cmcclain | August 12, 2007In the deep dark sea, bioluminescence is the name of game. Its central role is unequivocal for many organisms. Do different sexes of species display dimorphism with respect to bioluminescence? Does it have a role in the dirty deeds that occur in the dark? The following is an illuminating dirty laundry list of all sex and lights in the deep.
The most obvious would be to make the business parts light up. Ovaries and eggs of asteroids, ophiuroids, and meduase can bioluminescence. Surprisingly, no cases of glowing testes are known. So males may have to resort to other tactics. However, this…
cmcclain | August 10, 2007
It's Friday afternoon and your setting there staring at the monitor. Sure you could be productive and continue on until 5. But hey, it's Friday afternoon why be productive and if you are reading this already I know you are looking for a way out. Over at The Other 95%, Kevin posts a new invertebrate themed song every week. You can download the mp3 and listen to Kevin wail on the acoustic guitar and exercise his chops. This week it's Sea Squirts Just Want To Have Fun. Absolutely brilliant...
I'm attached to rock in the moonlight
My colony says 'when you gonna live your life right?'
Oh but…
petnoyer | August 10, 2007
"Holy jumping jellyfish, Batman. Watch out! That thing's heading straight for us."
"Not to fear, young ward. That's Enypniastes sp., a swimming sea cucumber."
"A pelagic deposit feeder, I should have known..."
"...from the cape alone. You can access the video from Deep Slope Expedition 2007 at the Batlink here."
Photo from the weblog Kingdom of the Echinoderm by Bob Carney, LSU at Deep Slope Expedition 2007 Website.
Technorati Profile
cmcclain | August 8, 2007More on the race to claim the Arctic. The Russian "scientific" operation was a sham.
Despite the fact that a huge number of people were involved in the mission, it was more of a tourist trip than a scientific expedition. Two foreigners paid a substantial part of the expedition costs. According to Novaya Gazeta, the Swede Frederik Paulsen and the Australian Mike McDowel each payed 100,000 USD per day for their participation. Both men joined the two mini-subs, the Mir-1 and Mir-2, to the 4200 meter deep sea bed by the North Pole. The expedition was headed by Artur Chiligarov, deputy speaker in…
cmcclain | August 8, 2007...munitionsFrom the daily blog of the University of Washington students aboard R/V Thomas Thompson using the ROV ROPOS to conduct seafloor surveys in support of the NEPTUNE Canada cabled observatory and to recover seismometers at Endeavour.
The start of the midnite to 4 am watch marked the completion of the first 24 hours of the ODP 889 cable route survey. Within minutes of beginning our data logging duties, the ROPOS ROV came upon a large object that turned out to be a neatly stacked pile of military ordnance sitting on the bottom right in the proposed cable route. They were artillery…
cmcclain | August 8, 2007Goes to the Yangtze river dolphin...
After a fruitless search lasting six weeks, scientists failed to find a single Yangtze river dolphin, also known as the Baiji, in its natural habitat in China. They will now propose that the dolphin be formally reclassified this autumn as "possibly extinct" and say there is no longer any hope of resurrecting the species using a captive breeding programme.
Published in Biology Letters
petnoyer | August 7, 2007It stands to reason that a place blessed with the mountains, beaches, and emerald forests along the Olympic Coast of Washington State in Pacific Northwest should be equally beautiful, productive, rich, and wonderful on the continental shelf just offshore- 200m or 300m below the tideline.
The Olympic Coast is a highly productive temperate marine environment with shelf waters along the continental margin reaching depths from 100- 600m. The Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary (OCNMS) rests on the continental shelf mostly, but runs all the way from the shelf break to the intertidal zone, with…
cmcclain | August 6, 2007Carl Zimmer over at The Loom as a post titled Branded with Science.
So I'm wondering now--have I bumped into the tip of a vast hidden iceberg, or do I just happen to know the few scientists with tattoos of their science? If anyone wants to send me a jpg, I'll post it. If you're worried about tenure, just let me know how the tattoo represents the object of your study. The more personal the link, the better (i.e., not a generic tattoo of pi).
As DSN's resident bad boy...Peter is the pretty one, you can guess I have a tat. Any ideas on what it might be? Below the fold...
The credit goes to…
cmcclain | August 6, 2007
...go near the QE2
Duke Riley, a heavily tattooed Brooklyn artist, was arrested after his homemade submarine that looked like an 18th century Bushnell Turtle drifted near the restricted waters near the QE2 ship.
cmcclain | August 6, 2007From news@nature.com...
Russian marine biologist was drowned, and an Italian badly hurt, when the research vessel on which they were working was rammed by a cargo ship and sank off the coast of Sicily on 3 August. The ship, Thetis, was measuring marine biomass around seven kilometres off the island's coast when it was struck by the Heleni, a 55,000-tonne Panamanian container ship. It was morning, and the weather was foggy. "The scientists on board say it was like an apocalypse when the container ship came at them out of the blue," says Ennio Marsella, head of the CNR Institute for Coastal…
cmcclain | August 5, 2007The latest and best of salt-water writing is up at Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice, and Sunsets.
cmcclain | August 3, 2007A day ~575 million years ago seemed like any other. Life was simple, not as in life was easy, but organisms were simple creatures. Then, geologically-speaking, BAMM!, complex life forms. Sure they were not the showy creatures of today, but the Ediacara biota (580Ma) of centimeter- to meter-sized eukaryotes, representing both some extant kingdoms and failed experiments, still are intriguing. So what events started the Ediacara party?
To answer this question we go to the Ediacaran animals in deposit on the Avalonn Peninsula in Newfoundland. The community is from a deep seafloor…
cmcclain | August 3, 2007As atmospheric CO2 increases, the ocean will become more acidic. The oceans are known to absorb about 1/3 of the CO2 we put into the air. Current projections indicate the pH of the ocean will drop by 1.4 over the next 300 years. Now keep in mind this is on a log-scale so the current ph of the ocean is between 8-8.3, which corresponds to 1/10 concentration of hydrogen ions. A drop of 1.4 puts the pH at 6.6-6.9 closer to hydrogen ion concentration of 10. This is between a 10x-100x increase in acidity.
When CO2 dissolves and reacts with water it can from three chemical species: 1) dissolved…
cmcclain | August 3, 2007 The orange gas hydrate is home to Hesiocaeca methanicola, a newly discovered species of marine worm found in the Gulf of Mexico in 1997. This lobe of hydrate was exposed on the seafloor. The Deep East Expedition will investigate the life above and in a shallow bed on the Blake Ridge where other lobes of exposed gas hydrates are believed to be located. Image courtesy of Ian MacDonald and NOAA Ocean Explorer
cmcclain | August 1, 2007It appears that Lockheed Martin will be building the replacement for the Alvin submersible, which I am now officially calling A2. The price for A2? WHOI awarded the contract for a reasonable $2.8 million. Call me crazy, but submersible technology must have went down in price because this seems low. Besides new submersible smell and fancy rims, A2's features will include
A larger sphere for the 3-person crew
Greater visibility for the crew
Increased payload capabilities
A 6500m verses the 4500m of A1 depth maximum
Long-range weapon capabilities
Too bad it will not be ready to help scour…
cmcclain | July 31, 2007As I finish off my day, three separate stories are rolling around in my head.
This year's Gulf of Mexico dead zone, that fun-loving anoxic zone of death, didn't meet size expectations but is still the third largest. Is this good or bad? Texas not wanting to be outdone by Louisiana, now boasts its own dead zone.
Next is a paper published in a relatively unknown journal with a low impact factor but its findings, pending a further evaluation, are intriguing nonetheless. Researchers from Saint Louis University (SLU) and Peking University in China are revealing for the first time the findings…
cmcclain | July 31, 2007Well three years in to this intellectual hurricane we call DSN and I am going have to take down my beloved "We Never Won A Blog Award Blog Award". This is all thanks to Jeremy Bruno Over at Voltage Gate who tagged us with a Thinking Blogger award. While it may not be a Tony or a Koufax it did bring a tear to my eye. Part of the Thinking Blogger Pyramid Scheme is that I tag 5 more blogs that get my intellectual juices flowing and they all pay me $100.
Kevin has only been on the scene a month or two but already I am hooked on the Other 95%. I read his blog daily for all that is invertebrate…
cmcclain | July 30, 2007Photo courtesy of the U.S. Army, In 1964, mustard gas canisters are pushed into the Atlantic Ocean off New Jersey. Millions of pounds were dumped this way.
Following the web frenzy that followed our post on ocean dumping, Brian Ross and the Investigative Team at ABC News post on their blog The Blotter a followup piece. In shameless self promotion (hey I am trying to find a faculty job) a few quotes from myself occur in the piece. The good news...
Legislation on the books for this fiscal year requires that the secretary of defense issue a yearly report naming the location and quantity of the…
cmcclain | July 30, 2007A three-week Canadian expedition recently finished that documented a protected area near Sable Island referred to as the Gully. The Gully is the largest submarine canyon in eastern North America, approximately the size of the Grand Canyon. The submersible expedition can be classified as a success obtaining 3,000 digital images, hours of video footage, and multiple samples. One of the goals of the expedition was to increase knowledge on the distribution of deep-water corals. The team discovered a new species of bubblegum coral, a single-cell organism the size of a grapefruit (Xenophyophore…
cmcclain | July 29, 2007From the Moscow Times...
Two deep-sea submersibles made a test dive in polar waters Sunday ahead of a mission to be the first to reach the seabed under the North Pole. It took an hour for Mir-1 and Mir-2, each carrying one pilot, to reach the seabed at a depth of 1,311 meters, 87 kilometers north of Russia's northernmost archipelago, Franz Josef Land in the Barents Sea, Itar-Tass reported. "It was the first time a submersible had worked under the icecap and it proved they can do this," Anatoly Sagalevich, the pilot of Mir-1 was quoted as saying by Itar-Tass as he left the sub....The mission…