Deep Sea News

2007…what to say? A year that saw a lot of changes. First DSN moved to the big time here at Sb. Our traffic and regular visitors increased. At the old DSN, we hit 100,000 hits in nearly two years of blogging. For 2007, we reached nearly 320,000 hits! Lots of great posts, new discoveries, novel research, and…well deep-sea news. In the next week or so I will post the Best of 2007 determined by a crack, i.e. a bunch of suckers we got for free, team of experts. What will happen next year. DSN is going to be bigger, better, and badder. Don’t worry we will still be the #1 action site ever! Expect more theme weeks and craziness centered on all deep-sea happenin’s. Expect some major change ups too but you got to wait for that!

The Neptune Memorial Reef project is the largest man made reef ever conceived and provides an extraordinary living resting place for the departed, an environmental and ecological masterpiece, a superb laboratory for marine biologists, students, researchers and ecologists, and an aesthetically exquisite, world-class destination for visitors from all walks of life. The most innovative concept in artificial reef design is currently emerging in 50-feet of water, 3.25 miles east of Key Biscayne, Miami. Wrapped in the silence of the clear blue ocean a new reef is evolving. The Neptune Memorial Reef is attracting recreational scuba divers, as well as homeless fish while enhancing the costal environment and reducing demand on other fragile natural reef

Christina pointed this out to me. I think I am still opting for the Viking funeral. Although, my wife ensures me that no matter how much she wants to send me to sea in a burning vessel, that she cannot get the required permits.

One of my back up plans for early retirement is to start a consulting business for Hollywood special effects (SFX) studios. My crack team of marine invertebrate biologists and kinesiologists will advise big studios on new scary creatures for space-based and terrestrial monster movies.

The first one’s free. The picture of the amphipod Phronima sp. above would be a good biomechanical model for an update of say, the Imperial AT-AT Walkers from “Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back”. The picture comes from the Norway-based MAR-ECO project and the global Census of Marine Life program initiative. National Geographic ran a story on the expedition here. My team will retrieve these alive for you, and keep them in an aquarium, so your SFX animators and your actors can study them.

The second one’s free, too. A prime candidate for space monster would be the amazing microscopic elephantine creature known as the tardigrade, or water bear. Folks over at Kristianstad University put these hardy little animals into space and brought them back again as part of the Tardigrades in Space (TARDIS) program. The script is practically written for you already, but we could translate. We have people on staff that speak Astrobiology. The problem with the tardigrade is that it’s lumbering, like the Stay-Puft marshamallow man. Not scary, like Phronima sp..

Wait, wait… my phone is ringing. “Hello. Hollywood?”

A recent study linking deep-sea biodiversity to ecosystem processes recognized that 1) the deep-sea supports the largest biomass of living things on the planet and 2) the deep-sea represents the most important ecosystem for carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous cycling. The chosen indicator species for the study was the nematode worm.

Nematodes apparently account for 90% of all life at the bottom of the sea. I am unsure whether this is given in terms of species richness or biomass, but either way, it’s an image problem. Just kidding, of course. The new study is published in the January 8 issue of the journal Current Biology.

Dr. Roberto Danovaro of Polytechnic University of Marche, Italy led the research team in a study of 116 sites. The results indicate an exponential increase in ecosystem processes and efficiency with increased nematode diversity. That means a small increase (or decrease) in the number of species results in a large increase (or decrease) in the rate and the efficiency of nutrient cycles. This is in contrast to terrestrial findings, which have generally shown a linear relationship between diversity and ecosystem function, such that a small increase in species would yield a small increase in efficiency.

More on the story at ScienceDaily. Tell me what you think of their headline.

Photo: Trissonchulus sp., from Dr. Tim Ferrero, The Natural History Museum, London, UK. Published in MEPS.

Apparently that slime trail left behind by snails and slugs is good for the skin.

The studies have verified that the dribble of snail allows to prevent and to eliminate wrinkles, to attenuate grooves, to eliminate scars caused for wounded and burns of first degree, to remove the acne, to clean spots produced by the sun. It has also demonstrated to be effective to eliminate warts of the skin.

But will my hair grown back on my bald head if I rub a snail on it. The real question is how to they harvest it.

Unbeknownst to me a Chilean company AGROINDUSTRIAL LA FLORESTA LTD is dedicated to the production and exportation of ’soil’ snail, Helix aspersa Müller. Being the raising of snails our principal target we have split our production in the elaboration of high quality slime:SNAIL SECRETION FILTRATE or cryptosina, used as raw material for dermatologic and cosmetic products widely recognized.

You can read more at the Gimcrack Hospital.

This video shows why it can feel like Christmas when you’re cruising the seafloor in a submarine and you stumble upon a deep-sea coral community. The “marine snow” is falling, the bamboo corals light up like Christmas trees, the anemones, well, they kind of remind me of poinsettias.

Yet, perhaps what’s most amazing is how well the lyrics of “Let It Snow” fit the scene. How many phrases can you find?

The footage shown here was taken by the Johnson Sea-Link submersible in 1500 feet of water on Viosca Knoll in the Gulf of Mexico. Special thanks to DSN sweetheart Christina Kellogg for her ongoing contributions to Deep Sea News at Scienceblogs.

This holiday season, remember that it’s always snowing somewhere.
Have a wonderful Christmas where ever you are.

So all day long after the previous post I wondered, how separated is Architeuthis and Kevin Bacon?

As you might remember although the Giant Squid had some cameos in previous B movies, it really was not until 1954 in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea that Mr. G. Squid hit the big time. In this movie, the Giant Squid shared the screen with Kirk Douglas who played Ned Land.

and…

Kirk Douglas was in Tough Guys (1986) with Eli Wallach

and…

Eli Wallach was in Mystic River (2003) with Kevin Bacon

Chionoecetes tanneri (chio-snow and ioketes-inhabitant) are commonly referred to as Grooved Tanner Crabs and related to the more commercially important snow crab, C. opilio. C. tanneri is from the infraorder Brachyura (short-tailed) or the true crabs (Phylum Arthropoda, Subphylum Crustacea, Class Malacostraca, Order Decapoda, Suborder Plecyemata, Infraorder Brachyura, Superfamily Majioidea, Family Majidae). Tanners may live to an estimated maximum age of 14 years feeding upon a wide assortment of marine life including worms, clams, mussels, snails, crabs, other crustaceans, and fish parts. Females mate with an adult male for the first time during her last molt, mating in the softshell condition while grasped by the male. Older hardshelled females are also mated by adult males, but in the absence of a male they are capable of producing an egg clutch with sperm stored from a previous mating. A female Tanner crab may deposit 85,000 to 424,000 eggs in a clutch. Hatching occurs late the following winter and spring with the peak hatching period usually during April to June, coinciding with the spring bloom. After ~60 days the larvae lose their swimming ability and settle to the ocean bottom. After numerous molts and several years of growth, females mature at approximately 5 years of age. Males will mature at about 6 years.

I have had a long standing interest in the body size of organisms, especially those from the deep sea. I experienced a little euphoria when I first encountered this fine specimen las year. Crabzilla is a female and substantially larger than most of her kind with a carapace width of 15.30 cm (1206.5g, A big lady indeed!). In another study that contained more than 750 adults none reached carapace widths over 14.5 cm (mean=11cm). The two pictures display Crabzilla and a typical size tanner (note the white line is the same length in both pictures). She was captured at 1035m in January in Monterey Canyon and lived in an aquarium here at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute for better part of a year.

Here’s an old favorite from April 2006.

An enormous sea anemone from 2500m depth on the East Pacific Rise was reported in in the journal Marine Biology. The monstrous actiniarian Boloceroides daphneae is abundant on boulders, cliffs, and rocky outcrops near hydrothermal vent sites but not on them, writes author Marymegan Daly from Ohio State University. The largest living specimen she found had a column diameter of 1m, a tentacle crown of 2m diameter, and tentacles trailing an estimated 3m and more. That’s just downright dangerous. B. daphneae’s closest living relative is the comparatively diminutive Cerianthid anemone found in warmer coastal waters.

The new species has been known since 1990, but it was tough to collect, and it provides a good example of commonly encountered but largely unstudied species in the deep sea environment. According to Daly, the eggs of B. daphneae are yolky, and should therefore be long lived. Theoretically, they should also be capable of fairly broad dispersal on deep ocean currents, maybe even caught in a hydrothermal updraft to be cast even more widely. This would account for their broad distribution. Ten or more giant anemones can be seen in a ‘typical’ eight hour submersible research dive.

Here is a link to more.

Image by Stephane Hourdez/IFREMER.

We have a new state in this country! Welcome number 53. It’s called “The State of Deep Coral Ecosystems of the United States”

Of course, it’s not a state, really, in the Nunavut sense of the word. This is a federal deep-sea coral report prepared by NOAA’s Coral Reef Conservation Program to address the status of our knowledge about deep corals and the capacity of our federal government to manage deep coral habitat.

The “State of Deep Coral Ecosystems…” report was commissioned, in effect, by the President’s Ocean Action Plan, so we take it seriously here at DSN. Seriously. It’s a comprehensive, peer- reviewed report called for the President of the United States, written by a a dozen deep-sea biologists. How cool is that? I hope he reads it. We should ask Sylvia Earle to plant a copy on him next time they go for dinner. Maybe ship a box to the Congress.

In a sense, this report will be guiding our deep-coral research and management priorities for the next several years, given the budget demands. Your university can use this document to lobby your elected officials and state representatives. The word on the street in Washington is that this is a beautiful, full-color, glossy publication, just perfect for illustrating the living beauty of these fragile ecosystems.

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