1000th Post

Dear readers,

I am very excited to announce that we have exceeded 1000 posts here at Sb. This was supposed to be the 1000th post but Kevin and Peter screwed everything up. But of course since we've added Kevin, DSN has come one step closer to an aquatic Three Stooges.

I wrote the first post here at Sb on December 13th of 2006. In the short time here our traffic, regular readers, and content have increased. While still focusing on deep sea discoveries, we have expanded our coverage to often include shallow water issues of conservation, general marine invertebrate zoology, charismatic megavertebrates, and much more.

In 1872, the instructions to the captain of the HMS Challenger, the first dedicated global exploration of the oceans, read explore "all aspects of the deep sea...You have a wide field and virgin ground before you." The field over 100 years later is still expansive. Each day filled with novel discoveries of habitats and creatures. New ideas are presented...old ideas revised. Here, we try to include you in these discoveries as we and other deep-sea scientists explore this wonderful underwater world.

If 1000 posts and nearly a million hits are metrics of success then I feel we must be on the right path. People have referred to us as the "biker gang of marine blogging", "the bad boys of the oceans", "passionate", "accessible", "intrepid deep-sea explorers", "cutups", "marine rockstars", "insightful", "hilarious", "stooges", wise asses", and myself as "a young ringer for Bruce Willis". DSN is noted as a "totally cool blog" and "one of the more education and enjoyable [science] blogs". Blog Critics Magazine called DSN the "salt of the earth," saying "It casts back to the best traditions of popular science, sparking curiosity and bewonderment, explaining the phenomena in comprehensible language." Of course, I've left out all the bad things.

We here at DSN are extremely flattered by our readership, wonderful reviews, and incoming links. I anticipate the next year will hold exciting things for us here and we continue to report on new discoveries. Expect the next 1000 posts to be harder, better, faster, stronger...sorry I was listening to Daft Punk this morning.

Sincerely,
Dr. Craig R. McClain
bald deep-sea scientist, heir doctor, young ringer for Bruce Willis, blogger extraordinaire, explorer, founder and editor of DSN, and all around wonderful person.