petnoyer | December 27, 2007A recent study linking deep-sea biodiversity to ecosystem processes recognized that 1) the deep-sea supports the largest biomass of living things on the planet and 2) the deep-sea represents the most important ecosystem for carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous cycling. The chosen indicator species for the study was the nematode worm.
Nematodes apparently account for 90% of all life at the bottom of the sea. I am unsure whether this is given in terms of species richness or biomass, but either way, it's an image problem. Just kidding, of course. The new study is published in the January 8 issue of…
cmcclain | December 26, 2007Apparently that slime trail left behind by snails and slugs is good for the skin.
The studies have verified that the dribble of snail allows to prevent and to eliminate wrinkles, to attenuate grooves, to eliminate scars caused for wounded and burns of first degree, to remove the acne, to clean spots produced by the sun. It has also demonstrated to be effective to eliminate warts of the skin.
But will my hair grown back on my bald head if I rub a snail on it. The real question is how to they harvest it.
Unbeknownst to me a Chilean company AGROINDUSTRIAL LA FLORESTA LTD is dedicated to…
petnoyer | December 24, 2007
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, perhaps what's most amazing is how well the lyrics of "Let It Snow" fit the scene. How many phrases can you find?
The footage shown here was taken by the Johnson Sea-Link submersible in 1500 feet of water on Viosca Knoll in the Gulf of Mexico. Special thanks to DSN sweetheart Christina Kellogg for her…
cmcclain | December 24, 2007So all day long after the previous post I wondered, how separated is Architeuthis and Kevin Bacon?
As you might remember although the Giant Squid had some cameos in previous B movies, it really was not until 1954 in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea that Mr. G. Squid hit the big time. In this movie, the Giant Squid shared the screen with Kirk Douglas who played Ned Land.
and...
Kirk Douglas was in Tough Guys (1986) with Eli Wallach
and...
Eli Wallach was in Mystic River (2003) with Kevin Bacon
cmcclain | December 22, 2007
Chionoecetes tanneri (chio-snow and ioketes-inhabitant) are commonly referred to as Grooved Tanner Crabs and related to the more commercially important snow crab, C. opilio. C. tanneri is from the infraorder Brachyura (short-tailed) or the true crabs (Phylum Arthropoda, Subphylum Crustacea, Class Malacostraca, Order Decapoda, Suborder Plecyemata, Infraorder Brachyura, Superfamily Majioidea, Family Majidae). Tanners may live to an estimated maximum age of 14 years feeding upon a wide assortment of marine life including worms, clams, mussels, snails, crabs, other crustaceans, and fish parts.…
petnoyer | December 21, 2007
Here's an old favorite from April 2006.
An enormous sea anemone from 2500m depth on the East Pacific Rise was reported in in the journal Marine Biology. The monstrous actiniarian Boloceroides daphneae is abundant on boulders, cliffs, and rocky outcrops near hydrothermal vent sites but not on them, writes author Marymegan Daly from Ohio State University. The largest living specimen she found had a column diameter of 1m, a tentacle crown of 2m diameter, and tentacles trailing an estimated 3m and more. That's just downright dangerous. B. daphneae's closest living relative is the comparatively…
petnoyer | December 20, 2007We have a new state in this country! Welcome number 53. It's called "The State of Deep Coral Ecosystems of the United States"
Of course, it's not a state, really, in the Nunavut sense of the word. This is a federal deep-sea coral report prepared by NOAA's Coral Reef Conservation Program to address the status of our knowledge about deep corals and the capacity of our federal government to manage deep coral habitat.
The "State of Deep Coral Ecosystems..." report was commissioned, in effect, by the President's Ocean Action Plan, so we take it seriously here at DSN. Seriously. It's a…
petnoyer | December 20, 2007There is so much happening in the field of deep-sea coral research right now that there is no way to cover everything in detail without cheating you out of some of the excitement, so I'll list it all in a couple posts and let you pick through it over the holidays. This assumes you're interested, of course.
I really hope you are interested, because Craig tells me he's going away for a week over Christmas, leaving me to "let it snow, let it snow," so as far as I am concerned, it's Instant Anthozoa here at DSN. If that makes you uneasy, Craig has a few ghost-posts in store, so please don't flee…
cmcclain | December 20, 2007This is a notice that DSN has changed names to The Davy Jones News Report. Kidding...Because of the slowness of end-o-year, deep-sea related news, I decided to end the week with a discussion, with the thanks of Wikipedia, of the origins of Davy Jones and his deadly locker, Arrgh!
NOUN: The bottom of the sea, especially as the grave of all who perish at sea.
The phrase actually goes back at least two centuries, the first known reference comes from Tobias Smollett, author of The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle in 1751:
This same Davy Jones, according to the mythology of sailors, is the fiend…
cmcclain | December 19, 2007
The buccinid gastropod Neptunea amianta (Dall, 1890) is a deep-water species found off the North American west coast. Typically boreal, the range extends as far south as Punta San José, Baja California with depths usually between 300 and 1500m. In approximately 15 years of video sampling by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute with remote operated vehicles in Monterey Canyon, N. amianta has been documented from 100-3500m, yet dense aggregations, uncommon in deep-sea snails, seem to occur only between 200-2000m. This range extends the species into the oxygen minimum zone, where…
cmcclain | December 18, 2007A new study in Nature: Geoscience suggests that current estimates of sea-level rise in response to global warming are too low. Rohling et al. utilize a "combination of a continuous high-resolution sea-level record, based on the stable oxygen isotopes of planktonic foraminifera from the central Red Sea and age constraints from coral data to estimate rates of sea-level change" during the last ice age (124-119 kyr). Their findings indicate in a climate 2 degrees C warmer than the present the oceans were 4-6m higher than the present. Overall, sea-level increased by 1.6m per century. An…
cmcclain | December 18, 2007Mark at blogfish is the bearer of bad news this morning. Ocean acidification is permanent, even with reductions in CO2 (like that will ever happen).
"For all practical purposes, this is permanent," said Steven Emerson, UW oceanography professor. "That's not true of temperature. But with ocean acidification, the time scales are long."
cmcclain | December 14, 2007
Kevin Zelnio is at the top of my list for musicians singing about invertebrates and the deep sea. The competition is small but Kevin is king.
Unfortunately, Kevin has some stiff competition. A one man band, Pagan Wanderer Lu, is leading a project to "highlight the plight of the Giant Isopod". In 2008, there will be a tribute CD released. You can hear 4 of the songs at the Bathynomuslove Records Myspace page. The tracks so far are predominately from British bands. More about the biology of Bathynomus here, here, and video here.
Paul Hawkins - Isopod (I can evolve)
Pocus Whiteface -…
cmcclain | December 14, 2007Behemoth is the only word that comes to mind as I discuss, with mouth agape, about the deep-sea drilling vessel Chikyu. JAMSTEC, the Japanese Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, launched a venture in 2005 to take the deepest cores into the earth's crust following the route of Nautilus in Jules Verne's novel. The deepest core into the crust was currently 2111m but during the Center for Deep Earth Exploration (CDEX) the goal was 7000m. To accomplish this...the Japanese unleash Chikyu which translates into "earth", a fitting name given the size of the ship. Yes it is really that big…
cmcclain | December 14, 2007Christina 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). Viewing it reminded me of Robert de Niro's statement "I don't like to watch my own movies - I fall asleep in my own movies." When I worked at my college radio station, which I enjoyed thoroughly, I never listened to the broadcast later. The radio gig always left me puzzled by how I sounded and viewing…
cmcclain | December 14, 2007My wife felt it important to share this with me and I feel its my duty to pass it along. 100 of these lovely cards are only $139.00 with your own text printed inside.
Send a bit of whimsy to your holiday card recipients with the Jumping Dolphin Holiday Card. A dolphin adorned with red and green ribbon trimmed in gold foil breaks the surface of the water, rising toward the nighttime sky filled with twinkling gold stars. The palm trees on the nearby shore and the colorful plants and fish under the water's surface are accented with gold and lend a festive feel to this colorful card
cmcclain | December 13, 2007I can't think of anything worse than this...I really tried. This completely ruined two of my favorite things Christmas and the ocean.
cmcclain | December 13, 2007Then Tim Flannery's rather late review of The Deep and The Silent Deep should convince you to add these to your collection.
cmcclain | December 13, 2007Not just whale bones but all bones. Osedax worms are those bone-eating snot flowers, purveyor of all rotten and whale-like, masters of polyandry, and more diverse than we thought. Researchers here at MBARI placed cow bones, in constructed bone trees, on the seafloor and found Osedax fancies them too. Not as much though! Densities were significantly lower than those typical of whale bones.
Figure above from Jones et al. (2007). Figure 1. (a) Deployed 'bone tree' adjacent towhale-2893 during May 2006. (b) In situ close-up fromhigh definition video of Osedax rubiplumus and O. nude-palp-A on…
cmcclain | December 13, 2007A whole sack full of news on climate this week. Yesterday, I enjoyed an excellent talk delivered by Joaquim Goes from Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. He provided rather convincing data that the Arabian Sea is undergoing an oceanographic shift. Eurasian warming is triggering a decline in snow across the Himalayan-Tibetan plateau region. This in turn results in atypically strong southwest monsoon (SWM) winds and enhanced wind-driven upwelling off the coasts of Somalia, Oman, and Yemen. The effect is a drastically increased phytoplankton bloom in the western and central regions of the…