Deep Sea News

As 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 of a discovery that could change the way we think about the development of life on Earth.
  

  Two years ago, Timothy Kusky, Ph.D., the Paul C. Reinert Professor of Natural Sciences at SLU, and Jianghai Li, a professor of geological science at Peking University, dug up hundreds of fossilized black smoker chimneys in northern China…The discovery is important, the researchers say, because it lends support to the theory that life on the planet developed on the sea floor.

  Why haven’t we heard more of this?

• If we encountered alien life, would we recognize it? I don’t mean large, ambulatory, tentacle-snapping organisms with eyeballs on the ends of stalks. Those are always obvious. I’m talking about the low-key, chilled-out microscopic life-forms that might be lurking below the surface of Mars, or beneath the crust of one of Jupiter’s jumbo moons, or in some such exotic, slightly scuzzy planetary environment where you’d definitely never find a Starbucks. What are we looking for, exactly, when we search for alien life? What is life?

  writes Joel Achenbach. The answer provided by the National Research Council, “The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems.” Life may exist in forms completely unlike anything we see on Earth. We need to keep our minds open to the possible existence of Weird Life. The novel adaptations that deep-sea life exhibit and the strange forms use to jar me a bit. Now I am much more used to it. Weird life indeed, maybe astrobiologists need to hire me as a consultant.

Well 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 and just plain great, informative writing
• For the insider’s perspective on conservation and policy, and when I need a hit of vertebrates, I turn to Blogfish by Mark Powell, Director of Fish Conservation-Ocean Conservancy. The posts are insightful providing examinations of issues that are rarely discussed and new perspectives on issues drawing attention.
• Another great conservation focused blog is Malaria, Bedbugs, Sealice, and Sunsets. Part this and part that, it’s one man’s journey to do nothing less than save the world. In this quest, both mental and physical, you get musings that are part travel log, part science, part photography, and part conservation. The writing is top notch and a great way start your day.
• I am also a huge fan of Galactic Interactions. Rob Knop’s take on academia, policy, and of course astronomy is a breath of fresh air. The blog stands out among the noise that is the repetitive statements of both right and left wing blogging. Rob, who took an unfair beating from the PZ’s masses, boldly blogs on the interface of being both Christian and a scientist providing commentary on topic he has obviously thought about-in contrast to others. His move to the nonacademic world because of the short-sided decisions of a university has left a huge void in academia.
• The last? Well that is up to you.

Photo 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 dumped military munitions in U.S. waters. The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007 also mandates sampling and water analysis be done around the disposal sites selected by the secretary. The size of the dump sites as well as the types and quantities of military munitions should also be identified.

The bad news…the dumping an estimated 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents into U.S. waters part of that in an operation called “Cut Holes And Sink ‘Em”. Cal Baier-Anderson, of the Environmental Defense, has a brilliant comment in the piece…

“You can think these munitions are glorified metal containers, but they are corroding and rusting out over time,” …”When they’re (munitions) on the shoreline, they can be unstable. You don’t know what’s in them.”

So what potential problems arise…

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A 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), and a colony of Lophelia (stony coral).

“We really didn’t know what we would find when we went out there because it was all new to us,” Ellen Kenchington, a research scientist at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Halifax, N.S. told CTV’s Canada AM. “Previously we had been working at depths to about 700 metres. With the new technology that we had…we could go two and a half kilometres. So it was fantastic.”

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From 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 involves a nuclear-powered icebreaker clearing a path to the Pole for the expedition’s flagship Akademik Fyodorov. This will launch the submersibles to scoop samples from the seabed for research. The mission will also plant a flag on the seabed under the Pole to claim the territory symbolically for Russia.

Get This Widget!TOPP.org

During Megavertebrate Week, DSN teamed up with several people and organizations. One of these was Tagging of Pacific Predators (TOPP), the same people who brought the Great Turtle Race, a sort a Big Brother of Marine Verts. TOPP is a 10-year project headquartered at Hopkins Marine Station, Long Marine Lab, and NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Center in Pacific Grove that is putting satellite tags on thousands of the Pacific’ top predators. TOPP has a new website (http://www.topp.org) featuring animated maps, researcher daily blogs, downloadable widgets (like the ones above and below), videos, updated ocean news, photo-of-the-day, ask-a-researcher, and feature stories about the charismatic megafauna you all love.

Get This Widget!TOPP.org

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Image credit: (c) 2003 MBARI, A pair of Humboldt squid hunting in Monterey Bay. Over the last five years, large, predatory Humboldt squid have moved north from equatorial waters and invaded the sea off Central California, where they may be decimating populations of Pacific hake, an important commercial fish. More on the study here at DSN.

No that’s not real and neither are the others in the post!
Argonauta Argo, National Museum& Gallery, Cardiff
Spending time at the Museum Comparative Zoology at Harvard (MCZ), a Museum of a Museum, I realize the potential for items to get lost in unvisited cabinets. This happens regularly in my own brainoffice. Eureka!

Paula Holahan, a curator at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Zoological Museum, noting a series of keyholes under the exhibit cases decided to explore. After excavating the keys, she was quite surprised to find several boxes of glass sculptures of marine invertebrates with incredible detail. Recognizing the label Ward’s on some of the items, she was able to track down the meaning of another small tag on the sculptures-Blaschka. To some of you this name may be familiar especially if you have visited the Harvard Museum of Natural History. The Blaschka’s, Leopold and Rudolph, also created the Glass Flowers Exhibit, a fantastic and highly realistic collection of glass sculptures.

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On the wire from Oceana (Europe)…

Just a few weeks into our summer-long expedition, the crew of Oceana’s Ranger experienced an intense day at sea….At the time of the incident we had filmed, photographed and recorded the positions and catch of about 80 French illegal driftnetters…Seven ships coordinated their attack by surrounding the Ranger in the Mediterranean Sea. After immobilizing our propellers, they began to hurl objects of all kind – including poisonous fish, flares and 4-letter words – and demanding the photos and videos we had collected. They even went so far as dropping their pants and making obscene gestures before attempting to ram our ship. Our crew refused to hand over the evidence and we issued a “May Day” call to the French authorities. Shortly thereafter, the Coast Guard sent two helicopters onto the scene, causing the seven ships to disperse before anyone got hurt or the ship incurred any more damage. The illegal driftnetters later had the nerve to claim that Oceana prompted the encounter and that we were the aggressive ones…Although the attack was traumatic, the fishermen ultimately aided our conservation efforts by bringing this issue into the mainstream consciousness. London’s Daily Telegraph mentioned the incident and cited it as one of several reasons for the European Union calling for a ban on bluefin tuna fishing. The article reads,”Pressure for a ban has been mounting after rampant over-fishing by France, Spain and Italy and after French boats illegally drift-netting for tuna clashed with conservationists documenting their activities in the Mediterranean.”

There is also video of the encounter here.

Growing up to two meters (six feet) long, Humboldt squid are formidable predators that hunt krill and a variety of fishes. Their normal habitat is within the tropical and subtropical waters of the East Pacific. Over the last few years, however, Humboldt squid have begun moving into cooler-water areas such as Central California.
Image: (c) 2003 MBARI
If you been keeping up here at DSN, you probably already know that Humboldt squid are invading further north up the Pacific Coast. Dosidicus gigas are voracious pack hunters occurring historically from Chile to Baja California. Occasionally, they are reported as far north as San Francisco and in the last few years strandings of Humboldts as far north as BC have occurred. Mass strandings are a common occurrence in Sourthern California. This may sound cool…who doesn’t love a big squid in their backyards? The problem is they may be decimating populations of Pacific hake, an important commercial fish. The culprit for the squid’s advances…no not global warming…overfishing. “Ironically, these squid may have benefited from the decline of large tuna and billfish in the Equatorial Pacific, which previously preyed upon and competed with the Humboldt squid for food.”

The first scientific documentation of the pattern and potential underlying mechanisms occurs in a fascinating study from Louis Zeidberg, formerly of MBARI and now at Hopkins Marine Lab, and Bruce Robison and published in PNAS.

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