cmcclain | March 10, 2008All the rage this week on the big bad web is the big bad albino orca. It swims around the big dark ocean intimidating other sea creatures with its big white...The...ummm...big glowing specimen was spotted aboard the NOAA RV Oscar Dyson with its pod about two miles off Kanaga Volcano, part of Alaska's Aleutian Islands, on February 23. At the time, Kodiak-based Oscar Dyson was on a research expedition for NOAA's Alaska Fisheries Science Center, assessing pollock fish stocks near Steller sea lion haulout sites.
So how many other cracker creatures are there?
An Albino Grey Nurse Shark…
cmcclain | March 10, 2008
I have finally gotten around to creating a list of deep-sea themed books, with some others thrown in at Amazon. Some of you will recognize a handful of the titles that have been reviewed here. Others will be new. As I find new books, and feel free to recommend some, I will post here noting I updated the list. The list includes in no certain order:
1. Deep-Sea Biology: A Natural History of Organisms at the Deep-Sea Floor "The 'blue bible' of deep-sea biology. Despite it being 15 years old, still an authority. Great for the educated public, undergraduates, graduate students, and Ph.D.'…
cmcclain | March 9, 2008
Quotes from Beebe'sHalf-Mile Down in which he describes his and Otis Barton's 1934 descent to 3,028 feet off Bermuda. To reach this depth the two placed themselves into a self-designed 4,500lb sphere about five feet in diameter raised and lowered from a ship by a cable.
One thing we cannot escape-forever afterward, throughout all our life, the memory of the magic of water and its life, of the home which was once our own-this will never leave us
Yet I fine that I must continue to write about it, if only to prove how utterly inadequate language is to translate vividly, feeling and sensations…
kevin z | March 8, 2008Research and exploration into our deep oceans has resulted in a magnitude of benefits to society from medicinal compounds to improved navigation and mapping equipment. It is not often you hear about connections between the deep sea and sports though. TimesOnline UK reports:
British scientists prospecting the world's deep-sea basins for oil have discovered that the same technique can be applied to catch drug cheats in sport.
The innovative steroid test developed by researchers at Imperial College, London, and the University of Nottingham uses a process known as hydropyrolysis to detect levels…
kevin z | March 8, 2008I know I was supposed to be live blogging the conference, but there is just so much to do and see here the ASLO Ocean Sciences conference! Running from 9am to 7:30pm with 16 concurrent sessions and over 4000 participants this meeting was huge. So I am going to pick a few highlights from the meeting.
Charlyene Bachraty presented work on modeling biogeographic dispersal at hydrothermal vents. Based on a multivariate regression tree of species distributions, she determined 6 vent biogeographic provinces. Though some of her work suffers from sampling effort bias (as is true in most of the deep…
cmcclain | March 6, 2008
Giant Isopods Ate My Well-Known Brand of Corn Chip
They will attack you when your sleeping!
Everything is better when narrated by Sir David Attenborough
cmcclain | March 6, 2008
By random but thankful chance I stumbled upon DiveFilm HD Podcast in the ITunes Store (click here). The podcast features some of the best underwater video footage out there. Sometimes the narration is cheesy but that is what mute is for. The video is again high definition and wide format. Much of the video is so crisp that you will think your looking out a window. Episodes 6 and 4 are a must see. Frequent readers will now I don't get all giggly about about animals with a backbone but Episode 1 with footage of humpbacks is truly specatacular. Some screen shots below the fold.
cmcclain | March 6, 2008Ten years ago Fred Grassle, a marine biologist with deep-sea tendencies, and Jesse Ausubel, program director for Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, started conversing on an initiative to document the biodiversity of the oceans. That program, the Census of Marine Life, started in 2000 with the goal "to advance a major new international observational program to be completed by 2010 to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine life." That program lead to the support of several field projects and expeditions (currently over 15), the Ocean Biogeographic Information System…
cmcclain | March 4, 2008
Unfortunately, Zoologix beat us to the story of Henry the Hexapus. Henry, caught in a lobster pot off north Whales, is the first reported six-legged octopus. The loss of two limbs did not occur from a tangle with some thug octopus but rather results from a birth defect. If you're interested in how such a thing could happen in this beautiful world, PZ has a whole post on HOX genes and cephalopod development that is good preliminary reading. How common are octopod defects? Below the fold is something we like to call Cephalopod Freak Show!
Heptapus: Gledall (1989) "A male specimen of…
petnoyer | March 4, 2008
Plastic bags from the stomach of a dead minke whale are making the news in the UK. British newspaper Daily Mail has a story on a whale found dead in the English Channel back in 2002. The animal was initially thought to die from natural causes but an autopsy revealed 2 lbs of plastic bags clogging the stomach. If the whales consume enough bags, their stomachs become full, they stop eating and they starve.
What to do, what to do? The City of San Francisco voted to ban plastic bags recently. Ireland, Uganda, and China are trying to tackle the problem, too. China banned free plastic bags.
Where…
kevin z | March 3, 2008
I'm reporting this week from the Ocean Sciences Meeting, the annual meeting of the American Society for Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) and The Oceanographic Society (TOS). The first session I went to this morning was on Marine Predator hotspots. There were some interesting talks on megavertebrate distributions, diving behavior and habitat provisioning.
D.M. Palacios presented an interesting talk about is groups work on tagging and tracking albatross post-breeding habitat provisioning. They are looking at 2 species who breed together in the tropical Pacific: the Laysan and the Black-…
petnoyer | March 3, 2008
Perhaps you thought houseboats were going out of style? Au contraire, sea levels are rising and coastal populations are increasing, so the land is disappearing while the density of residents grows. Life on the water seems like the perfect solution for some people, especially in Europe, where floating home designers are enjoying a renaissance.
Some countries, like Amsterdam, have a significant number of people living below sea level already, so Dutch and German designers are hoping to take their modern floating homes to the bank. American urban epicenters like Los Angeles, Seattle, and…
kevin z | March 1, 2008These chicas are freaky. But if you lived on a whale vertebrae and eat through bone, perhaps you'd be a little on the kinky side too, right? Osedax, the "bone-devouring" worm is weird. Now, I know long time Deep Sea News readers will be a little used to us talking about odd critters in the ocean, maybe you've come to expect it and are no longer shocked. We have even talked quite a bit about our good friend Osedax. But this is one critter that would infuse the pope with fear and disgust.
FIgure 3a from Rouse et al. 2008, whale vertebrae covered in Osedax roseus (arrows).
Rouse et al. 2008…
cmcclain | March 1, 2008As I write this post and sipping on my Organic Nueva Esperanza Coffee, I am happy. Part of it stems 3 cups of coffee previous to this one now flowing through my system. Mostly, it stems from knowing that my choice to drink this cup of coffee makes a difference in conserving the oceans. I firmly believe in the power of an individual to make impacts, both small and great, through daily choices. I also believe in the power of consumer choices as indicated by my previous challenges.
The Request: This week I ask you to think about your choices surrounding your coffee (or tea) consumption and…
kevin z | March 1, 2008CNN reports that Japan will meet with several International Whaling Commission members on Monday, preempting the meeting of the Commission by 3 days:
" Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the nation's fisheries agency will make their case to officials from Angola, Eritrea, Congo, Guinea, Ghana, Malawi, Tanzania, Palau, Micronesia, Cambodia, Laos and Vanuatu, ministry spokeswoman Eri Okabe told CNN. Several of the countries are new to the 78-member whaling commission.
Two months ago, Japan "temporarily halted" its plan for a humpback whale hunt in the seas near Antarctica as what it said…
kevin z | February 29, 2008Picture copyright C. Fisher/Ridge2000
Brisingids look like crinoids, but they are actually sea stars, just kind of turned over. this particular beauty is Freyella sp. from near hydrothermal vents in the Lau Basin back-arc spreading center. They typically are on rock outcrop faces facing the current. Their tube feet are modified for filter-feeding.
That poor little squat lobster (Munidopsis, probably 'lauensis', Galatheidae) looks like he is being ambushed.
petnoyer | February 29, 2008
Do you ever get bored when you're scuba diving on a Caribbean shipwreck, and wish you had a Mermaid guide to show you around? Thanks to the fabulous new mer-suit technology from Otter Bay your wish may come true. Seashells not included. The video is one of a series from UWvideographer at YouTube.
Who knows why mermaids wear seashells, anyway? *
Answer below the fold.
*Because B shells are too small and D shells are too big....
bwaaaahahahahaha.
Happy Leap Day. What do you expect from a mermaid joke?
petnoyer | February 28, 2008
China has a knack for naming their exploration vehicles. They gave the world the Shenzhou (or "divine vessels") to reach outer space and the Taikonauts to fly them. Now China is planning an ocean exploration program 'equally important' to their space endeavours, including plans to build a sub-sea base station and a manned submersible capable of diving to 7000m by year 2010. So, how do you say "sea dragon" in Mandarin?
You can never have too many deep diving manned submersibles. Less than a dozen vessels I know of are capable of working beyond 1000m depth. Between the Chinese submersible,…
cmcclain | February 27, 2008Add another tremendously gargantuan fossil lizard to your list. "The Monster", which unfortunately was a predator, measured 50 feet putting it in contention for the largest Pliosuar. Jorn Hurum led the excavation of the monster last summer last summer on Norway's Arctic island of Spitsbergen. Pliosuars, unfortunately not magical, were the dominant marine predators during the Jurassic.