Deep Sea News

A pretty cool little discovery! Amphipod hanging out down below 600 feet of ice in an isolated Antarctic basin. Is it lost?? What are you doing there amphipod!? Of course this begs the question of where the heck is it getting its food from? Vents under the ice? Plesiosaur falls from a lost world?

As reported from NASA:

At a depth of 600 feet beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet, a small shrimp-like creature managed to brighten up an otherwise gray polar day in late November 2009. This critter is a three-inch long Lyssianasid amphipod found beneath the Ross Ice Shelf, about 12.5 miles away from open water. NASA scientists were using a borehole camera to look back up towards the ice surface when they spotted this pinkish-orange creature swimming beneath the ice. Credit: NASA

Disclaimer: This review may not appropriate for all audiences. Certainly not anyone that is sensitive to violence against dolphins. If you think you may be too uncomfortable with this type of content, please do not read any further.

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A week ago I was approached by the PR department that filmed The Cove, an multi-award winning documentary, to see if I was interested in reviewing the movie for my audience. I’ve seen the movie reviewed on other sites and Deep Sea News has taken an interest in the issue of mercury poisoning from fish and dolphin meat, so I was naturally curious. Sunday night I made the leap and saw exactly why this film is so talked about and why it racks up film festival awards, recently taking home an Oscar for Best Feature Documentary.

Many documentaries, especially environmental documentaries, annoy me because the end up being about the person filming it or being filmed. The Cove starts off about the man Ric O’Barry. Ric was the trainer for Flipper, the popular ’60s TV dolphin. In the movie, Flipper is credited with generating the lust for dolphin worship that is today a multi-billion dollar industry based primarily upon marine mammal captivity. As Ric ironically put it, “the dolphins smile is nature greatest deception, it gives the illusion they are always happy”. As the beginning progressed it became apparent that Ric’s role was only one cog a greater wheel of commitment by a diverse group of talented individuals. While blatantly playing on emotion, The Cove was able to demonstrate the simple fact of a mass annual dolphin slaughter and the role that played throughout a local Japanese community.

The paradox is that the dolphins need to be harvested live for sea life amusement parks and dolphin-swimming “experiences” that have sprouted up all over the world in many tropical and temperate areas. Each live Taiji dolphin that is sold to a trainer brings in a lucrative US$150,ooo. In contrast, a dolphin is only worth US$6,000 as meat, still nothing to laugh at. The meat is sold throughout Japan, but most of it stays in the community where the government purchases it for mandatory free school lunches that all Japanese schoolchildren must eat. Yet another irony that was not lost on me is that in Taiji one can can buy and eat dolphin and whale meat in same venue where you can see them performing acrobatics in an amusement show.

You might say what is the problem with the Taiji fishermen harvesting dolphin for local consumption? If you have been following Deep Sea News for awhile then you know we are not dolphin-hugging eco-hippies. While the movie necessarily pulls at heart strings, there are two larger issues that they successfully bring up: the issue of inhumane methods of killing and , as they put it in the movie, “dolphins are swimming toxic dump sites”.

Being an organismal biologist I can consider myself pretty tough to the grime, blood, guts and smell of slicing and dicing my way though most of tree of life. I even had the occasion to wade knee deep in a deceased whale to dissect out the vertebrae (it was one week ripe by then). Its all part of the job. As a humane biologist, I try to be efficient and thoughtful in how I approach fixing and preserving my samples. Even when I was a kid fishing with my father and gramps, I was always taught to quickly snap the neck to make it a quick and easy death for the fish. By vegan standards I am a murderous wretch but as an outdoorsman or biologist I respect the fauna I decimate whether it is for food or scientific study.

After the story builds from a series of reconnaissance missions and a sort of societal background, they show the horrible footage that you have been anticipating all film. There is no words to describe the amount of blood and thriving dolphin bodies. No words could express my uncomfortableness at the nonchalant attitudes of the hunters and how they effortlessly stabbed the herded dolphins and let them bleed to death while swimming insanely looking for a way out. Seeing the snorkeling fishermen waltz out of the blood-drenched depths and light up a cigarette without even the slightest sense of remorse or respect was troubling.

While the emotional aspect of the story might be enough to rile up many viewers, the greater story is the neglect of the Japanese government to its own people. As a top predator in the ocean, dolphin meat is laden with mercury. This is born out of several studies. It is a fact. You can measure it. You can compare it to standards and compare it to other animals. You can take a strand of human hair and calculate the exact amount of mercury in his or her body. In Japan, the acceptable level of mercury in tissue is 0.4 ppm (according to the film). The crew of The Cove found dolphin meat in a market with 2000 ppm mercury.

Mercury is not an efficient killer. The very definition of mercury poisoning, Minamata Disease, was defined in Japan. It is not a slow, painless, easy death. First your hands and feet go numb, you lose your vision and hearing, and cannot speak. Before paralysis sets in and you die in a coma, there might be a couple weeks of insanity. It is a neurological disorder, not a disease. It is not contagious. Children are the most susceptible. Since they are so small their little livers cannot detoxify the 3 orders of magnitude mercury being spoonfed to them in their mandatory school lunches. The Cove does an excellent job highlighting the fact that eating dolphin is very bad. Sadly, these points were lost on the Japanese Ministry of Fisheries. When confronted by Ric O’Barry, the Minister sat smugly in his chair saying he does not think there is enough science done to support the claims. An argument used when you’ve used your last argument.

Some people might argue that a movie like The Cove is one-sided and appeals to the wealthy, elite Western ideals and culture. By weaving in the toxicity and science aspect alongside the emotional and animal intelligence aspect they ensure the argument is a sensible one: Don’t hunt or eat dolphin. They also thwart some of the one-sided arguments by interviewing locals in large cities away from the actions of the Taiji fishermen. The people they showed in the movie did not know dolphin hunting occurred or that people still ate dolphin meat. I have known about these issues for a few years now and familiarized myself with some of the data and sentiment. It is one thing to hear about it and read a news article about dolphin hunting and whaling, but an entirely different thing to see the Japanese officials lying to the camera about the effects of mercury and how concentrated the mercury is not only in dolphins and other large predatory fish, but in their own people!

The crazy thing about this whole situation is that is appears almost to boil down to pride. Do the Japanese hunt whale and dolphin as a rebellion against the West telling them what to do all the time? Like a frustrated teenager, Japan is fight back irrationally when challenged. Or is it something more? A unique kind of logic that we cannot readily grasp in our hemisphere – as spoken in the film, its “not about money, its about pest control. They are being told by the government dolphins are eating too much fish in the ocean”.

Please also see Bluegrass Blue Crab’s excellent post at Southern Fried Science for a much more scientific review that brings a whole new perspective from her training in toxicology and sociology.

Purchase The Cove on DVD at Amazon.

This is a new species of Bathyacmaea (Mollusca, Gastropoda, Patellogastropoda, Acmaeidae) currently under description by a japanese colleague. I have found hundreds of these individuals in my quantitative collections of chemoautotrophic communities at the Lau Basin hydrothermal vent fields. They reminded me of the Patella limpet I learned about in my undergrad inverts class.

Photos were taken by me with an Olympus digital camera. You can see the muscular foot in the center, head is on the left with its cephalic tentacles hanging out on the sides.

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!

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

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!!!!

I was EXTREMELY shocked that my beloved urochordates were not included in the rekindling of the invertebrate wars. I am compelled to defend their honor by reposting this rousing defense, originally published on the Oyster’s Garter.  I’ve transferred my studies to the open ocean and no longer study benthic tunicates, but out in the mid-Pacific the mighty salp rules the waves. Bow before it.

When I somewhat belatedly caught up on the Great Invertebrate Wars, I was torn. Which was best, molluscs or echinoderms? On the one hand (as Jason pointed out), we are extremely fond of tasty bivalves here at the Oyster’s Garter. On the other hand, echinoderms frequently eat poop and barf up their guts, which is a giant plus in my book.

But I do not need to fit myself into this narrow phyla dichotomy! I am a maverick, a unique and special snowflake, and I walk boldly alone to proclaim from the very electronic rooftops that UROCHORDATA IS THE BEST PHYLA IN ALL THE OCEAN.

Why? Because they are my study organism and I plan to spend the summer doing unspeakable things to them in tiny torture chambers. But if that isn’t enough, here is a conveniently numbered list that will make the Deep Sea News lads throw their puny molluscs across the room in jealousy and perhaps gently weep into their extremely expensive deep-sea cores (but I hope that CR McClain will not weep too much because he gave me a kick-ass tour of MBARI and bought me tasty squid for lunch and is awesome).

But first, Meet the Urochordata.

What has no backbone yet is a chordate? That’s right, your friendly neighborhood tunicate. (For the purposes of this little essay, a tunicate refers to a member of the phylum Urochordata.) As adults, tunicates are basically a soft sack for filtering water, surrounded by the tough tunic that gives them their name. They suck the water in through an intake siphon, catch the nummy bits in a mucousy net, and squirt the water out an excurrent siphon with nary a backbone in sight. But as larvae, they have all the critical chordate characteristics (a notochord, a dorsal nerve cord, pharyngeal slits, and a post-anal tail, in case you were wondering) and swim about just like a little fishy until they undergo metamorphosis into the invertebrate-like adult form.

Being a benthic lass, I have a bias towards the ascidians, which are the group of tunicates that live stuck to hard surfaces like rocks and docks. However, there are some extremely kickass tunicates that are strictly pelagic, which is to say they spend their entire lives floating about in the open sea. I have selected four reasons why tunicates are best.

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1. Urochordates are secret double chordate agents quietly infiltrating the invertebrate world.

Sure, they look all slimy and featureless, but tunicates are our closest relative in the invertebrate world. Most chordates can only live as solitary individuals (booooring) but tunicates also live as colonies of genetically identical clones (no other chordate can do that!).

Colonial tunicates pretty much have chordate superpowers. They can absorb and regenerate organs or even entire clones without batting an eye. If broken into fragments, they can reattach, grow, and thrive. Creepily, if a colony comes into contact with either its parent or sibling colony, the colonies will fuse and become one uber-colony.

Creepiest of all, the golden star tunicate (Botryllus schlosseri), which I have been working on, has parasitic stem cells. When two colonies fuse, the stem cells battle it out for who gets to control the genes that go into reproduction. Whoever wins gets to pass its genome to the next generation. Whoever loses…well, that’s natural selection.

2. Tunicates thrive where puny molluscs and echinoderms fear to tread. All shall look upon them and despair!

Tunicates laugh in the face of pollution. If you go to the most godforsaken stinkiest backwater harbor, you’ll probably find tunicates growing there. Many species eat copper antifouling paint for breakfast and wash it down with some tasty fecal bacteria. Harbor-dwelling tunicates travel all over the world on the bottoms of boats and then happily establish themselves in a new home. That’s why most temperate harbors all over the world have similar tunicate species – they’ve managed to migrate. Not bad for something that can’t move on its own.

Tunicates can also kick ass in tropical systems. One Caribbean species, Trididemnum solidum, is overgrowing apparently healthy corals. Trididemnum is the mack truck of tunicates, combining incredibly toxic poisons with spiny spicules to ward off predation. And it’s not even dependent on outside food – it has a symbiotic algae that makes yummy sugars right in its cells.

3. Invasive tunicates r in ur aquaculture, killin ur molluscs.

Yep, that’s right. When tunicates and molluscs face off, molluscs lose. Here’s Didemnum vexillum rather drippily overgrowing mussels, and an entire page of bivalves overgrow by assorted tunicates. No contest here – that’s just a molluscan rout.

4. Tunicates are noble warriors against climate change.

But being a tunicate is not just about chowing down on plankton and kicking molluscan hiney. The pelagic tunicates are waging a mighty battle against climate change by exporting all the carbon they can. Salps are colonial pelagic tunicates that grow truly enormous, and are famous for their exceptionally dense poop (previously featured on TOG). They are carbon sequestration machines, raining down poop to the depths, where (pathetically scavenging) molluscs and echinoderms can get at it.

Larvaceans are another mighty carbon warrior. They build a mucous house around themselves to catch particles of food. When the house gets clogged, the larvacean casts it off, and it also sinks down to the depths with a load of carbon. Larvacean houses are another critical source of food to the molluscs and echinoderms (and worms and giant protists and everything else) in the deep sea.

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This was just a tiny selection to establish the New Tunicate Order. I didn’t even get into bioluminescence (the doliolids!) or predatory ascidians or even much into glorious tunicate toxicity. But if any of those…other…phyla dare to raise a tentacle or tube foot in protest, the awesomeness will rain down one hundred fold!