute. She speaks without script or slides. That's probably what makes her such a great speaker. Stories of her life as a fisherwoman turned activist invoke depressing, humorous, and inspiring…

You can't say farewell to Summer 2008 without a loving look back at... the Italian Spiderman. This viral video came on the scene like a Jersey girl on the boardwalk, sweeping Philly boys off their feet. We're showing Episode 6, in which our hero seeks remnants of the the asteroid that formed the…

Image courtesy Dr. Erik Cordes, Expedition to the Deep Slope, NOAA/MMS The deep-sea gorgonian genus Iridogorgia sp. is characterized by a partially calcareous axis with an open, upright spiral or helix arrangement (Verrill, 1883) used to strain food from the water column. Three new species were…

When a sailor misses a chance to go to sea, he tends to wander around his garden, paying special attention to the clouds and the weather, as if he were walking on the ship's deck in fresh sea air. He circles his home like it were a shipyard, looking for repairs. Today I noticed some rotting wood on…

Living polyp of a Swiftia sp. sea fan. Photo credit: Peter Etnoyer, HRI. Many deep-water animals have never been photographed alive in their natural habitat, they're known only from their pickled state. Dried, dusty, and broken specimens fill museum drawers. "Living specimen photography" captures…

Our expedition to the Twilight Zone is still on hold because of generator problems on the RV Nancy Foster. Now we've got Hurricane/Tropical Storm Gustav bearing down on us from the Caribbean. The storm is expected to enter the Gulf of Mexico Sunday morning. So, even if we made it out to the shelf…

100 m deep on Flower Garden Banks. Photo credit FGBNMS/NURC. Like many marine protected areas around the world, most of the seafloor in the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary (FGBNMS) is deeper than the depth limit for recreational and scientific diving (50 m). We call this the "…

All good things must come to and end, so they may have a new beginning. So begins the next chapter in the history of deep ocean exploration... The NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer was commissioned this week in Seattle, WA. The vessel will be equipped with two deep-sea ROVs capable of broadcasting high-…

"Sizzle" is a global warming comedy, a film directed by Randy Olson of the Shifting Baselines blog. Sizzle has been making the rounds between our respective research institutions here at Deep Sea News. Mine arrived about one month ago in a brightly colored envelope marked "your XXX photos have…

Last year around this time, DSN reported on a Corpus Christi Caller-Times story documenting that 135 sea turtle nests were located in 8,895 hours of surveys over 73,632 miles of Texas beaches. Of these, 128 nests were Kemp's ridleys (Lepidochelys kempii), six nests were loggerhead sea turtles (…

Michael Phelps is faster than a flounder. He swims about 6 mph. But what if he was fighting currents, swimming upstream, and jumping dams? Salmon, dolphin, and blue shark are all faster. Salmon swim 8 mph. Maybe Mike could take them in a sprint. Swordfish and sailfish top the scales at 60 mph.…

Can you name the genus of this deep-sea squid? This is one of those WTF videos that came flying across my desktop today. I had never heard of the genus or seen the video 'til this morning, but even if you don't study squid, there's no forgetting this one. The video is attributed to Shell, from…

There are a few theories about why sea turtles make occasional excursions into very deep (> 1000 m) waters of the bathyal zone. These involve escape from predation, thermoregulation, and prey availability. In the first two scenarios, sharks are fewer in deep-water, so turtles can evade predation…

Rick MacPherson hosts this week's TGIF video at Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice, and Sunsets. He is advertising the Pelagic Magic Black Water Dive, a special night dive from Jack's Diving Locker in Kona, Hawaii where you can hang on a string in 60ft. of water with a little flashlight. The dive boat's…

Welker Seamount peaks around 700m depth in the Northeast Pacific. Pillow lava is pictured here at 2700m depth, indicating an eruption on the seamount flank. The base is ~3500m. Gorgonians have settled nearby. Unidentified hexactinellid sponges with crabs and anemones are part of the habitat. This…

One of the best things about hot days in the summertime is you get to sit around watching movies all day. ScienCentral is offering exclusive footage and interviews from the upcoming IMAX 3D production "Under the Sea 3D" featuring cinematography's sweethearts Michelle and Howard Hall talking about…

Think of an aquatic habitat as far away from the deep-sea as you can get without coming up on land, and we will find a connection to the deep-sea. River rock = settlement substrate. Kelp forest = urchin food. Beaches = spawning grounds for tuna food. Mangroves = seafood ... food. Bumper stickers…

Lifeguards in the Mediterranean have a new problem, and they have overfishing, pollution, and global warming to thank for it. Stinging jellyfish invaded beaches off Barcelona a few weeks ago injuring 300 people and sending 11 to the hospital, reports the New York Times. Now patrol boats skim the…

If you have been following the story of Andrea Marshall and the manta rays off Mozambique you may notice she responded to questions in the comments section yesterday to tell us she's working with elasmobranch expert Leonard Compagno to sort through "10 generic and 25 species synonyms, mostly…

West Coast politics are hot. Senator Ted Stevens of the four seas of Alaska (Chukchi, Bering, Beaufort, and the Pacific) was indicted for false statements while the Governators of California, Oregon and Washington launched a historic action plan to address challenging ocean and coastal management…

When Andrea Marshall began studying the manta rays of Mozambique for her dissertation five years ago, she never expected to discover a new species, let alone a globally cosmopolitan, highly migratory ocean wanderer. She was "awestruck by their beauty," studied the rays, and then gradually noticed…

Deep Sea News' Friday edition has a new mission - to "restore" small black and white figures from obscure scientific journals to their original color, hoping to give these images a new life and audience online. The paper's citation will be included. Please contact us if you have something to share…

This is an exterior shot of the submersible that collected and photographed the Phakellia sp. sponge from 170 m depth off Florida in the Friday deep-sea picture above. The video was lifted from the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration webpage for the Johnson Sea-link submersible. Go there to…

In an alarming trend, the practice of "dynamite" or "bomb" fishing has spread recently to Central America. Reports are coming in that hawksbill turtles are being blasted to death by explosive fishermen working in the Biosphere Reserve of the Bahia de Jiquilisco, El Salvador. At least seven turtles…