Deep Sea News

Every palinurid’s secret ambition is to be sparkly and aboard Lady Gaga. But if Lady Gaga were REALLY hardcore, she would have tiny sparkly Cycliophorans on the sparkly lobster’s sparkly mouthparts.

Image credit: Mike Koh

I love science fiction. I love the ocean. Seems like science fiction & the oceans go together like Old Bay on an oyster. Except that almost all the ocean-themed scifi that I’ve encountered has these bloody annoying frickin’ dolphins. My disgust with dolphins and their nasty habits is nothing new, but I’m afraid that the otherwise cool new blog Science In My Fiction rekindled my dolphin-rage with their debut post. They propose:

Researchers’ recent suggestion that dolphins be recognized as non-human persons is a prime example of a scientific idea ripe for storytellers’ extrapolation.

No no no no no! NO MORE TALKING SCI-FI DOLPHINS! And to once and for all refute the idea that this is a novel plot device, here is my quasi-comprehensive list of dolphins in science fiction and fantasy. (JEByrnes shares my sick fascination with dolphin sci-fi & has contributed to the list over the years.) The list is rough order of good to unspeakably terrible.

• So Long and Thanks For All The Fish, Douglas Adams. This is by far the best of the lot. At least the dolphins are saucy and non-psychic.
• Hyperion, Dan Simmons. An otherwise excellent book, but innocent talking dolphins stand in for Bad Humans & Ecological Destruction.
• Deep Wizardry, Diane Duane. In which human and cetacean wizards team up to fight the forces of entropy – at a hydrothermal vent! I loved this book as a kid.
• A Ring of Endless Light, Madeline L’Engle. Psychic dolphins impart spiritual healing.
• The Dolphins of Pern, Anne McCaffrey. Nothing says “let’s jump the shark!” like a friendly talking dolphin. Even if Pern doesn’t have sharks. It’s not like psychic dragons aren’t cool enough – you had to add talking friendly happy dolphins?
• Cachalot, Alan Dean Foster. A murder mystery on a water planet. OMG, did the talking dolphins do it???  At least they’re not happy friendly dolphins.
• A Deeper Sea, Alexander Jablokov. The killer whales speak in weird Elizabethan English. In space.
• Ishmael in Love, Robert Silverberg. A talking dolphin inexplicably falls in love with a human woman. Extreme ickiness ensues, in the way that only obnoxiously sexist 70s sci-fi can be icky.
• I have not read: Dolphin Island, by Arthur C. Clarke. But there are definitely superintellignent dolphins in it.

This is just books and stories. I’m not even getting into talking-cetacean TV/movies like SeaQuest DSV or Star Trek IV.  So, please, sci-fi writers, I beg you, no more talking dolphins! Can we at least have some talking squids in outer space?

Thanks, Garrett!

It is with great sadness and a heavy we report on the loss of the Autonomous Benthic Explorer (affectionately known as ABE). It was lost at sea last week during a research expedition to the Chilean Subduction Zone as part of the INSPIRE expedition (INternational Southeast Pacific Investigation of Reducing Environments). I’ve known about since the beginning, but writing about the loss of valuable and important deep-sea research equipment is always very difficult to come to terms with, only superceded by the loss of ships and human life. The Maritime Professional reports the details:

“ABE was brought out of retirement to be used during the mission to explore the Chile Triple Junction, because its replacement vehicle, Sentry had already been committed to another research expedition. The expedition to the Chile Triple Junction, the only place on Earth where a mid-ocean ridge is being subducted (or pushed beneath) a continent (South America) in a deep ocean trench, began February 24 and is scheduled to run through March 17.

On ABE’s first dive on the research cruise, it had detected evidence of hydrothermal vents. At the time of its loss, ABE had just begun a second dive to home into a vent site and photograph it. ABE was launched from the Melville about midnight local time for its descent to the seafloor.

“After a smooth launch, the dive began normally,” scientists and engineers on the ABE team reported. “ABE actively homed to its assigned position, reached the seafloor, released its descent weights, then leveled off to check its ballast. After this point, we received no more acoustic returns from the vehicle on either of its two transponders”—undersea acoustic devices that transmit and receive sound signals between vehicle and ship. The loss had nothing to do with earthquake activity off Chile, the scientists said.

ABE was equipped with several independent systems to bring it back to the surface at the end of a dive or should a fault occur. The Melville remained in the vicinity to see if ABE had resurfaced, at first searching for ABE’s strobe lights in the darkness. Researchers tried to establish radio contact with ABE in the event it had surfaced, but attempts turned up nothing.”

It is put most nicely by Chris German, WHOI’s National Deep-Submergence Facility chief scientist and a co-chief scientist for the Chile Triple Junction expedition:

“ABE was a vehicle that we’ll always have fond memories of— it was a world-beater in its day. In a way, it’s fitting that its demise comes on the job, and that it has gone to be recycled through the Chile subduction zone.”

The Bitter End Blog and gCaptain are reporting news of several new shipwrecks in the Baltic Sea between the Scandinavian Peninsula and Russia. The Baltic is a very important shipping route, historically as well as in modern times. Some of the new shipwrecks are reported to be up to 1000 years old, while many will be from the 17th and 18th centuries.

The shipwrecks were discovered while gas and oil company were surveying the seafloor for installation of the Nord Stream gas pipeline (see map to left).

The shipwrecks were discovered during a probe by the Russian-led Nord Stream consortium of the sea bed route its planned gas pipeline from Russia to the European Union will take through the Baltic.

“They used sonar equipment first and discovered some unevenness along the sea bottom … so they filmed some of the uneven areas, and we could see the wrecks,” Norman explained.

The discovery was made outside Sweden’s territorial waters, but within its economic zone, he said.

None of the wrecks were in the actual path the Nord Stream pipeline is set to take, but they were in its so-called anchor corridor, meaning they are in the area where ships laying the pipeline might anchor, Norman said.

“That’s one of the reasons this probe was done: to avoid damaging wrecks on the sea bed,” he said, adding that the Swedish National Heritage Board had received assurances from Nord Stream that “the positioning of the wrecks will be taken into account when they lay the pipeline”.

Due to its low temperatures and oxygen levels, the Baltic Sea is known as an ideal environment for conserving shipwrecks, which can remain virtually unblemished for hundreds and even thousands of year.

According to Norman, some 3,000 shipwrecks have been discovered and mapped in the Baltic, but experts believe more than 100,000 whole and partial wrecks litter the sea bottom.

“What makes this discovery so unique is that these wrecks have their hulls fully intact,” Norman said, adding however that there were no plans to raise the wrecks, which lie at a depth of more than 100 metres (328 feet).

(Yahoo News)

What looks like a worm, is completely symmetrical in cross-section, and in the words of  Dr. Peter Holland:

“It has no mouth, no gut, no brain and no nerve cord. It doesn’t have a left or right side or a top or bottom – we can’t even tell which end is the front!” (quoted from Physorg)

Its the one and only Buddenbrockia plumatellae! Buddebrockia is a myxozoan, a strange group of typically amoeboid parasites. This little fellow in particular is a parasite of bryozoans (see picture below, exiting a bryozoan zooid). Myxozoans have strange potentially-nematocyst-looking cells called polar capsules. Some researchers considered Myxozoa to be reduced cnidarians, though with the discovery of the worm-like Buddenbrockia plumatellae and Hox genes support a bilateria origin. Confused or just wierded out?

Photo credit: Sylvie Tops

A study published in 2007 in Science answers the paradox of Buddenbrockia with a 50 gene (thats 31,092 amino acid alignments) analysis confirming that 97% of the time Buddebrockia plumatellae clusters with medusozoan cnidarians. The authors conclude:

“This active muscular worm increases the known diversity in cnidarian body plans and demonstrates that a muscular, worm-like form can evolve in the absence of overt bilateral symmetry.”

Cnidarians really offer an amazing evolutionary system to study how body form is controlled at the genetic level. For instance, if these are really cnidarians, albeit highly derived parasitic forms, how can there be this amazing diversity of body form from medusoid, polypoid, amoeboid, worm-like, and planular larvae all within a single phylum?

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Jimenez-Guri, E., Philippe, H., Okamura, B., & Holland, P. (2007). Buddenbrockia Is a Cnidarian Worm Science, 317 (5834), 116-118 DOI: 10.1126/science.1142024

Below the fold is a summary of tweets from March 13th, 2010

(more…)

From the INSPIRE cruise blog: "The research vessel Kay Kay II, belonging to the University of Concepción. The 18m ship was washed 1km inland following the Feb. 27 earthquake. Vandals subsequently stripped the ship of its oceanographic instruments. Image courtesy of Ruben Escribano."

UPDATE: The Consortium for Ocean Leadership has set up a University of Concepcion Oceanographic Relief Fund. You can donate here.

Along with the lives lost in the recent Chilean earthquake, Chile’s excellent marine science research program has been utterly devastated. Dr. Lisa Levin, a professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (full disclosure: I am a student at SIO and have taken many classes from Dr. Levin) is currently cruising off Chile on the INSPIRE expedition,  and has received reports of total scientific devastation:

The wonderful marine laboratory at Dichato, where I had worked for one summer and returned to teach for part of another, was completely destroyed by a series of 3 tidal waves.  These arrived 30 minutes apart, the first 2 hours after the initial quake. The loss of instrumentation, lab equipment, computers, samples and countless hours spent generating data is catastrophic and heartbreaking.  Many of the top marine researchers at the University of Concepcion made this laboratory their base of operations.  Only the side walls remain, most of the contents and parts of the roof are gone.  The Kay Kay, the University’s 18m research vessel was left high and dry nearly one kilometer inland. Although this ship could have been salvaged, vandals have apparently removed all of its instruments.

Of course marine sciences at the main campus in Concepcion also must be greatly affected.  A week without electricity spells doom for sensitive samples in freezers… for some this must be a lifetime of collection lost, for others a PhD dissolved.  Countless other consequences will undoubtedly emerge…

…a brand new 70-m vessel called the Cabo de Hornos.  The new ship, with world class, state-of-the-art equipment, would work in south Chile and Antarctic waters. It was due to be launched on Feb. 27th, 2010 just hours after the earthquake.  Instead a wave lifted and pounded it atop the dock onto dry land.

Dr. Levin ends her post with the hope that marine scientists from around the world can come together to help Chilean scientists get back out to sea and into the lab as soon as possible.

Isopods, you know them as those adorable little roly-poly bugs under rocks in the forest or the gigantic Bathynomus of the deep sea. They are also those cute and cuddly parasites in the gill chamber of shrimp too! Awww, How special! In a recent issue of JMBA-UK, Calado et al. describe how these fuzzy wittle darlings castrate their shrimpity hosts.

The isopod in question is the Argeiopsis inhacae, a member of the parasitic family of isopods – Bopyridae. They don’t start off as the lovely parasite “friend” of shrimp. The larvae begins life as a free swimmer until it finds a copepod to attach itself too, then metamorphoses into another larval stage and looks to buddy up with the nearest shrimp it can find.

Calado et al. found that when pairing unparasitized males and females together, females laid perfectly fine clutches of eggs. However, when unparasitized males were paired with females containing the isopod, there were never any egg clutches laid. This is in spite of similar courtship behavior and no differences in moult patterns. Furthermore, parasitized adult female shrimp did not develop a key feature denoting fertile production, a bright green spot on the back that marks the presence of large yolky oocytes. It appears that this bopyrid isopod causes “reproductive death” in females Stenopus hisidus. Unfortunately, they never tested whether parasitized males can make viable offspring. It is still not known whether parasitism is sex-biased or appears as such because of the author’s limited sampling.

This short study is interesting because it is the first experimental study to nail down reproductive cessation due to the isopod parasite. What use is it to stop reproduction? One reason may be to divert the host’s resources away from reproduction, an energy expensive process. The isopod would ensure its survival and its continuance to leech off the shrimp.

The isopod, Argeiopsis inhacae, forces the shrimp's carapace to bulge, as it grows inside the branchial chamber. Figure 2 from Calado et al. (2008).

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Calado, R., Bartilotti, C., Goy, J., & Dinis, M. (2008). Parasitic castration of the stenopodid shrimp Stenopus hispidus (Decapoda: Stenopodidae) induced by the bopyrid isopod Argeiopsis inhacae (Isopoda: Bopyridae) Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the UK, 88 (02) DOI: 10.1017/S0025315408000684

I originally posted this article on The Other 95% on April 8, 2008.

They get huge! And can take down a frikkin house! Also, dey vill piiiiiiiiinch yooooo!!!!