petnoyer | February 10, 2007
This is Science Weekend. Any thing you read here should be interpreted within the context of picnics, cartoons, and sushi dinners. The last five days of Science Week featured stories from colleagues contemplating important stuff like sea cucumbers, sediment transport, and blue smokers. It went well. It's good to have new writers. We need more.
To be honest, the "Science Week" challenge caught me off guard. Deep Sea News always writes about science. We never drag on about ourselves. Craig and I are invertebrate biologists interested in the physical and evolutionary processes that maintain…
cmcclain | February 8, 2007[For the 5th installment of Just Science, I asked Brian Romans a PhD candidate in the Department of Geological & Environmental Sciences at Stanford University to post on his research. You can catch his blog at http://bromans.blogspot.com/]
As we all know, the deep sea contains fantastic records of ancient oceanic conditions. The deep sea also holds clues about the continents. In this case, we can use deep sea sediments to better understand how Earth surface systems respond to climatic fluctuations. The inherent relief between continental and ocean plates drives the transfer of sediment…
cmcclain | February 8, 2007The sea cucumber, Scotoplanes globosa, at 1500m in Monterey Canyon.Just Science Entry #4
Not giant squid or man eating sharks...megafauna, those organisms those organisms large enough to be caught in trawls or seen in photographs or video. (fish, crabs, lobsters, starfish, urchins, sea cucumbers, sponges, corals, etc.). This is different than the macrofauna (those organisms retained on a small screen mesh sieve, cannot see them with the naked eye) and meiofauna (really small organisms you cannot see with the naked eye like forams, copepods, nematodes).
For more than a century the ocean…
cmcclain | February 6, 2007From JAMSTEC, Chimney of "Blue Smoker" at a depth of 1470 m
Just Science Entry #3
Hydrothermal vents appear from ruptures in the newly created basalt along mid-oceanic ridges. At fractures the surrounding cold water penetrates the crust and mix with red-hot basalt. This mixture emerges through three types of hot springs seafloor.
In some cases the liquid simply emerges through a crack or crevice at temperatures ranging from a cool? 5-250 degrees C. At black smokers (270-380 degrees C) and white smokers (100-300 degrees C) the vent liquid is hotter The vent liquid emerges forming structures…
cmcclain | February 6, 2007
Just Science Entry #2
[For the second day of Just Science, I asked Henry Ruhl, fellow MBARI'ian and deep-sea ecologist to discuss a new project he is involved with]
Much of what we know about temporal variability in deep-sea ecology comes from only a few locations and most timeseries studies extend back less than two decades. Comprehensive understanding of both natural variability and anthropogenic impacts will require longer datasets. Providing some certainty about the spatial extent of any observed trends will require the inclusion of currently under-sampled locations such as the…
cmcclain | February 5, 2007Just Science Entry #1
Kim didn't miss much. She went into Final Jeopardy with $15,000 and won the match by a scant $1 by correctly identifying the world's largest invertebrate (answer: "What is a giant squid?").
But was she right?
There seems to be considerable debate about this.
Steve O'Shea (giant invertebrate expert extraordinaire) says this (with his permission)...
Architeuthis is frequently reported to attain a total length of 60 ft. The largest specimen known washed ashore on a New Zealand beach, Lyall Bay (Wellington) in the winter of 1887. It was a female and "in all ways smaller…
cmcclain | February 2, 2007Over at BlogCritics Magazine someone has critiqued DSN. ggwfung has not been so nice to my Sb'lings and they have in turn not been so nice back. That being said, ggwfung had some really nice things to say about us...
Deep Sea News is a partnership between Craig, a "post-doctoral fellow at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute", and Peter, a "Graduate Research Associate at the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies." Fairly impressive titles, but this blog is salt of the earth, or in this case, salt of the sea. It casts back to the best traditions of popular science,…
cmcclain | February 2, 2007Alepisaurus ferox which washed up alive on the beach in front of MBARI in the spring of 2002. Tonatiuh Trejo, a graduate student at Moss Landing Marine Laboratory, and Jeff Drazen are holding up the specimen after dissecting it for various tissues and stomach contents. Several strandings of this species occurred in 2002 in Monterey Bay, and strandings are usual in the spring (Bond, 1996). From Jeff Drazen's Deep-Sea Fishes
petnoyer | January 31, 2007SEED Magazine is running a welcome news story on a Japanese/EU agreement to ease their collective appetite for tuna. This is a very important development. The Japanese have been a significant source of politicial pressure at ICCAT in the past. This cooperative atmosphere for marine conservation may herald a new era in fisheries management.
If you're interested in learning more about bluefin tuna (the most expensive fish in the world), there's addtional background information on the Gulf of Mexico spawning grounds for bluefin tuna from a DSN story posted October 2006.
cmcclain | January 31, 2007I am orginally from Arkansas so I am all too acquainted with the evil that is Wal-Mart. In Conway, AR, my favorite hardware store and a lot of the local downtown shops are gone now thanks to the new supercenter. Apparenlty, ADSA has fallen far(?) from the tree. ASDA is a supermarket chain found throughout the U.K. and is part of the Wal-Mart "family". The BBC reports today that ASDA is to stop selling Monkfish.
The retail giant says it will no longer supply the restaurant favourite until there are more sustainable ways of catching it. Asda said the technique used to harvest the deep-sea…
cmcclain | January 31, 2007Researchers report that an approach used for years to understand the structure of Earth's oceanic crust is flawed and geoscientists will have reconsider the correspondence between seismic data and rock units when mapping formations of young oceanic crust.
More at Press Zoom...
petnoyer | January 30, 2007The Bush Administration announced major budget increases totaling more than $140 million over the fiscal year 2007 request "to support coastal and marine conservation efforts in fiscal year 2008." The press release announcing this new funding can be found here.
Highlights include:
* $123 million to NOAA for sustainable use of ocean resources ($25 million), protection and restoration of marine and coastal areas ($38 million), and enhanced ocean science and research ($60 million).
* $25 million to NSF and USGS to implement the Ocean Research Priority Plan (ORPP), with $3 million of…
cmcclain | January 28, 2007[Note from Craig: The following is by a close friend and colleague, Jeff Nekola. I invited Jeff along for a day out at sea. I thought it would be interesting, and a new perspective, for Jeff to tell you about field work for deep-sea biologist.]
My field time is mostly spent looking at snails living in soil in a wide range of terrestrial habitats. Over the last decade I have conducted field work at over 1100 sites across North America, ranging from the subtropical bay thickets of the Gulf Coast to the taiga of central Quebec across the Midwest to the shores of Hudson's Bay at Churchill…
cmcclain | January 28, 2007A reader recently asked me for recommendations for books about the deep appropriate for children. Here is my running list and we'll have Peter (who actually has child instead of being one) provide some recommendations in a later post.
One of my favorites is The Deep-Sea Floor by Collard. Great text that is accessible for even young children. The wonderful illustrations by Wenzel help to children visualize the environment. I often hand this out as a gift. Collard also has In the Deep Sea, that I have not seen but should be has excellent as his other.
Another fantastic book is Diving To A…
cmcclain | January 26, 2007
Yeah that's a mouthful of a name...so go with WAM-V. Got to say this is one of cooler designs I have seen, much better than the Flipper boat . Apparently WAM-V is modular and can host either a luxury cabin for two, simple cruising accommodations for up to six passengers, twelve passenger transport, scuba diving platform, lab for collection and on site analysis of specimen, oceanographic equipment deployer, emergency response unit, or a surveillance station
cmcclain | January 26, 2007
This pink gorgonian coral was photographed by ROV Tiburon at a depth of about 1,700 meters (5,600 feet) during an expedition to Davidson Seamount in 2002. Several small pink shrimp are climbing on the coral, perhaps eating small animals or bits of the coral itself. From MBARI.
cmcclain | January 25, 2007One of my favorite artists and favorite subjects together. Johnny Cash + Squid = Tentacles Cash (via this website). Much better than a blending of two of my other favorites.
cmcclain | January 25, 2007Every time some bizarre animal washes ashore or is swimming around a bay, or a lagoon, there is a media hype about how it's from the deep sea, it's a voracious predator, and it doesn't belong here.
A monster from the deep! Get the women and children and run for the hills. Grab your pick axes and kill it's different and it doesn't belong here.
Okay, maybe I exaggerated the last part. However, every morning I check the news and inevitably find an article such as...Deep Sea Fish Washes Up on Oregon Coast - Alive
OrRare shark of the deep snapped
So my first step after reading these is to do all…