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Yo DIC (Dissolved Inorganic Carbon), Let's Kick It! Hat tip to Christina Kellogg for pointing this out to me.
While we were busy with the pageant of the new administration, we are still cleaning up the messes from past administrations (not just Bush although Bush was the examplar of incompetence). Past messes like a broken food safety system. The latest example, of course, is the peanut butter and peanut…
Christina Kellogg invited me to give a seminar at the joint USGS/University of Southern Florida College of Marine Science. Overall I think the talk went well, but you can be the judge. You can view the whole talk about seamounts here in all of its glory (warning the file size is very large).…
This video shows why it can feel like Christmas when you're cruising the seafloor in a submarine and you stumble upon a deep-sea coral community. The "marine snow" is falling, the bamboo corals light up like Christmas trees, the anemones, well, they kind of remind me of poinsettias.
Yet,…
Brilliant! My regulator would have fallen out of my mouth from laughing.
ok, so first of all this is an incredibly funny video... (i'm saying that just so it's clear i DO have a sense of humor)...
now i'm putting my conservation hat on:
the video depicts potentially unsustainable diver behavior... a lot of my conservation work involves engaging the marine tourism sector and trying to reduce it's ecological footprint... divers (even seasoned divers) need to be reminded the importance of proper buoyancy... especially around sensitive ecosystems...
but this is a sand patch, right? so no worries there? not necessarily... sand beds are often habitat to vital seagrass or coralline algae (halimeda sp.) beds... these are not only juvenile fish and invertebrate nurseries, but current research has identified halimeda beds playing a significant role in producing sand and providing habitat... then there is all the infauna and interstitial life not visible from above the sand surface...
i worry that a video of sand stomping (entertaining though it may be) can seem like an invitation to less aware divers emulating this in other areas...
ok, i'm off my soapbox now...
Rick,
Great comment and insight. I don't really feel your got "on a soapbox" but rather the comments highlighted something I had not simply thought of. I think all divers should remember to keep their impacts minimal even when bottom appears void of life.
I believe dancing on the bottom can only benefit the sand patch.
The dancers took precautions. They removed their fins in advance of the duet, thereby limiting the impacts of the underwater swing dancing event. According to the intermediate disturbance hypothesis, dances on the bottom should increase species diversity because it opens new habitat to pioneer species.
Occaissional dancing on the bottom should actually accelerate accretion of sand from Halimeda, so I'm in favor.
i'm a big proponent of the disturbance model as well, peter...
in deep water or typically undisturbed areas, disturbance certainly can bolster diversity...i recall studying all the "k" and "r" life strategies of species within and without gray whale feeding scars on ocean bottoms... it's absolutely amazing...
only problem there is factoring in the frequency of the disturbance... in some popular, near shore dive destinations, we are talking up to 300+ visitors every day... that's a lot of traffic... i seriously doubt the recovery or pioneering capacity of anything much more macro than bacteria if bottom disturbance was encouraged...
As with all studies examining IDH, quantifying the frequency and intensity of disturbance is actually quite problematic. Unfortunately, I don't think that most studies would support the smooth bell curve between diversity and disturbance originally envisioned by Connell. Likely, the relationship while unimodal is likely more leptokurtic.
It seems that this topic requires further study. Perhaps a comparison between the effects of swing dance, tango, Viennese waltz, and Scottish country dance on seafloor diversity.