cmcclain | May 4, 2007
Charles Messing graciously shared these pictures with DSN of crawling crinoids. You can see the full movie here.
Cenocrinus asterius, a larger species, in the process of crawling up a roch off of Grand Cayman Island at about 228m
Neocrinus decorus in normal feeding posture at the study site in the Bahamas where the creeping specimen was photgraphed
cmcclain | May 2, 2007
Benthobatis marcida (Chordata: Elasmobranchii: Torpediniformes: Narcinidae)
"It is a clumsy fish about a yard long, and very ugly. Being too slow to catch its swift prey in fair chase, it stuns them with an electric shock, and then eats them. The electric power comes from the body of the Ray; if it wishes it can send a deadly shock through any fish which ventures near. Without chance of escape, it is at once stunned, and falls helpless." - R. Cadwallader Smith Within the DeepDescription Described in 1909 in collections from the Albatross Steamer off of the coast of the southern U.S…
cmcclain | May 2, 2007
I try to keep all posts here strictly on topic, after all this is Deep-Sea News. So if you are not interested in my personal life and only in the deep sea then stop reading now.
Last year on July 4, I faced the decision that no one with a dog should ever face. The vet looked at me and said, "We can take Moses into surgery and try to find and correct the problem or..." It is the next words that scared me the most, "or put him to sleep." I never hurt so much except for the day I left him behind at an interstate exit when I asked for directions, not realizing he was missing until 10 miles…
cmcclain | May 2, 2007In case your are unfamiliar with this group, Wespac is the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council in charge of policy for the management of fisheries in the EEZ around American Samoa, Guam, Hawaii, the Northern Mariana Islands and US Pacific island possessions. Funny things are going on at Wespac. According the Honolulu weekly...
Under Kitty M. Simonds, executive director of Wespac, the council's budget has grown to the point where it receives nearly 25 percent ($5 million) of all federal funds dedicated to federal fishery management councils ($20 million), even though the value…
cmcclain | May 1, 2007
and live in underwater cities made of lollipops and children's dreams. And we will tour the ocean depths with Undersea Tourist Boats! O what a glorious future we will have when the year 2000 comes!
PZ turned me on to the Paleo-Future blog, a wonderful site where the future of yesteryear is relived. The above image is the only one to come true from a series of postcards produced by Hildebrands (a leading German chocolate company of the time). Paleo-Future also has a some more posts on future human inhabitation of the world's oceans.
cmcclain | May 1, 2007
So when I am down in a submersible, I worry about protection. What happens if I accidentally drop my USB flash drive out the window at 600 feet down? What if I am scuba diving and I need 8GB of memory? What if an evil deep-sea biologist snatches my USB wand and uses my data for his evil deeds? What if..?
I worry a lot about data storage but luckily Corsair has just released its Flash Survivor GT with a 8GB or 4GB option. The Survivor's case is CNC-milled, anodized aircraft-grade aluminum, water resistant to 200M, and impervious to shock through its dampening collar. It also has…
cmcclain | May 1, 2007An oddly incomplete article is over at the Tenerife News Online. Despite its revealing title of An Interview with Professor Searle - MICHAEL - IN NEED AN INTRODUCTORY PARAGRAPH - WHO DID THE INTERVIEW ETC , Searle provides some interesting commentary on the first expedition of the RSS James Cook..The drill could produce some good samples of mantle rock, but as I said the sediment cover in many places was thicker than we expected. We are therefore thinking about writing a proposal for funding to bring a larger drill here to penetrate deeper. But don't worry, the mantle substance at the bottom…
cmcclain | April 29, 2007
The oil freighter Esso Languedoc outside the coast of Durban (1980). The man who took it, Philippe Lijour, estimated the mean wave height when this occurred to be about 5-10 m. The mast on the starboard side is 25 m above the mean sea level. The wave approached from behind and broke over deck, but caused only minor damage. Picture from here.
When I started this deep-sea biologist gig, my wife asked me if going to sea be would dangerous. I lied and said no but not that she believed me anyway. A short list includes:
Falling overboard and being lost at sea
A submersible failing to…
cmcclain | April 29, 2007
Exterior view of Phoenix 1000. Photo from U.S. Submarines
Regular readers of DSN know that Peter and I try to provide all the latest information on all the newest vessels. Regular readers will also know Peter and I have had little success raising the necessary funds from you are readers to purchase any of them. Well here is the next plea and rest assured it will not be the last. Peter and I need $78,000,000 to purchase the Phoenix 1000.
The Phoenix 1000 is a 65-meter (213') personal luxury submarine...As proposed, the submarine would constitute the single largest private undersea…
cmcclain | April 27, 2007The twilight zone is a section of water extending from the euphotic zone down to 1000m. A new study demonstrates that this region acts like a gate and that little makes it to the seafloor.
...carbon dioxide --taken up by photosynthesizing marine plants in the sunlit ocean surface layer--does not necessarily sink to the depths, where it is stored and prevented from re-entering the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas.
Instead, organisms in the twilight zone consume the material (50-80%) long before it reaches the murky depths. Understanding these processes are important for predicting the role of…
petnoyer | April 26, 2007
This crystal was recovered from the preserved tissue of a bamboo coral collected from Alaska's Aleutian Islands in the 1850's. Bamboo corals are deep-sea gorgonians (or sea fans) in the family Isididae. They can be found as deep as 3500m in the Northeast Pacific. This particular bamboo coral is stored in the archives of the Invertebrate Zoology Department at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.
The crystal in the image is about 100 microns across, or one-tenth of a millimeter. On the right you'll see the laminar tuberculated texture of a tiny…
cmcclain | April 26, 2007
Approximately 55 million years ago it was very bad to be a deep-sea animal. First the ocean temperature was rising. At the surface, temperatures rose anywhere from 5-10 degrees and in the deep around 5 degrees. The chemistry of the water also changed significantly. Oxygen became depleted. The ocean became more acidic. Global currents were altered such that deep-water upwelled in the Northern Hemisphere instead of the Southern for ~100,000 years.
This event is used to mark the end of the Paleocene and the start of the Eocene and thus the event is called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal…
cmcclain | April 26, 2007
Lucernaria janetae (Cnidaria: Staurozoa: Lucernariidae)
Stauromedusae are not entirely uncommon, but not entirely common either. In fact "stalked jellyfish", as they are sometimes known, are very rare in the deep sea and only about 50 species are described (5). Only one other has been reported from abyssal depths (Lucernaria bathyphila). These strange jellies are making more appearances along the East Pacific Rise.
"A Lucernaria ... may be compared in form to a goblet or a funnel with double walls" (6)
Description L. janetae was described in 2005 from specimens at 8N on the East…
cmcclain | April 26, 2007It appears that the vessel rolled in heavy seas while the chef was slicing food causing a knife to lacerate his abdomen.
From iafrica.com
petnoyer | April 26, 2007Mr. Leatherback reports that we have a winner in the Great Turtle Race. A sea-turtle named Billie made the trek from Coast Rica to the Galapagos in ten days. Billie was sponsored by the Offield Center for Billfish Studies.
Meanwhile, Yahoo's "Turtleocity" set the record for deepest diving turtle in the race with an incredible dive to 2,789 ft (850m)! Wow. There be jellies, we presume.
Read more here.
cmcclain | April 25, 2007
In the past, I have made the statement on DSN that there can be no such thing as a sustainable deep-sea fishery. My reasons for this are that
Deep-sea fish are slow growing and long lived due to the cold temperatures of deep water.
This results in low turnover, or replacement, of commercially important, large individuals in the population. In other words, we harvest fishy grandmothers and grandfathers and we have to wait awhile before a new batch of grandparents comes around. Hey grandparents just don't grow on trees!
While we could theoretically have a healthy fishery the turnover…
cmcclain | April 23, 2007
Image from surfersvillage.com. Surfer catching wave at Mavericks
If you want to know where the good surf spots are sure you could ask your local bro', or you could gather some geologist and map the seafloor at high resolution. Sure the first might cost you at most a cigarette and beer while the latter requires a multiyear grant that rivals the budget of a third world country. I still vote for the mapping. Those of you who surf already know about the Mavericks a big wave break off Half Moon Bay in Central Cali. The spot attracts only the best riders where waves can crest over 50 feet…
cmcclain | April 22, 2007
A recently-discovered jellyfish has been found at newly discovered vents in the Pacific Ocean. Credit: WHOI
Last week while DSN focused on charismatic megafauna with notochords, a newly discovered species without pharyngeal slits at a newly discovered vent field was uncovered at 8500 feet during the expedition discussed by Kevin. The new species is from the Cnidarian (phylum of jellyfish, corals, anemones) order stauromedusae. The jellyfish's resemblance to Medusa lends itself to the new vent's name. The new species is unusual in its color (pink) and its proximity to to the…
petnoyer | April 21, 2007
This Earth Day, remember the deep-sea. The goblin shark (shown here) and the frill shark are two of the rarest and deepest dwelling of sharks. Only two of each species have been taken in North America EVER. That's why researcher Jose Castro from Mote Marine Laboratory was surprised when Japanese friends set up a trip to nearby Chiba, where a few goblins are taken each year. Dr. Castro says he saw more rare deep water sharks in Chiba in one day than he has ever seen in the USA: including Dalatias, Deania, Cihrrigaleus, Etmopterus, Apristurus, etc.
Shark populations are hard hit by…
petnoyer | April 20, 2007The core idea behind Megavertebrate Week was to identify neritic species that can be found in the deep sea, in order to make that "deep-sea connection" for people outside our typical readership. It worked.
We hit the list serves for C Turtle and for MarMam. We made the blog rolls in Germany and Russia. We introduced you to many marine animals that you already knew, like the sea turtles, whales, elephant seals, and penguins, and we showed you how these marine megavertebrates spend a good part of their daylight hours diving well below 200m. The marine megavertebrates we profiled are all…