Everything Marine

I'm out here fighting, hungry The fish ain't biting Life's so frightening I'm out here stumbling Broke and crumbling And nothing's happening And aye aye, captain --Lamont Dozier, "Fish Ain't Bitin' " Hank Williams at Scientific Blogging has grown weary of the cliches that headline writers use to describe how scientists react to the unexpected. Too bad for him. "Baffled," "stunned" and that good old standby for the climate crowd, "alarmed," are just too tempting for editors to ignore and always will be. But I used to be paid to write headlines, and I understand Williams' point of view. Which…
In a rare treat on the usually quiet and contemplative Island of Doubt, I now bring you the 12th edition of the Carnival of the Blue, a celebration of all things wet and wonderful. Islands are only islands, after all, if they're surrounded by water. Hong Kong, for example, is what it is because of what it isn't: the mainland. Between the Special Administrative Region and China proper can be found the shallows of Mai Po, a staging area for thousands of sought-after East Asian/Australasian shorebirds, black-faced spoonbills, Chinese egrets, Saunders' gulls, and a host of other species that pass…